Dead-Check in Falluja: Village Voice

Dead-Check in Falluja
by Evan Wright
November 24 - 30, 2004

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0447/wright.php

n April 9, 2003, the day the statue of Saddam Hussein was being toppled in Baghdad, symbolizing the promised liberation of Iraq, I was embedded with a Marine unit engaged in fierce combat about 30 miles north of the city, on the outskirts of Baquba. Late that afternoon, the Humvee I was in was following about 50 feet behind a Marine Light Armored Vehicle when it pulled alongside a Toyota pickup pushed to the side of the road, its doors riddled with bullet holes. The head of at least one occupant was visible in the truck, but I couldn't determine if he was moving or not. Nor did I see any weapons. As our Humvee stopped behind the truck, a Marine in the vehicle ahead of us leapt out, pointed his rifle into the window of the pickup and sprayed it with gunfire. It was a cold-blooded execution.

As we continued forward, passing the truck, I glimpsed at least two corpses sprawled on the seats, the interior spattered with blood. During the brief moment I looked, I was unable to determine whether the dead men possessed weapons. None of the four Marines in our Humvee said anything. We had been awake for more than 30 hours, much of that time under steady mortar, rifle, machine-gun, and rocket-propelled grenade fire from enemy combatants who dressed in civilian clothes and moved around on the battlefield in Toyota pickups. (To make matters even more confusing, during the height of combat farmers were racing into the surrounding fields—where enemy soldiers were shooting at us from dug-in, concealed positions—in order to rescue sheep from the gunfire.)

In the previous few minutes we had already passed more than a dozen corpses strewn by the side of the road. Some had the tops of their heads missing, expertly hit by Marine riflemen. Others were burned—still smoking, actually—having crawled out of other vehicles set ablaze by rockets fired from Marine helicopters. The execution of one or two more men wasn't worth commenting on.

I greeted the sight of dead Iraqis in the pickup with a sense of numb relief. At least they would not be trying to kill us that day. In the preceding two-and-a-half weeks, the unit I was embedded with had come under frequent enemy attack, with three Marines wounded. There were 23 bullet holes in the Humvee I rode in—miraculously, none of the five of us inside had been hit. I had developed a strange relationship with the sight of dead Iraqis. I felt safer when I saw them.

Bu$h and Co. should be impeached and tried for crimes against humanity (including that of the Marines), peace and gneocide.

VC didymau!

You bioc numba one GI?

No VC! No VC!

pidjin English. It's a wonder any of us understood a thing that was going on. :-)

He was a kid about 16, very bright with many dreams of getting an education. He was very personable, but in retrospect I realize the other side of him I perceived must have been an intense ambivalence at our operations there. We were a company of Acavs and tanks careening through the countryside wreaking havoc on the well manicured rice patties, the dykes and irrigation systems that had taken centuries to build. We didn't know any better at the time. But I sure know how I'd feel if I were one of those villagers!

Take care, bro. Welcome home.

Yep, and now there's an entirely different generation going through the same things we did with an optional war. I've got a Friend I put on a personal "suicide alert" who was 82nd Airborne. That man has demons haunting him from those days. He was wounded in both legs in his first tour, and most of his unit was killed. He went back as a door gunner with a serial killer's attitude.
I told him to call or come by my house night or day; I'm hoping I can keep him alive. He's got a young child he has to raise, too. Thousands more will be facing those same demons. :-(
Anyway, thanks again!

after reading that article.

We have become animals.

always were

What's on your table this thanksgiving?

Most of us live in glass houses so don't be so quick to pick up those rocks.

Don't blame ours kids ....It's the leadership If I wasn't a peace-nik I'd say "kill em, kill em all" (the leadership that is) but then again I'm a peace-nik.

unless you're equating killing a turkey with executing people. :shrug:

Another Marine in the unit I followed—a Democrat's dream, he returned home from fighting in Falluja in time to vote for Kerry—added,

"Americans celebrate war in their movies. We like to see visions of evil being defeated by good. When the people at home glimpse the reality of war, that it's a bloodbath, they freak out. We are a subculture they created and programmed to fight their wars.

"You have to become a psycho to kill like we do. To most Marines that guy in the mosque was just someone who didn't get hit in the right place the first time we shot him. I probably would have put a bullet in his brain if I'd been there. If the American public doesn't like the violence of war, maybe before they start the next war they shouldn't rush so much."

"THEY"...that's extremely telling.

This article should be required reading for the bloodthirsty dumb-fucking AmeriKans....


~snip~

I felt especially comforted when I saw dead men by the road still clutching weapons in their hands, a common sight. Unfortunately, of the hundreds of dead people I saw on the roads leading from the Kuwait border to Baghdad, perhaps 20 percent or more were obviously civilians. I will never forget the three or four women I saw fatally shot and partially burned, still seated in a bus on the road north of Nasiriyah. Or the little girl, about four, lying by the side of the road in a pretty dress, her legs neatly and inexplicably chopped off at the knees. Mercifully, I remember thinking at the time, she was dead like all the others.


~snip~
A few days earlier, the youngest Marine on the team had shot a 12-year-old boy four times in the chest with his machine gun, mistakenly thinking a stick the boy had been carrying was a weapon. When the mother and grandmother of the boy later dragged him to the Marines' lines seeking medical aid, the sergeant who led the team dropped down in front of the mother and cried.

:cry:

I have an almost-4-year-old and this absolutely sickened me. Just thinking of this poor girl (and how many others like her?) dying alone and in horror and pain in a war started by lies and greed alternately depresses and enrages me. And our president, the chief liar, has the nerve to joke about it "Now where are those WMD's...." scurrying around the White House pretending to look for them. Where's the outrage? Why aren't those red-state war baiters having to look at this, what this administration is doing to people not unlike themselves? What if that little girl were their daughter? It will take many generations to cleanse this stain, if it ever can be.
I'd like to email this article to every Democratic congressman and senator. Is there anywhere a master email list of these? The lists that I've seen so far have a lot of web-based comment pages rather than email addresses and I don't have time to do 300 or more of those.

Kill the Koreans?

Bloodthirsty killers will be coming home from Iraq....

<snip>

One thing military officials are not saying is that the behavior of the Marine in the video closely conforms to training that is fairly standard in some units. Marines call executing wounded combatants "dead-checking."

"They teach us to do dead-checking when we're clearing rooms," an enlisted Marine recently returned from Iraq told me. "You put two bullets into the guy's chest and one in the brain. But when you enter a room where guys are wounded you might not know if they're alive or dead. So they teach us to dead-check them by pressing them in the eye with your boot, because generally a person, even if he's faking being dead, will flinch if you poke him there. If he moves, you put a bullet in the brain. You do this to keep the momentum going when you're flowing through a building. You don't want a guy popping up behind you and shooting you."

What I'd seen on that road outside of Baquba on April 9 was a dead-check. The Marine who fired into that Toyota with wounded men inside didn't want anybody shooting at us as we went past. It may have been a war crime, and had I possessed a video camera at the time and filmed it, the Marine who fired into the truck might have faced punishment. As it was, no one questioned the Marine's actions.

In fact, commanders in the Marine Corps during the period I was embedded with them in the spring of 2003 repeatedly emphasized that the men's actions would not be questioned. As one of the officers in the unit I followed used to tell his men, "You will be held accountable for the facts not as they are in hindsight but as they appeared to you at the time. If, in your mind, you fire to protect yourself or your men, you are doing the right thing. It doesn't matter if later on we find out you wiped out a family of unarmed civilians."

<snip>
The Marines constantly debated the morality of what they were engaged in. A sergeant in the platoon told me he had consulted with his priest about killing. The priest had told him it was all right to kill for his government so long as he didn't enjoy it. By the time the unit reached the outskirts of Baghdad, this sergeant was certain he had already killed at least four men. When his battalion commander praised the unit for "slaying dragons" on the way to Baghdad, the sergeant later told his men, "If we did half the shit back home we've done here, we'd be in prison." By then, the sergeant told me, he'd reconsidered what his priest had told him about killing. "Where the fuck did Jesus say it's OK to kill people for your government? Any priest who tells me that has got no credibility."
<snip>

The crusading spirit is still alive and well. I'm sure Jesus would so approve.

<extremely bitter sarcasm off>

what a lousy priest. I am sure he organizes right to life marches for his parish too! What hypocrisy!

:grr:

This is a must read and pass along to fundie family at the dinner table today!

:kick:

...she read it. She posted back that since it was from a "left-wing rag" it isn't credible.

Sheesh! As if Newsmax would print it.

about his time embedded with this unit. Sheesh, nothing will wake up the bush bots!

GD'it Bush and his thugs need to be charged with WAR CRIMES.

:dem: