"Pull the f***ing trigger, Lucey!"

source: http://www.pigstye.net/iraq/article.php/LuceyJeff

What Jeff Lucey told his family about his time in Iraq as a Marine reservist made the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib pale in comparison.

His father, Kevin Lucey, remembers his son's story: Two unarmed Iraqi men had stood before Jeff in the desert. They were presumably prisoners.

"Pull the f***ing trigger, Lucey!" someone had shouted. His gun was shaking, but he did look into the eyes of one of the guys. He said it was a young guy like him. The kid was scared. Jeff was wondering if this was somebody's son, somebody's brother, somebody's father, somebody's friend.

The order to shoot came again. Jeff obeyed.

He was about five feet away. The blood splattered all over. And then he shot the second one. One was in the eye, and one was in the throat.

Jeff told his family he watched the men die. Then he removed their dog tags and later brought them back home with him.

For Jeff's family, there seemed no question that the young man, angry and anguished, was telling the truth. And if they did have any lingering doubts about the ordeal Jeff went through in Iraq, they disappeared on June 22, 2004, when, nearly a year after coming home from the war, Jeff Lucey hanged himself with a garden hose in his family's basement in Belchertown, Mass.

Jeff Lucey was a lance corporal in the 1st Truck Platoon of the 6th Motor Transport Battalion, a small, tightly knit Marine Reserve unit based in New Haven, Conn. The 6th Motors, as they call themselves, drove truck convoys for three months in Iraq at the start of the war. The unit returned home in July 2003 intact -- no deaths, no serious injuries. To many of them, Jeff's suicide was the first casualty. They were saddened and angry. But they didn't want to talk about it with anyone outside the Marine Corps.

When a few Massachusetts newspapers and the foreign policy blog This Is Rumor Control began speculating about events in Iraq that might have led Jeff Lucey to take his own life, the Marine Corps Reserve Public Affairs Office dismissed the stories. "There was nothing we found to substantiate any of the claims," Capt. Patrick B. Kerr told the Daily Hampshire Gazette.

The denial came just four days into the Marine Corps' own investigation. Maj. Jon Woodcock, who was assigned to head the inquiry, had spoken to only a handful of people and was scheduled to continue work for another two months. Already, however, contradictions were emerging.

Capt. Kerr had told This Is Rumor Control that Lucey had had "no interaction with enemy prisoners of war." But Jeff's parents found film in his camera with a photograph showing an enemy prisoner, hands bound, shirt pulled over his head, sitting in the dirt next to a military convoy truck.

And then there were the dog tags.

Jeff had taken to wearing the tags of the two Iraqi POWs around his neck some six months after he came home, around the time he began revealing to family members details of his Iraq experiences. His father asked him if he thought wearing the tags was a healthy thing to do. Jeff replied the tags were not trophies but tokens of honor for the two men he had killed, who did not have to die. "I regarded them as a millstone around his neck," says Kevin Lucey. "He regarded them as so much more."

Maj. Woodcock admitted in an interview that he hadn't bothered to look at the dog tags during his investigation. What could be a valuable piece of evidence naming the men Jeff said he killed remained locked up in the evidence vault of the Massachusetts State Police barracks in Northampton, Mass., part of the material police had gathered while probing Jeff's suicide.

When Maj. Woodcock completed his investigation in early October 2004, he reached the same conclusion offered by Capt. Kerr in August: "Allegations of war crimes alleged by Lance Cpl. Lucey to his father concerning shooting two unarmed Iraqi Enemy Prisoners of War cannot be substantiated."

Reading the heavily redacted version of the Marine investigation, Kevin Lucey was skeptical of its conclusions. So were we.