Winter Soldier by Iraq Veterans Against the War, Aaron Glantz

next two weeks, this woman had no idea whether her son was alive, dead, or worse. At the end of that two weeks, the Special Forces team rolled up, dropped her son off, and without so much as an apology drove off. It turns out they had acted on bad intelligence.
    Things like that happen every day in Iraq. We are harassing these people. We are disrupting their lives.
    One day we were on another dismounted patrol through the Kindi Street area. We were walking past an area we called the Garden Center because it was literally a fenced-off garden. As is policy, we kept all cars and individuals away from our formation. So a car was approaching us from the front. I was at the rear of the formation because I was the medic and the medics hang out at the back with the platoon sergeant in case anything happens up front so you can respond.
    They waved the car off down a side street so that it would not come near our formation. As I made it to the side street, the car turned around and was coming back toward us because the street was blocked off by a concrete T barrier. I began doing my levels of aggression. I held up my hand trying to get the car to stop. The car sped up and I thought to myself, “Oh my God, this is it. This is someone who is trying to hurt us.”
    So instead of doing what I should have done according to policy and raising my weapon, instead I did what you should never do and I took my hands off of my weapon altogether and began jumping up and down waving my hands back and forth trying to get this car to stop and see me. The car kept coming and so I raised my weapon and the car kept coming. I pulled my selector switch off of safe and the car kept coming. I was applying pressure to my trigger, getting ready to fire on the vehicle and out of nowhere a man came off the side of the road, flagged the car down, and got it to pull over. He opened the driver’s side door, and out popped an eighty-year-old woman. This woman was a highly respected figure in the community and I don’t have a clue what would have happened had I opened fire on her. I would imagine a riot.
    To this day, that is the worst thing that I have ever done in my life. I am a peaceful person, but yet in Iraq I drew down on an eighty-year-old geriatric woman who could not see me because I was in front of a desert-colored building wearing desert-colored camouflage.
    The next mission we got was to man the main checkpoint that entered into the Green Zone. We called this checkpoint Slaughterhouse 11, because a car bomb goes off almost every single morning at checkpoint 11. The first day we took over that checkpoint, a car bomb drove into it and exploded. My guys were able to find cover and it didn’t hurt them, but it killed and injured untold numbers of Iraqi civilians in queue for the checkpoint. I treated five people that day, and I imagine twenty or thirty others got carted off in civilian ambulances before I could get to them. I remember a man running toward me carrying a young seventeen- or eighteen-year old Iraqi guy, very thin, and very pale. The guy was missing parts of his arm; his arm and his forearm were only held on by a small flap of skin. The bones were protruding and he was bleeding profusely. He had shrapnel wounds all over his torso and his entire left butt cheek was missing and it was bleeding profusely, and it was pooling blood.
    To this day I have that image burned in my mind’s eye. Every couple of days I get a flash of red color in my mind’s eye and it won’t have any shape, no form, just a flash of red and every time I associate it with that instance. Not only are we disrupting the lives of Iraqi civilians, we are disrupting the lives of our veterans.
    Conservative statistics say that the majority of Iraqis support attacks against coalition forces. The majority of Iraqis support us leaving immediately and the majority of Iraqis see us as the main contributors to the violence in Iraq.
    I like to explain it this way, especially in the