Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan

Rules of Engagement Panel Testimony

Testimony given in two parts for the Rules of Engagement panel of Winter Soldier: Iraq & Afghanistan on March 15, 2008. As part of the event, I was also interviewed by Truthout and my testimony appeared in a book by the same name by Aaron Glantz.

• Part 1 Transcript

  I have some images also if you could load the first one my name is Logan military I currently reside in Camden New Jersey the fourth most dangerous city in the u.s. I moved there after I got out to avoid running away from the violence that I experienced in Iraq it's my hope that if I can stop running from it embrace it not embrace it but not let it conquer me that's I think what has had the most healing effect on me so a lot of people have asked me why I'm here today I was a cynic when I joined IV aww I was very hesitant to to advocate for the meeting with all the troops I've had a change of heart so anyway that being said I listened enlisted in the United States Army February 16th of 2000 I stepped out on active duty in on August 9th of that same year I was immediately assigned 282nd everyone I went through Airborne training I was there just under two years on September 11th I was in the dentist chair getting three teeth pulled so I got the privilege of watching the news for the next three days straight when the prospect of Afghanistan came up I volunteered to go I was in e3 at the time I didn't have enough rank to pull the strings to get me into the the right brigade that was going so I didn't get to go my second option I decided to reenlist for Hawaii and the 25th entry Division and go green to gold and become an officer so I was very committed to the military when I initially enlisted you've not only I mostly did so for college money next slide please

  about a year into my time in Hawaii I deployed on January 19 2004 I was with 114 golden dragons second Brigade 25th Infantry Division and at that point it had the light indicator still now it's a striker unit was the imager looking as writing on the bathroom wall in the Kirkuk air base or forward operating the base warrior one of my compatriots apparently decided to list the different places of my battalion is scene and I I'm showing it to you because it's hard for me to say that we had any amount of predictability in Iraq after two months being in to Zermatt to a small airfield south of Kirkuk we picked up and we were assigned to be a quick reaction force for the country so I I traveled to all these different fobs fought Bernstein initially in to see our motto fob Duke in the draft Weiss fob maras and Moe Mosel fob warrior in Kirkuk fob Sykes and tell afar operation Baton Rouge in Samara and fob McHenry in Hawaii and then we and then we redeployed in February 15 2005 I came back and let a lot of its - I didn't really do too much with it and after about six months because of a lot of different things going on in my life I began to reimburse Christian faith I told myself I was Christian basically basically my whole life and I came to see that that faith obligates me to non-violence I applied to be a conscientious objector I asked my my unit my commander specifically that to return to Iraq without a weapon I asked to be a noncombatant and through the process of being a co and having an interview with the psychiatrist I was labeled or I was given diagnosis with maladjustment disorder because every soldier is trying to be an infantryman first so the idea of a soldier going to battle without a weapon is incomprehensible when the reality is we have two Congressional Medal of Honor winners who are conscientious objectors Desmond Dawson World War two and Thomas Bennett was killed in Vietnam both were unarmed medics and I wanted to carry on that legacy I felt very strongly about non-violence and providing alternatives to violence in the middle of combat as a result of that my commanders were commits I had some grand scheme together the army they they told me I was aiding the enemies of America that I didn't deserve my my rank owes me five at the time and they reassigned me after I had to apply pressure because they were sitting on my my procedure on my application without doing anything I got reassigned to a writ attachment battalion and one of the most difficult days of my life was August 7th 2006 watching my unit to play without me knowing that wouldn't be there with them and so I eat yest I got out of the the active duty November 21st 2006 I was in the West Bank at the time after a month of terminal leave in my MSO my military service obligation my IRR time expired February 15th of this year next slide please I want to preface what I'm saying just by stating that nothing I'm sharing with you today should be misconstrued as an attack on the military I've witnessed my fair share of bad social neck and economic situations that have been alleviated by one's enlistment in the arm in the army furthermore one's experience in the service is less dependent upon the institution itself then on the people he or she shares that experience with and as we have and will continue to see many members of the Armed Forces have displayed the capacity to abuse the authority granted them by their rank or their office and finally it's my personal opinion that individual militarization causes significant and often irreversible injury to one's physical social and spiritual health I was a forward observer for for in the active duty for six years I'm not sure if anybody else has noticed I want to make a quick comment about the tag line I wouldn't I witness accounts the occupations the first sense of occupation is is obvious we're occupying a sovereign nation without the consent or the support of the international community but the second sense I noticed sitting in the first panel this morning in that sense of occupation there's a disturbing minority that enter Iraq with a profit motive who make their money for more and whose occupation is to extend and prolong this war to the benefit of their pocketbooks I thought that was really interesting my mind works really fast but I thought or that I had next slide please

  as I said my unit moved around a lot this picture was taken in Mosul just prior to the elections in January 2005 and it's fairly representative of most of my time there the roee would change first of all there was mostly verbal we never were given our OE cards when Adam for cash this morning flash went in front of everybody that was actually the first time I saw it I didn't think they I thought there were one of those stress cards that people get in basic there are mostly rumors so we never got any concrete are we that actually defined what our mission was and what our levels of aggression were allowed to be we were told I think there were four s's or maybe five let me see if I remember correctly signal shout shove shoot I'm sorry signal shout show shoves shoot and that was the extent of what our ROV was on a running basis the the Golden Rule one that we could always count on was that if you feel threatened don't hesitate to use your weapon if you feel it's necessary that was our license if something occurred we could always say that we were threatened and I think that I observed that a couple of times with other members of my unit

• Part 2 Transcript

  the are we for indirect assets artillery mortars was always really clear they were very restrictive in my experience but for automatic weapons or rifles they were never very clear and that's where I think that images is very powerful one thing that people don't always understand I can only speak to this because being a forward observer when we were in a sitting position or if we were if we visited a forward operating base that had artillery or mortars they'd been in a sitting position for more than several date of weeks you have to register the guns to the weather conditions to all different things so every now and then forward observers were tasked to sit on an Opie and watch rounds being fired if you call it training because we definitely utilized it to train up some of our younger Joes and essentially what we're doing is firing rounds into Iraq while we were bored I didn't understand till recently the white phosphorus is not supposed to be fired you know it's not supposed to be used against civilian targets in our civilian etc that's what we used as our training rounds in what were hasty impact areas in Iraq so I think it's important to realize that it's not just the operations themselves but it's also what we did for training was still had a significant impact on the surrounding community

  Jason Lemieux also mentioned very permissive are we I experienced the same thing in the Joff in 2004 in I want to say July rolling into the city moqtada al-sadr was our enemy at that time we were told anybody in black clothing with a green headband is fair game to shoot I never experienced it but it was made very clear that this is the uniform of the enemy and you should feel free to take them out whenever necessary and that was the closest I think we got to conventional warfare which is what I trained on for five years before I went to Iraq

  another time is Samara and October of 2004 I was a part of that operation Baton Rouge my platoon was attached to I believe one to six armor we were the first light infantry to enter the city of Samara from the West I was a trained up for Fallujah we were told as the litmus test to see what procedures we need to incorporate into the attack on Fallujah in November on the second day on the the roof of a school we set up a security position we'd set up a security to position and one of the snipers well backtrack a little bit going into Samara we were told that all of all of the civilians had been told that we were coming that we had a very permissive are we because they were told that we're supposed to stay in their house or evacuate the city the following day one of the snipers saw a man crossing the street with a bag in his hand and shot him within the roee but I don't think that that would for me satisfy my ethical kind of restrictions

  and another real quick one and after I got back from Iraq hopefully to a anyway when I clarify what has also been said at the National Training Center for Irwin my battalion commander after three weeks in the box at Fort Irwin sat at my company down for a pep talk and they made it explicitly clear that if there was a problem and the wrong person went down we would plant weapons to ensure that you guys are protected several months later on their second deployment would have been my second deployment to members of my old unit were brought up on article 32 charge for premeditated murder and he was relieved and I'm I'm curious why he was relieved when he obviously set the atmosphere that allowed incidences like that to occur next slide please and I'll try and make this as brief as possible on in the lines of unnecessary loss of life I'm afraid you might not be able to see it very well the turning point for the war for me came on November 16 to 2004 in there's a American convoy that I was on a convoy in a presence patrol actually Rocketman Patrol we were looking for mortarman we got a call to assist another unit that had had an accident on a convoy vehicle had overturned over a reservoir which you might be able to see and was resting over part water and and part land I was asked to get in the water and look for bodies I did that about an hour into it after I had gotten out of the water I was circling the vehicle looking for things to do when I saw a set of legs sticking out from what used to be the door to the Humvee at first glance I thought it was a rest we were talking to another personnel pinned by the vehicle as we had given morphine to I checked his leg I tapped him on the leg didn't I didn't get a response I indicated toward the medics I think it was a casualty and then we needed to give him attention his response was he's too far gone we need to focus on the people have a chance so for an hour and a half I kind of fretted about what to do with this guy so and to explain combat triage is actually the opposite from triage in a hospital where he rushed the most immediate to the operating room in combat if someone doesn't have a chance you make it as comfortable for them as possible to die

  finally a crane came lifted the vehicle got the guy out there's pinned by his leg red morphine already injecting him and the Special Forces medics got the other guy up and he had a pulse he was still alive and I heard on the radio going back to Kirkuk that he had died before he could reach the clinic and for some reason that struck me pretty pretty hard for nine nights I didn't sleep I realized that there's a great possibility that he died hearing everybody around him and knowing that nobody was coming to his aid in the tents at night I in the pitch dark I couldn't stop thinking about how it felt being trapped under a Humvee and possibly not be able to catch a breath and you know cry for help and then I really got disturbed when I realized despite all the Iraqi bodies I had seen throughout Iraq there was an American soldier that made me disturbed and so for several months after that and still today I wrestled with what does that mean that I saw these Iraqis dead or you know whatever Nationals they were but it took an American soldier someone in my own race and Creed and skin color to wake me up out of this kind of slumber and to illuminate it maybe a little bit please forgive me for this necessarily harsh image but imagine you wake up in the morning and in your purse or your wallet you find a membership card if if they have them from the KKK and your name is on it and you realize four years of your life you were told you were taught to think something about a certain people and what that must feel like and what that would take to overcome that in your future and I want to close with real quickly why why I do this Martin Luther King said of the war in Vietnam and I would repeat in the war of terror I opposed this war because I love America I speak out against this were not in anger but with a great sorrow in my heart I speak out against this this war because I'm disappointed with America there can be no great disappointment where there is no great love I'm disappointed with our failure to deal forth positively and forthrightly to those evils of racism economic exploitation militarism we are presently moving down a dead-end road that will lead to national disaster and I don't want a national disaster thanks for letting me share

  thank you very much