Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan. Aaron Glantz
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only so much hand-waving you can really do from a vehicle, and those who didn’t turn around, unfortunately, were neutralized one way or another. I personally witnessed shots fired into windshields and radiators well over twenty different times. I personally never fired at these and used the free-fire order, but there was a lot of collateral damage. No combatant damage that I can recall at that point in time by the people I was with.
Lastly, I want to talk about the way the raids were conducted. Usually what we found, what happened in raids is what the military calls a “dry hole” or “whoops.” This happened several times.
There was one raid, just a typical night raid. It was my platoon and a couple of Bradleys. We rolled out to this house. Typically there were concrete walls around the house, with closed and secured metal gates. So we would pivot and steer the Bradleys into the walls to knock down the wall and tear down whatever security infrastructure the person’s home had. Sometimes we would even crush the vehicles parked behind the wall. After doing that, we dropped a ramp and continued inside.
Then we started hearing a lady screaming from the inside, her and her children. We get to the door and bust the door in, and take her and her children to what we call the EPW roundup area, which is where a couple of lower-enlisted soldiers would take the enemy prisoners of war, like this lady and her children, at gunpoint and hold them until the raid was complete. Next, we entered their house and destroyed it. We rummaged through her personal effects looking for weapons. We punctured the walls looking for soft spots. We’d heard the insurgents were putting things in the walls, so that was our order.
To make this long story short, we destroyed this lady’s house and we found nothing. We’ve scared her and her children to death and come to find out we were off by a number. We were supposed to raid the house across the street. I actually said, “Hey, we’ve got time. Why don’t we go?” However, we didn’t go. We chalked it up, and as Clif says, “Charlie Mike.” We went home and maybe went to bed.
This was not an isolated incident for my platoon. I can’t blame the people who did it. I was one of them. We were all good people. We were just in a bad situation and we did what we had to do to get through. So for all those in the video and that I served with, like Clifton, I have to thank them, and I hope they hear it.
Jesse Hamilton
Staff Sergeant, United States Army Reserve, Fire Support Specialist
Deployment: July 2005–July 2006, Fallujah
Hometown: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Age at Winter Soldier: 28 years old
I worked as part of a ten-man team while I was in Iraq, so I didn’t serve with a lot of different U.S. soldiers and marines over there. I did work with a lot of the Iraqi forces though, and if you want my opinion as to whether or not Rules of Engagement actually exist within the Iraqi army, the answer is no.
We had some phrases: “Spray ‘n pray,” where the Iraqis would just start shooting and pray they hit the enemy, if there was one. “The death blossom” was also a term we used regularly, because once the shooting started, death would blossom all around.
I never saw any civilians get killed by these actions, but one instance sticks out in my mind. I lived in Fallujah the whole time that I was in Iraq, on an Iraqi firm base, and the enemy would take potshots at us. They would shoot RPGs at us. We’d get mortared and as soon as something like that would happen, the Iraqi guards on the roof would start a barrage of fire. It didn’t matter where the fire had initially come from, if it was just mortars or a combination. They would just start shooting. One day I ran up to the roof. And while I couldn’t see any incoming fire, I saw the Iraqis shooting indiscriminately, and that was normal. I saw a civilian running and the wall that she was running in front of was just peppered by bullets. The Iraqis weren’t shooting at her. I know that for a fact. They weren’t aiming at her. They were just shooting indiscriminately.
Iraqis can be very brutal. We would often take in prisoners. Sometimes it wouldn’t even be on a joint mission. The Iraqis would conduct presence patrols and bring people in for questioning. They weren’t overly nice, but they weren’t overly brutal in those situations. But when we took Iraqi casualties, that’s really when the tides turned. I saw Iraqi soldiers make prisoners run the gauntlet from the vehicle in which they were transported to the S2 Intelligence Office where they would be questioned. Our job as American advisers was to try our best to stop that, and we did. However, there’s only so much you can do, and you can’t prevent it all. We weren’t there when prisoners initially got picked up. More times than not, the guys that they were bringing in got released after a short questioning.
After a while I was almost like, “I don’t care. I’m over it.” I tried to stop it, but I just stopped caring. It was their people and that’s what they were gonna do. We’re just ordinary people that decided to pick up a uniform and serve this nation and you can only take so much. We’re sons, we’re brothers. Some are fathers. When people take pot shots at you, shoot RPGs at your house, mortar you, it begins to wear on your mind and that creates apathy.
The Iraqis have been doing their thing for thousands of years and I think it is very pretentious of us as Americans to think that we can go in there and spoon-feed them democracy. I think it’s even more pretentious to try to go in there and change their culture and the way they handle situations. I think that it is a lost cause in Iraq. I think that regardless of when we leave, whether it is tomorrow or in a hundred years, the Iraqis are going to handle things the way that they’re going to handle them. It’s their culture. It’s their country. We are allegedly giving them democracy, so let’s give it to them and let’s let them do what they want with their country and their lives.
At this point, given my experience working, living, speaking in Arabic with my Iraqi counterparts, getting to know them and getting to care about them, and with my military history and my friends who are in the U.S. military, I don’t think that it’s worth it to continue losing American lives, to continue what we now see in hindsight as a pretty big mistake. I just don’t think it’s worth it.
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 ’m from a little place nestled in the mountains of east Tennessee called Kingsport and hence the mountain-man beard. People don’t really trust you if you’re clean-shaven there. Kingsport is truly small-town America. There’s a Baptist church on every street corner and even the high-class restaurants serve biscuits and gravy. My father, Carl C. Hurd, who died in 2000 at seventy-six years old, was a marine during World War II. Shortly after he died, I had the two World War II battles he participated in tattooed on my arm, because my father had the same tattoo. He was in the Pacific Campaign and participated in the Battles of Tarawa and Guadalcanal, which were some of the bloodiest occurrences of that war.
I decided to join the military in 1997. I was seventeen years old. I had just graduated from high school and I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do with my life. My father was adamantly opposed to me serving in the military. My father was one of the most war-mongering, gun-loving people you could ever meet, but he didn’t feel that way when it came to his son because he knew the negative psychological consequence of combat service. Looking back, I know for a fact that my father had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He had the rage, he had the nightmares, and he had the flashbacks.
I decided against my father’s wishes to go into the military as a medic in August of 1997. Originally, I intended to do my four years and get off of active duty and go to college in Johnson