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."