Ames Progressive

From March 13 to 16, veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq gathered at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Maryland, to give personal testimonies of their actions while in combat. The event was organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War and was modeled on the Winter Soldier hearings that took place in Detroit in 1971, at which Vietnam veterans offered eyewitness accounts of their experiences on the ground.

This month’s hearings, which took place in the days leading up to the fifth anniversary of the war, provided veterans with the unique opportunity to state their actions openly and candidly and to have their personal experiences entered into the public record of this war. And the hearings provided the American public with access to an insider’s view of a war that most of us see only from the unbridgeable distance of television and computer screens - a view distorted by the funhouse mirrors of mass medias.

The significance of Winter Soldier – and its primary difference from typical accounts of the war in the news media - is that it presented the Iraq War in the first person. The veterans gave testimonies of their own actions and they did not shy away from admitting to atrocities and horrors that they committed themselves.

A major theme in the testimonies was the prevalence of indiscriminate killings in urban, largely civilian areas. A former Marine Corps corporal named Jason Washburn reported that “if the town or the city that we were approaching was a known threat, if the unit that went through the area before we did took a high number of casualties, we were basically—we were allowed to shoot whatever we wanted. It was deemed to be a free-fire zone.” As an example, he told of an incident in which a woman approached his unit carrying a large bag. “So we lit her up with the Mark 19, which is an automatic grenade launcher. And when the dust settled, we realized that the bag was only full of groceries. And, I mean, she had been trying to bring us food, and we blew her to pieces for it.” And another former Marine named Hart Viges, speaking of house raids, testified that “we never went on a raid where we got the right house, much less the right person. Not once.”

Hart Viges’ account stressed another major theme of the hearings: the strong sense of dehumanization in the combat environment. Viges drew attention to the widespread psychology of dehumanization by repeatedly stressing that it was people whom he had killed. He described the spectacle of an aerial bombing occurring “while I was laying down mortar fire on this town full of people – letting down mortar fire on this town full of people.” And, speaking of an order to open fire on all taxicabs, he said that “all the units that were in there fired on numerous cars – again, you know, people.” And, most straightforwardly, Viges reminded his audience, and perhaps himself as well, that “people live in towns. It’s beyond imagination to think that normal people, civilians, don’t live in towns. This is upside-down thinking.”

The current chair of the board of Iraq Veterans Against the War, a former staff sergeant named Camilo Mejia, also stressed the pressures toward dehumanization in Iraq. “What you do,” he said, “is you basically remove the humanity from them to make it easier to oppress them, to brutalize them, to beat them. And in doing so, you remove the humanity from yourself, because you cannot act as a human being and do all of these things.”

But the brave veterans who participated in the Winter Soldier hearings, by acknowledging their capacity for inhumanity, have forced us to consider a deeply humbling fact: our morality and our values are dependent on our environment. And all Americans bear the responsibility for allowing the men and women in our military to enter into an inhumane environment where their humanity is compromised. As Jason Hurd, who served as a medic in Baghdad in 2004,  said in his testimony, “We react out of fear, fear for our lives, and we cause complete and utter destruction.”