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Sara and Justice Wallace listen to a question about their experiences in Iraq at a panel discussion hosted March
6 at Seattle Central Community College. They are attending Winter Soldier, a gathering of Iraq Veterans Against
the War planned March 13-16 near Washington, D.C.
Photo by Cydney Gillis |
Seth Manzel isn’t a bad man. He was just
a soldier caught up in a bad war.
That’s how the 28-year-old former
Army sergeant regards the violence he
says some of his fellow soldiers inflicted
on civilians in Iraq, where he served from
November 2004 to September 2005 with
the 25th Infantry Division.
After being stationed in the city of Talifar,
where he says Iraqi rebels outnumbered
U.S. troops 600 to 200, the men on his patrol
didn’t have the luxury of distinguishing between
friend or foe and had turned brutal
with every Iraqi they encountered.
It really showed up, Manzel says, when
he was transferred to the much calmer city
of Mosul, where he and others experienced
a sudden “reality check” that “there were
personalities in our platoon who were
regularly being brutal with regular citizens,”
he says. Soldiers “were beating up people
on the street for no reason.”
That’s just the start of what Manzel
has to say about what’s wrong with the
U.S. occupation of Iraq and, next week,
he plans to tell what he saw at a national
gathering of Iraq veterans who have taken
their cue from the anti-war vets who went
before them.
Manzel is flying to a college near Washington,
D.C., to give testimony March 13-16
at Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan, a
first-of-its-kind conference of Iraq Veterans
Against the War, which has named its event
after a historic 1971 gathering of Vietnam
veterans in Detroit, MI.
Thirteen other IVAW members from
the Northwest will attend the event, at
which Seattle chapter organizer Chanan
Suarez Diaz says 100 will speak, including
Manzel. Another 150 will attend
as witnesses, with their “testimony” on
various panels to be streamed live on
the Internet and recorded for later presentation
to members of Congress.
Like the Vietnam veterans before him,
Manzel hopes his words will help open
American eyes to the regular and systemic
atrocities that soldiers commit in Iraq. Such
incidents are not the isolated work of
“bad apples,” he and others say, but part
and parcel of soldiers trying to survive an
urban guerilla war that the U.S. is involved
in only for private profit and needs to exit
immediately for its own security.
“We make more terrorists everyday,”
says Manzel, a Tacoma security guard who
says he joined the Army because he was
out of work and had no way to support his
wife and child.
Neither do most
people today in Iraq,
where he describes
horrible conditions:
cities with little electricity,
hospitals with
few doctors or supplies,
and people
bathing and washing
dishes in what
are essentially open
sewers running
down streets and
ravines.
“When we first
got there, people
were positive about
us being there, they
were hopeful,” he
says. “After months
of no running water,
it became clear to
them that [the invasion]
was a sham,
that we were not
going to rebuild
Iraq and had no intention
of doing so.
That’s when they
turned against us.”
One task that Manzel’s unit was assigned
to didn’t help. With gasoline in
short supply, many Iraqis wait in line and
fill up containers to resell gas on the street,
providing some cash in a nation running at
70 percent unemployment. But the blackmarket
sales weren’t legal, so in Mosul, “It
was our job to make sure people didn’t do
that,” he says. “We would go and tell them
to stop selling gas and put holes in the gas
can, but, after a while, people were doing
this habitually and [some soldiers] started
getting brutal.”
In a couple of situations, he says, civilians
were killed by stray bullets that
soldiers fired. Another time, “they took
a kid and poured gasoline on him and
were threatening to set him on fire.”
“It’s not as though the people doing
this were bad people — they were all
good guys, they had families — but they
were being misused,” Manzel says. “When
you’re having soldiers who’ve been trained
to fight a conventional enemy and you put
them in basically a law-enforcement situation,
this sort of thing happens.”
“It’s a natural consequence, ” he
adds, of a war being fought not to rout
Al Qaeda terrorists — who are few and
far between in Iraq, Manzel says — but
to enrich contractors such as KBR and
Halliburton.
“Even if you’re for the war,” he says,
“there’s probably more active Al Qaeda inNew York City than in Iraq.”
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