Winter Soldier by Iraq Veterans Against the War, Aaron Glantz Page B
Authors: Iraq Veterans Against the War, Aaron Glantz
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combatant. Well, this is at dusk and marines are all wearing camouflage and this guy could just have been cruising through his neighborhood, or rushing home to see his family. We didn’t know, but it was enough that the marines got jumpy and shot a burst of .50-cal rounds into this vehicle.
The bullets started at the bumper and went up the engine compartment and then one round at least hit this Iraqi in the chest so hard that it broke his chair backwards and we saw the vehicle burning in the distance. Everybody tried to justify it and say, oh, they heard rounds cooking off in the fire, AK-47 rounds were bursting in the trunk or somewhere in the car. The next day they dragged the car into our sleeping area, and it was clear that there were no holes from rounds cooking off in the side of this car.
I posed on the hood of that car, and as someone mentioned earlier, it felt funny not because what we were doing was morally wrong, but because I wasn’t the one that killed this guy. There was a group of us marines that all took turns taking pictures and posing like this. At the first Winter Soldier in 1971, one of the testifiers showed a similar picture and said, “Don’t ever let your government do this to you.” Our government is still doing this to patriotic young men and women who have volunteered their lives in the service of this country, putting them in a situation where this kind of thing is normal.
At one point during the siege of Fallujah we decided to let women and children out of the city. We thought it was the most gracious thing we could have done. I went out on the northern bridge over the Euphrates on the western side of Fallujah, and our guidelines were that males had to be under fourteen years old. If they were old enough to be in your fighting hole, they were too old to get out of the city. I had to go there and turn these men back.
We thought that we were doing something really noble and gracious, and it took me a long time before I could think about what a horrible decision we were forcing these families to make. They could split up and leave their husband and older sons in the city and hope a Spectre gunship round doesn’t land on their head, or stay with them and hunker down and just hope that they made it through alive.
After the siege of Fallujah, my civil affairs team was pulled to set up a Civil Military Operations Center or CMOC two clicks east of Fallujah. My role there was manning the front checkpoint. We didn’t have enough translators and I was learning Arabic and spoke enough to run a checkpoint without a translator. We were still putting down Spectre gunship rounds into the city, and one night some of those rounds started a fire. Iraqi firefighters and policemen responded and they were silhouetted against the fire. Since the marine’s Rules of Engagement at that time were to shoot anything after dark, marines started firing at these firefighters and policemen.
An Iraqi policeman woke me up in the middle of the night and through pointing, pantomime, the little Arabic I spoke at the time, and a translation dictionary, I was able to figure out that marines were shooting at Iraqi firefighters and cops. We sent it down our chain of command and stopped it from happening, but how many incidents like that happen? I know that that happened while I was there, during the siege of Fallujah.
One day in the middle of summer I got a random call on my field phone at the checkpoint saying, “Take one marine and get up to the road and stop any black Opel that comes your way,” because al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was fleeing the city in a black Opel. All I could say was, “What’s an Opel?”
I got up there, and I was with my marine, he was behind me, and I saw a black blur coming toward us, and I was like, “Hey, is that a black Opel?” He was like, “That’s a black blur, Sergeant.”
So I got up on the road and I pointed my rifle down the freeway—the main road between
The bullets started at the bumper and went up the engine compartment and then one round at least hit this Iraqi in the chest so hard that it broke his chair backwards and we saw the vehicle burning in the distance. Everybody tried to justify it and say, oh, they heard rounds cooking off in the fire, AK-47 rounds were bursting in the trunk or somewhere in the car. The next day they dragged the car into our sleeping area, and it was clear that there were no holes from rounds cooking off in the side of this car.
I posed on the hood of that car, and as someone mentioned earlier, it felt funny not because what we were doing was morally wrong, but because I wasn’t the one that killed this guy. There was a group of us marines that all took turns taking pictures and posing like this. At the first Winter Soldier in 1971, one of the testifiers showed a similar picture and said, “Don’t ever let your government do this to you.” Our government is still doing this to patriotic young men and women who have volunteered their lives in the service of this country, putting them in a situation where this kind of thing is normal.
At one point during the siege of Fallujah we decided to let women and children out of the city. We thought it was the most gracious thing we could have done. I went out on the northern bridge over the Euphrates on the western side of Fallujah, and our guidelines were that males had to be under fourteen years old. If they were old enough to be in your fighting hole, they were too old to get out of the city. I had to go there and turn these men back.
We thought that we were doing something really noble and gracious, and it took me a long time before I could think about what a horrible decision we were forcing these families to make. They could split up and leave their husband and older sons in the city and hope a Spectre gunship round doesn’t land on their head, or stay with them and hunker down and just hope that they made it through alive.
After the siege of Fallujah, my civil affairs team was pulled to set up a Civil Military Operations Center or CMOC two clicks east of Fallujah. My role there was manning the front checkpoint. We didn’t have enough translators and I was learning Arabic and spoke enough to run a checkpoint without a translator. We were still putting down Spectre gunship rounds into the city, and one night some of those rounds started a fire. Iraqi firefighters and policemen responded and they were silhouetted against the fire. Since the marine’s Rules of Engagement at that time were to shoot anything after dark, marines started firing at these firefighters and policemen.
An Iraqi policeman woke me up in the middle of the night and through pointing, pantomime, the little Arabic I spoke at the time, and a translation dictionary, I was able to figure out that marines were shooting at Iraqi firefighters and cops. We sent it down our chain of command and stopped it from happening, but how many incidents like that happen? I know that that happened while I was there, during the siege of Fallujah.
One day in the middle of summer I got a random call on my field phone at the checkpoint saying, “Take one marine and get up to the road and stop any black Opel that comes your way,” because al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was fleeing the city in a black Opel. All I could say was, “What’s an Opel?”
I got up there, and I was with my marine, he was behind me, and I saw a black blur coming toward us, and I was like, “Hey, is that a black Opel?” He was like, “That’s a black blur, Sergeant.”
So I got up on the road and I pointed my rifle down the freeway—the main road between
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