Winter Soldier 2008: A Marine Mom’s Eyewitness Account of the Testimony
By Elaine Brower with Malcolm Shore
I.
I have spent the past seven-plus years as an activist against the policies of George W. Bush and his regime. Already, my son has completed 2 tours of duty as a U.S. Marine, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. So my life has been forever altered by the events of the past 7 years. Still, when I initially made plans to attend the Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) ‘s Winter Soldier event, I intended to cover it from the perspective of an independent journalist.
However, after spending almost four days within the halls of the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Maryland- meeting new members of IVAW, as well as many old friends from Veterans For Peace, VietnamVeterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out and other anti-war groups, and listening to the testimony of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans-I realized I can no longer be an objective reporter. So I decided to write this story from the perspective of a Marine mom; one who is adamantly opposed to the so called “war on terror”, the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and any other wars that this government is cooking up.
On Friday, Day 2, testimony began at 9 AM with a panel about the
“Rules of Engagement”. Speakers from the Army and Marine Corps.-
people that I have known for the last few years- recounted the
atrocities that they not only witnessed but participated in. Anyone
who is interested can listen online at www.ivaw.org/wintersoldier. But
about halfway into that panel, I lost my objectivity. The stories they
were telling about the rules of engagement they learned while training
at boot camp, or on a military base “back home”, were the same as what
I had heard from my son. I broke down sobbing. The photographs they
were showing on the five viewing screens of bloodied bodies torn apart
by close gunfire, 50-calibre Machine guns, rocket launchers, and every
other damn weapon our great military industrial complex has created,
were all too familiar to me. When my son returned home from both war
zones, he was so eager to share his stories and pictures.
I
could not fathom that my son, whom I raised to be a Catholic, whom I
took to Sunday school, who received Communion and Confirmation- had not
only been a participant in such horrors, but had pictures to prove it.
I immediately told him that I would not listen to his stories or look
at those pictures. He could speak with his father. My response may
seem to many as being hard on my son, who only wanted to unload what he
was feeling on his mother. But I couldn’t come to terms with it
then-or now.
Watching and listening to the testimony made me
very ill. Here were these young men and women, handsomely dressed,
some wearing medals, talking about how they shot civilians who were
holding nothing more threatening than a cell phone, groceries, a
shovel, a white flag, or a pair of binoculars. Anyone deemed suspicious
by the particular soldier or Marine on watch was fair game, subject to
the orders, “Take “em out!” The Rules of Engagement, as stated by
Garrett Rapenhagen were “a joke and disgrace, and ever changing.”
I
knew that. I had heard it back home from my son. He told me he had to
survive, he had to protect his buddies, so that they could all come
home alive. They didn’t know who the enemy was, so they would just
“blast them away.” The Marines are taught that. They shoot and don’t
even ask questions. Their motto is “Kill “em all and let God sort them
out!”
Camilo Mejia, who is the chair of IVAW, spoke about how
soldiers were trained that dehumanizing the enemy is necessary to
survival, and how they are taught to think of Iraqi’s as “hajjis”. In
fact, all of the panel members said Iraqi citizens were repeatedly
referred to as hajis. I know that word all too well; I have heard my
son talk about it, as well as other anti-Iraqi slurs such as “towel
head,” and “sand nigger.” The expression “if you feel threatened,
use your weapon” was also a familiar phrase to me. So, too, was the
slogan, “Do what you need to do.” That meant that you use your rifle
anytime, and you can crush whoever you want with your vehicle in the
street.
Members on the panel recounted how, when they were
bored, they blew up dogs and other animals to keep themselves
entertained. All too well I had heard these stories, which gave me the
creeps more than anything else. I also heard the testimony of former
Cpl. Matt Childers, who said that after American soldiers had already
beaten and starved detainees in their custody, one of them removed a
hat from one of the detainees” heads and smeared it with his own feces,
before feeding it to one of the prisoners who was so hungry that he
actually attempted to eat it.
One other Marine, whom I
happened to interview personally-which produced a conversation I hope
to describe more fully in a future article–was Bryan Casler. Casler
was part of the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003. He described Marines
taking their MRE’s (Meals Ready to Eat) which were in plastic bags, and
defecating in them before tossing them out to Iraqi children on the
side of the road. Those who picked them up would think they were food
and attempt to eat the contents. Casler also said soldiers would
urinate in bottles and throw them at children. They would also remove
the chemical packets that were within the MREs (which helped heat the
food) and hand them to children to eat. He said that when they went
into Babylon, the marines would drive vehicles into mosques and
historic ruins, and break off pieces to take home with them.
Some
of the soldiers” testimony was characterized by defiant anger. At the
end of his testimony, former Marine Mike Totten ripped up the
commendation he had received from General Petraeus, and threw it on the
floor in front of him, to a huge applause. One day earlier, former
Marine Jon Turner had taken a chest full of medals and thrown them into
the audience. ” I don’t work for you anymore!” Turner said. At the end
of his heart-wrenching account of the atrocities he had witnessed or
committed, Turner begged the Iraqi people for forgiveness.
All
too well I know these stories, and have known them for years. So I
kept crying and asking myself how these young men and women wound up in
this position. How someone who joined the military out of a sense of
“patriotism” wound up doing such horrible and heinous things that would
make a mother sick to her stomach. How do we let our children do
this? Casler, like my son, joined right out of high school. Many
others do the same. And many don’t have to be recruited; they join
voluntarily, out of a desire to serve their country. Many feel that
doing so is what makes heroes.
So I spent three days listening
to heart-wrenching, gut-wrenching stories, and continuously asked
myself the same question: “Why?” More specifically, why do these
soldiers and Marines, who represent a critical new breed of resisters,
still feel so tied to the military that many of them espouse some
variation of the sentiment, “I am proud of my service in the military.
I am not proud of what I did.” For someone like me, I can clearly see
that statement making sense. But then I had to ask myself why I
thought it made sense.
How could you be proud to be in the
military, and yet not like what you participated in while in the
military? I have often asked my son this question. He says, “I love the
Marine Corps. , but hate the government.” What a deep statement – one
that conjures up very mixed, confusing emotions. So I have to examine
not only the statements of love, but of loathing for war. War is a
dirty business, forever has been and forever will be. So why do we
encourage our citizens to think otherwise?
II.
I
had to get more to the root of my feelings about these questions. So,
after spending time at this event, I went to downtown Washington, D.C.
to visit monuments built to honor soldiers who fought in past wars. I
had to make sense of how we keep making the same mistakes. We send an
entire generation off to a foreign land to kill people. My father
fought in WWII, and was in the Battle of Okinawa, where he was severely
wounded. He was fortunate to come home and repair physically, but
never mentally. He hated the Marine Corps. He never spoke about that
war, but I always knew he was angry.
The first memorial I
visited was that one, where my father’s picture is stored in a digital
bank and you can enter the name and information surfaces on a computer
screen. There he was, in his Pacific Alphas (green wool uniform ),
with all his medals, smiling at the age of 27, when he was first
drafted. The roiling emotions took over my entire body. I grew up
seeing that photo, and loving my father for what he did to “protect”
our freedom. Next to the monument are the infamous words “Freedom
isn’t Free,” carved into the granite wall. My father eventually died
from liver failure, which was caused by Hepatitis C, which he
contracted on the battlefield through a blood transfusion from a
Japanese soldier that they had taken prisoner.
So why do we
do this as a country? I walked around to the Korean monument where
they had life-size statues of a platoon on patrol, and faces carved
into another granite wall hailing the suffering and sacrifice of those
soldiers. For what? I asked myself. I saw bus loads of visitors from
all over the U.S. taking pictures with the statues, wreaths in the
background, and against the granite walls, smiling and awestruck at our
“heroes.” A guide was repeating that freedom isn’t free and how our
military is the most honorable and the best in the world. We should be
proud of them, the guide said. Small children with their own cameras
were taking photos and looking in wonderment at the soldiers standing
in formation, their battle- hardened faces carved into metal.
I
asked myself why these kids were there. How could this be such an
attraction? So this is where it stars, I thought. Taking kids on bus
trips to the nation’s capitol and looking at war monuments. They are
being indoctrinated from the inception of their lives that America is
brave and wonderful because of its military.
I started
thinking what wars the U.S. had launched against other nations that
actually served the interests of humanity. I thought about Hitler’s
concentration camps in World War II, in which more than 6 million Jews
were murdered in the most cruel ways imaginable. The U.S. had helped to
liberate the concentration camps, defeat the Nazis, and free Europe
from the death grip of a madman. That would seem to be a worthy cause,
and an argument why we do need a military.
But was the real
motive of the Americans in World War II to stop the genocide against
Jewish people? It took this nation awhile to enter that war, and it
did so only after the attack on Pearl Harbor, which led to my father-at
age 27, the parent of a young son-being drafted. Then we dropped two
atomic weapons on innocent Japanese civilians, incinerating hundreds of
thousands instantly, and causing still hundreds of thousands more
deaths in years to come due to radiation exposure.
Was that
heroic? No, it was malicious and vengeful, and meant nothing to the
security of our shores. People died at Pearl Harbor, the damage was
done, so now it was time to pay back the Japanese one-thousand fold .
III.
Our
military might equals imperialism. Solidifying the U.S. position atop
the imperialist ladder was the real motivation for American entry into
World War II, and in fact it has essentially been the motivating factor
for every war waged against other countries by this nation’s military.
So when I asked myself what wars the U.S. had waged against other
nations with the genuine motivation of serving humanity, the answer I
arrived at is: None.
We train our soldiers and Marines to
kill, and to be merciless. They have the best weapons that our money
can buy, and are trained to use them on the enemy, whether they are
innocent civilians or someone who is actually threatening their lives
directly. It is indiscriminate killing at the behest of a government
that is seeking to terrify the world into submission to American empire.
Indeed,
the history of the U.S. Armed Forces is littered with war crimes in
pursuit of a domestic and global “manifest destiny” to achieve greater
lands and resources. Keep in mind that the United States as we know it
today would not exist were it not for the military’s systematic
decimation of first Native Americans, and then Mexicans, in the most
unspeakable ways imaginable. During the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864,
the U.S. Cavalry murdered hundreds of Native Americans-many of them
women and children- in what is today Colorado.
Or consider a
recent article in the New Yorker, entitled, “The Water Cure: Debating
Torture and Counterinsurgency-A Century Ago.”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/02/25/080225fa_fact_kramer
After
helping free The Phillipines from Spanish colonialism, the American
conquerors unleashed their wrath on those whom they were supposedly
liberating (sound familiar?) As the dawn of the 20th century
approached, American troops slaughtered civilians, burned down entire
villages, and-yes-waterboarded prisoners.
In 1950, during the
Korean War, American soldiers murdered hundreds of Korean
civilians-again, many of them women and children- under the bridge at
No Gun Ri. The Associated Press won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for its
series of articles exposing this crime against humanity; the pieces
centered on interviews with former U.S. veterans who had carried out
the slaughter.
http://www.pulitzer.org/year/2000/investigative-reporting/works/
During
the Vietnam War, U.S. forces murdered more than one million Indochinese
civilians, employing in the process horrific chemical weapons such as
napalm and Agent Orange, which burnt the skin of its victims. During
the first Winter Soldier hearings, Vietnam Veterans testified about
routinely murdering, disemboweling, and raping Vietnamese civilians,
throwing bound prisoners out of helicopters to their deaths, and
torching villages.
In fact, the final day of Winter Soldier:
Iraq and Afghanistan marked the 40th anniversary of one of the most
infamous war crimes in U.S. history. On March 16, 1968, U.S. troops
entered the village of My Lai and murdered hundreds of men, women, and
children-young and old– raping some of the women and bayoneting
elderly men.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/vietnam/trenches/my_lai.html
The
systematic crimes against humanity that are mentioned above represent
only a small percentage of the atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers
under the direct leadership of their Commander-in-Chiefs, and they do
not even touch on the countless instances of war-crimes-by-proxy
carried out throughout the globe by the CIA, and by various puppet
regimes installed by the U.S. government.
Without question,
the veterans who spoke out against the horrors the U.S. military is
inflicting upon the Iraqi people are to be commended for providing
tremendously critical exposure at time when the atrocities committed by
U.S. soldiers in the Middle East has been rendered “off the table” by
the mainstream media and political establishment. These veterans must
be praised, as well, for demanding an immediate end to the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars and occupations; their resistance can play a huge role
in bringing these nightmares to an end.
However, denouncing
these occupations in isolation from the history of repeated war crimes
carried out by the U.S. military no more makes sense than examining one
murder committed by a serial killer in isolation from the rest of his
murders. In order to both understand, and most powerfully resist, the
current manifestations of U.S. war criminality in Iraq and Afghanistan-
and in order to prevent future occurrences of crimes against humanity –
we must realize that the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars are symptomatic of
the historic role of the United States military as an institution.
During
last weekend’s Winter Soldier hearings, soldiers repeatedly testified
that the crimes against humanity they described were not isolated
incidents; that they were the rule, not the exception, of the U.S.
occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The further leap these
veterans -and many others within the anti-war movement-must now make is
to recognize that the occupations themselves, taken as whole, are
hardly isolated incidents; they, too, represent the rule and not the
exception-of the U.S. military.
Day 1 – By Elaine Brower, March 13 2008 
In 1971 Viet Nam Veterans” Against the War (VVAW) conducted a
testimonial based on the atrocities and horrors they participated in
during their time “In Country.” They called it Winter Soldier,
inspired by Revolutionary War hero Thomas Paine’s call for patriots to
act for their country in times of crisis.
Some of us remember the days when revolution was in the air, when we
had a civil rights movement, women “burning” their bras, a sexual
revolution, and a very powerful anti-war movement. Events such as the
assassinations of prominently outspoken Americans, as well as students
being shot at during Kent State protests, moved the masses of people
into a state of upheveal.
Veterans returning from the war in “Nam” were joining in the loud
voices to end the war. They did it by forming a strong organization,
using their anger and throwing their medals over
Then came Detroit when they converged to speak about the horrors of
the war. The testimonials were graphic, real and heart wrenching, but
it went almost unnoticed. The pro-war right called them liars and
cowards, and succeeded in almost destroying the validity of the
statements made by re
Now, 37 years later, Iraq Veteran’s Against the war (IVAW) has decided to recreate in a style that is all their own, new and hip, a Winter Soldier II shining a light once again on the horrors and atrocities of war.
Today at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., 6 veterans spoke to a room packed with cameras and reporters from every outlet, politically left to right. The announcement was to kick-off the next 3 days of testimonials from over 200 veterans and GI’s from around the country who will be recounting a particularly personal misery that they witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The media was gentle on the panel, considering what the next few days would uncover. One particular reporter asked about IVAW’s connection with CodePink and A.N.S.W.E.R. and if those particular organizations had sponsored the work of IVAW. Kelly Doherty, former MP in Iraq, and Executive Director of IVAW, stood up at the microphone with her serious stare, calm demeanor and beautiful porcelain skin and green eyes, and eloquently told the reporter that from the inception of the organization, VFP had helped support them in their fledging moments in 2004. She, along with 3 other Veterans, had stood on a stage in Boston, denouncing the war. Some members did protest alongside anti-war groups such as those mentioned, and many others, but their closest affiliation and allies were groups such as Veterans for Peace, Military Families and VVAW.
In the evening, there was live broadcasting from the National Labor College in Maryland where a panel discussion with some of the “oldies but goodies” started the introduction for the weekend. Barry Romo, original founder of VVAW and union organizer for the last 39 years, David Cortwright, author and historian of the GI resistance in Viet Nam, Tod Ensign, longtime veteran’s rights activist and Gerald Nicosia, friend of Ron Kovic, author of “Born on the 4th of July” and wounded in Viet Nam.
Kovic’s statement was read to the crowd and his passion for supporting this new group of resister’s was overwhelming. He said that by stepping forward “they were not just saving lives, they were saving the life of our nation.” Kovic expressed his disbelief that he is now seeing all over again what happened back when he was fighting an illegal and immoral war, and that the empire must be broken with this new generation of resistance fighters.
David Cortwright author of “Soldiers in Revolt,” agreed that only with resistance from within the military who “listen to their conscience” would end this war, as this resistance ultimately did that in Viet Nam.
Tod Ensign, Director of Citizen Soldier, author and supporter of the Different Drummer Café (www.differentdrummer.com) in upstate New York formed to replicate the coffee houses of the 60’s, passionately spoke of the young breed of soldiers he is meeting who eerily remind him of the past. He spoke of the similiarities between the anti-war candidate Richard Nixon, and his “secret plan” to end the war and those 2 democratic candidates who also have a plan to end the occupation of Iraq, but he says “who the hell knows what that is!”
Of course Barry Romo, being a labor organizer for 35 years, was much less eloquent in his speech, but had the audience riveted in the stories of the past. He witnessed the war in “Nam”, testified in the first Winter Soldier, and can only be described as a great colorful character. One story he recounted was the patch that signifies the VVAW, an upside-down rifle with a helmet on top, on red fabric. He remembered when they created that patch and had them made in East Asian countries such as Japan and the Philippines. The patches were “churned out by the thousands” and were worn by soldiers “in country.” He mentioned that in 1968 the North Vietnamese issued a statement, which is little know today, that “if any NV soldier sees an upside-down rifle patch on any soldier’s uniform, they will not shoot them.”
What Winter Soldier could mean to the current political situation in this Country is a complete unknown. All the testimonials will be broadcast live, and also streaming on the internet (see schedule at www.IVAW.org/wintersoldier). The members of IVAW are prepared for having their stories attacked, belittled and turned against them, as happened in 1971.
It is up to those of us in the anti-war movement, and there are millions of us who are against the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan, and escalating rhetoric of war with Iran, to promote the events of the next few days in a way that we have never done before. Word must get out through the impenetrable wall of the corporate media, to those on the street who don’t even know what IVAW is, and to the young men and women in this country who are on the verge of walking up to that recruiter and signing on the dotted line.
We are ready for Day 2, the full testimonials.
Elaine Brower is a member of the Steering Committee of World Can’t Wait.