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Sergio Kochergin, Joshua Simpson and Joshua Farris were among the soldiers offering testimony May 31 of what their units had done and witnessed in Iraq.
Photo by Andrew Drawbaugh. |
Sergio Kochergin leaned forward to the mike on the table, arms braced on the sides of his chair. He spoke in a near-monotone filled with the dull ache of what he had seen and what he himself had done in Iraq.
His first deployment during and after the invasion in 2003 was supposed to be humanitarian, the former Marine said. But other than spending a week or two fixing a park, all his platoon did was harass people.
On his second deployment to Anbar Province in 2004 and 2005, things turned worse. No sooner had his platoon arrived than the company chief, first lieutenant and a commanding officer were blown up by roadside bomb. After that, he said, the rules of engagement changed from disarming civilians to killing them.
“Pretty much all we did was just go out on the town and search for people to shoot,” Kochergin said. “Later on, we had no rules of engagement at all. It was go out there and if you see something that you think is not right, take ‘em out.”
“Looking back at it, it’s disgusting. It makes me sick,” he said. “I just want to say that enough is enough. We’re done. It’s not working. We went there to try and help. Obviously we’re not doing anything and it’s time to get out.”
Over the course of the next hour, 12 other men and women sitting to either side of Kochergin – eight deployed to the war – would share a similar mix of outrage and conviction in a May 31 outpouring called Northwest Winter Soldier, an event organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War.
There is no clear mission in Iraq other than corporate profit — one reason abuses and atrocities are common, the veterans said. American soldiers rip Iraqi men from their homes and families, often based on a tip from a neighbor seeking a payoff from the U.S. military, said Joshua Simpson, a veteran who worked in Army tactical intelligence. Soldiers then violently interrogate the captives, send them off to filthy detention centers for weeks or months on end, or “outsource” them to be tortured by the Iraqi police.
“I did see what the Iraqis did to detainees, and it was extremely terrible,” Simpson said. There were “scars all over their bodies, bruises all over their bodies — basically not an ounce of flesh had been unharmed.”
“The things that we do in Iraq are disgraceful,” said former Army sergeant Seth Manzel. “How can we possibly criticize other countries when we treat people this way?”
At home, returning soldiers who are injured receive medical care that’s woefully inadequate, said Doug Conner, a former Army surgical nurse who served at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., and in Mosul, Iraq. At Walter Reed, “We were lacking equipment to include just basic analgesia for patients who had lost their limbs,” he said.
Those who suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome, said Kochergin and Ash Woolsen, a former Wisconsin Army Guardsman, self-medicate, drink and get into trouble with the law – a cycle for which there is little, if any, help from the VA. Both said they had tried. The waiting list ran more than a year long, Kochergin said – with tens of thousands more to come, according to Evan Kanter, a psychiatrist with the Puget Sound VA.
About a third of those returning suffer from either PTSD or major depression, he said, with up to 20 percent struggling with the loss of function from a traumatic brain injury brought on by constant exposure to blasts in Iraq. At that rate, out of the 1.6 million military personnel deployed to Iraq, Kanter estimated a total of 300,000 to 400,000 “psychiatric casualties” will be coming home, out of which 18 veterans a day are already committing suicide – the highest rate ever recorded, he said.
The result for families, said Tracy Manzel, who spoke on the panel with her husband Seth, is domestic violence, broken marriages and, in one case she cited, a wife murdered by a husband in Seth’s unit. “The Bush Administration talks of family values and how much these values are attacked, but really what the administration is doing is splitting families apart,” she said.
Other comments made by veterans at Northwest Winter Soldier:
• Seth Manzel: “One time, an Iraqi man approached me while I was on guard near the detainee center. He told me that his father was ill and needed medical attention. The old man was lying on his side writhing in pain. He was jaundiced. The son explained to me his father suffered from an inflamed prostate and could not urinate. I went to get the medics. They arrived and said that the old man was just too lazy to get up and use the latrine. They said that they were not obligated to treat prisoners … They scolded me for wasting their time and left.”
• Joshua Simpson: “People know that the U.S. has a military that will pay for people to give information to us, [but it’s] the names of people [that] don’t have anything to do with terrorist attacks or the insurgency. It’s people they dislike or something, a neighbor who had a feud with them – sometimes just random people. And this would be the basis of the raids that we would do.”
• Joshua Farris: During “a late-night inspection, a man pulls a gun on me. Of course, I should have killed him, according to the rules of engagement, but there’s no clear understanding what the rules of engagement are in this situation. I don’t’ kill the guy but the sergeant tackles [him and] beats him into the ground in front of his entire family. He ends up being a police officer. Thank god we didn’t kill him.”
• Ash Woolsen: “I want to emphasize the loss of humanity during war. The value of human life is reduced to nothing. What I saw disgraced me as a human being and changed my perspective of the purpose of the war. I saw how no one that is involved in war benefits. The civilians of Iraq – they don’t benefit. The soldiers returning from Iraq – they see no benefit either. The only people that see benefit are the corporations that profit from the war in Iraq.” |
