Saturday 1 August 2009
The Hell of War Comes Home: Newspaper Series Documents Murder, Suicide, Kidnappings by Iraq Vets ☀
- AMY GOODMAN: You also talk about, in the case of Marquez, how in Iraq he had used stun guns and that, ultimately, he used a stun gun repeatedly on this man before he killed him, back in Colorado Springs or back in the United States.
- DAVE PHILIPPS: Right. When we started this story, which took about six months to report, we thought this would be a story of inadequate healthcare and civilian problems at home, or problems in the administration of the base at home that led to these guys falling through the cracks.
- What we started to find when we talked to them in prison is that there were widespread—I guess you would call them violations of the rules of war. They start with some small things, like several soldiers I talked to used hollow-point bullets. These are bullets that people usually use for deer hunting that spread when they hit their target, and so they can damage more flesh. These are banned by international treaties, but a number of soldiers I talked to said that they were getting them sent from home through the mail and that while it wasn’t openly talked about, it was sort of something that they did without fear of retribution.
- The other things that they were ordering from—getting through the mail include drugs, liquor, although people said that liquor was easy to get in Iraq, as well, but if you wanted good liquor, you’d get it mailed to you. They were also ordering stun guns, 500,000-volt stun guns, through the mail and getting them sent to them. And soldiers told me that a number of soldiers would carry them on raids. Now, this isn’t just one bad platoon. We talked to soldiers in multiple platoons in two battalions that reported the use of these stun guns.
- It goes on from there. Soldiers talked to me about randomly shooting cars driven by civilians. They talked to me about interrogating suspected insurgents and dropping them off of bridges.
- I want to stress here that we don’t know how widespread this is. This could be a severe minority, and certainly there are a lot of people in this brigade that probably, when they hear about this behavior, are disgusted with it. They’re honest, good people who are doing an almost impossible job.
- But what these soldiers told me is they were stuck in an insurgency fight they were not trained for, where there was no clear enemy. The main killer of these soldiers in this brigade was, by far, the improvised explosive devices, essentially roadside bombs. They were getting blown up without ever getting to try and fight back at the people that were killing their friends. And so, what they told me is that this anger and distrust for the entire population just burgeoned, and they thought that anyone was a potential enemy. And so, that’s why you saw them lashing out at the civilian population.
