Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan

An Op-Ed piece for the San Francisco Chronicle
by Gerald Nicosia

“The reason I am doing this,” said former Marine Jon Turner, “is not only for myself and for the rest of society to hear, but it’s for all those who can’t be here to talk about the things we went through and the things we did.” He pointed a finger vaguely up into the air, and his voice was shaking. “I just want to say that I am sorry for the hate and destruction that I have inflicted on an innocent people, and I’m sorry for the hate and destruction that others have inflicted on innocent people. At one point, it was okay, but reality has shown that it is not, and that this is happening, and that until people hear what is going on with this war it will continue to happen and people will continue to die. I’m sorry for the things that I did. I am no longer the monster that I once was.”

A former machinegunner with Kilo Company, Third Battalion, 8^th Marines, who had served two tours in Iraq, Jon Turner did not look like a monster. He was a little above average height, good-looking, with a thick thatch of blond hair, and gentle manners. If not for the small blue-dot earring in his left ear—and the tattoos he later exposed—he could easily pass for what used to be called “the all-American boy.” But the stories he related, and the videos and slides he showed to back them up, during the four days of hearings called “Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan” (March 13-16, 2008) just outside of Washington, D.C., were a million miles away from Norman Rockwell America. The hearings were staged by a group called Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW). Several hundred veterans of the war in Iraq attended the event at the National Labor College; and 55 of them, including Turner, gave personal testimony of what they had seen and done in Iraq.

Turner, whose unit had lost 18 soldiers in Iraq, reported routinely firing rounds into mosques just out of anger, “kicking in doors and terrorizing families,” the mistaken firing of rounds into cars filled with civilians, whose drivers were simply confused or didn’t understand the English commands to stop, and dozens of other brutalities carried out daily against the population of Iraq. Other veterans at Winter Soldier testified to similar incidents, and almost all recalled using the derogatory term “haji” (pronounced hodgie) for Iraqis—the equivalent of the word gook in Vietnam. Turner’s slides and videos were perhaps a bit more graphic—an image, for example, of the brains of a civilian scattered on pavement by a .50 caliber machinegun slug. But two of his stories were among the heaviest we heard in those four days.

The first was of Turner’s “first kill”—a “fat man” on foot whom he shot for refusing a command to halt. The “fat man” did not die from the first bullet Turner put in his neck, so while he screamed and looked pleadingly into Turner’s eyes, Turner deliberately dispatched him with a shot at close range. The second story was even worse. He and his men were having a bad day—and bad days are apparently not hard to have in Iraq, where a large percentage of the population feels hostility toward the American military presence. The CBS reporter who’d been following them switched over to the other squad in his platoon. Left unwatched, Turner and two fellow soldiers “took out some individuals” who were doing them no harm. Turner shot a man going by on a bike, then threw the body behind a wall and tossed his bike on top of it.

My friend Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead and a former Marine himself, who was there to cover the event, as was I, leaned over to me and said, “I think Turner just confessed to murder.” But putting that remark in perspective, Swofford would also tell me later, “The thing that got me the most, is I know that for every guy up there testifying today, there are probably a thousand others out there keeping silent.”

Some of the right-wing protesters outside, including the group Eagles Up!, claimed these testifiers weren’t real vets, but they had all been thoroughly checked out by an IVAW verification team. Moreover, nobody—unless they’d done a few years at the Actors Studio—could fake the emotions these vets were clearly feeling as they testified: voices choking up and cracking, tears spontaneously welling.

Although the horror stories kept coming for four days, not all of them involved personal malice. Just as powerful and moving as Turner’s was the testimony of slender, dark-haired Marine gunner James Gilligan, who resembled a young version of actor Bob Denver. He told how in Afghanistan in 2004 he was the only member of his team to see the artillery flash from enemy soldiers who had fired on their humvee from a hill about 6 kilometers away. The American troops set up a mortar to take out the Taliban attackers, and Gilligan’s commander asked him to provide the azimuth of the enemy position, using a compass that he was unfamiliar with. Gilligan started sobbing as he spoke, and was only able to continue when fellow veteran Garret Reppenhagen seated beside him put an arm around his shoulder. Gilligan had placed the compass too close to a machinegun barrel, causing it to give a false azimuth. Instead of taking out the Taliban artillery, they did grave damage to, and caused extensive civilian casualties in, a nearby Afghani village.

A wide array of men, women, and even families gave testimony, including Joyce and Kevin Lucey, who described the slow and inexorable breakdown of their son, Marine Cpl. Jeffrey Lucey, who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) upon his return from the war. When Kevin Lucey described taking his son’s body down from the rafters where he’d hung himself, half of the 500 people in the room were in tears or close to it.

The psychiatric diagnosis of PTSD actually developed from the study of Vietnam veterans, so it was apt that the name Winter Soldier was taken from a similar series of hearings held by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in Detroit in 1971. The term originally derived from Revolutionary War patriot Thomas Paine’s description of Washington’s soldiers at Valley Forge, who withstood a terrible winter on starvation rations in order to come back and fight for their nation one more time—and eventually win. Clearly these Iraq vets, just like their Vietnam vet counterparts, saw themselves as still fighting for their country in trying to bring the truth they experienced into a public forum.

They spoke with no discernible hostility or partisan bias, and less anger than one would have expected. The names Bush, Cheney, and Petraeus were seldom mentioned. Most expressed their reason for being there along the same lines as former Marine scout Sergio Kochergin, who said he was expecting his testimony to be heard by Congress and to help bring a rapid end to the war.

Most of the vets I talked to said they felt good about the testimony they gave, and it seemed to be the start of a slow healing for some. But there was a heavy price to be paid too—not least in the access of PTSD in many. One of the vets had to check into the Brooklyn VA immediately afterward, and was hospitalized for more than 2 weeks.

One thing is certain: the issues and problems that were talked of at Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan were all things that should have been discussed and debated by the Congress, the press, and the American people long before we entered this war.