By Scott Horton
Earlier this year, Joshua Phillips received the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for his 2008 American Radio Works documentary What Killed Sergeant Gray. Now he’s developed that story in a book that offers a compelling account of how the use of torture and abusive techniques on prisoners affected the lives of American soldiers caught up in it. I put six questions to Joshua Phillips.
1. Most of the discussion of torture has focused on the prisoners as victims; you turn this around by describing the tragic consequences of torture for soldiers. How did you come to this approach?
By accident. I learned about the central story while investigating various veterans’ issues, and the problems that some troops faced trying to report prisoner abuse to their superiors. One of the soldiers I interviewed was Jonathan Millantz, an Army combat medic. Millantz told me he was upset by the pushback that he faced from officers when he tried to report abuse. Over time, he revealed how he and his fellow unit members became involved in prisoner abuse and, in some cases, torture. It was important to Millantz that I understand the complex circumstances that led to such misconduct. He and his fellow troops also wanted me to recognize how damaging the experience had been for them—especially for soldiers who felt remorseful about their involvement with abuse, such as Sergeant Adam Gray.
As I learned more about these soldiers, I reflected on a story I wrote for the Washington Post (”The Case Against the Generals,” Aug. 17, 2003) about Salvadoran torture victims. One of the victims I profiled was a doctor, and he said he later met one of the soldiers who had tortured him in El Salvador. The doctor said he felt sorry for him because he noticed how this soldier, too, had been victimized by the torture. The soldier appeared to be traumatized by the violence he inflicted, he was discarded by the military that he faithfully served, and he could not describe to others what he had gone through.
in full:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/07/hbc-90007368