Racism and War: the Dehumanization of the Enemy: Part 1
Scott Ewing was an Army scout in Tel Afar from 2005 to 2006. He describes how treatment of civilians became progressively more brutal. Early on, soldiers sometimes broke down gates and front walls. Later, because the residents were believed to be insurgents, they ordered everyone out of a neighborhood and into camps outside the city, while American airships bombed the houses. Then soldiers searched what was left, trashing every house they entered, but the most warlike implements they found were wood saws, kitchen knives, and old pistol belts. In another neighborhood, they sent Kurdish militiamen to round up all the military-age men and one masked militiaman picked out 50 men whom he accused of being insurgents. They were taken away, and Ewing never found out what happened to them. “It’s hard for me to believe that the Iraqis who witnessed this could possibly take seriously our version of justice and democracy,” he says.
Jeffery Smith’s unit provided base security for a large American base in Iraq. He testifies to routine degrading treatment of Iraqis. including those who worked at the base for a dollar a day, often in extreme heat and dust. Smith says the military placed a low value on Iraqi lives. One night they killed a farmer with 14 children because he was working in his field after curfew and ran when ordered to halt. In another incident, Smith recalls American soldiers coming into the base with a truck, celebrating over the corpses of insurgents who had attacked them. The bodies had been ripped apart gunfire, and one soldier gleefully displayed a decapitated head.
Mike Totten served in Iraq as a military policeman. “Pre-deployment,” he says, “the cultural competency training that we received can be best summed up in a sentence: ‘Don’t touch the people of Iraq’s left hand. They wipe their ass with it.’” Totten says his company of MPs was very well run, with “phenomenal leadership.” But he testifies to cruel abuse of Iraqi prisoners by Iraqi police and by Bulgarian, Polish, and American soldiers—in one case by Totten himself.
Camillo Mejia says the abuse of Iraqis is “not the result of people waking up one morning as monsters, but it’s part of … the military culture. They train us that way.” He also says the brutality comes from being told that people are out to kill you. “You … 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.” He testified about abuse of prisoners to “soften them up” for interrogation. Mejia says some memories are so horrible the mind erases them. The first time he shot someone, Mejia remembers the events before and after, but the actual killing is a blank. In another incident, soldiers killed a young father in a car with his son sitting right next to him. Mejia can’t remember the expression on the boy’s face or even that he was a child—other people told him that later.
Michael Leduc served in the Marines during “Operation Venom Fury,” the attack on Fallujah. Before the attack, the battalion’s legal counsel told them the strict rules of engagement under which they had previously operated would not apply to this assault. They could call in artillery or air strikes on a building if they just felt unsure about what they might find: “reconnaissance by fire.” People with weapons, cell phones, binoculars—or even people with white flags if they did anything but approach slowly and obey orders—should all be killed. “I joined the military … to do something good to improve the whole human situation,” he says. “And I felt good about myself a few times. [But] for the most part, I was just doing what I had to do … whether it was breaking the rules or following them, doing what I thought was right or what I knew was wrong.”
Bryan Casler served in the Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. He speaks of soldiers’ disrespect for the people of those countries. One incident in particular taught him how differently he himself felt about Iraqis and Americans: He was in an ambulance rushing to pick up a badly wounded soldier, when he suddenly realized from the soldier’s uniform that this was an American. “This was the first time that I was affected in such a way: I was excited about what we were doing, and then a second later, I was terrified.” He says the lack of a clear mission led to brutality: “The mission just becomes to come home alive.” Marines are trained to kill in battle, he says, and “it absolutely becomes that all you have is hammers and everything you find is nails, and you’re gonna crush every nail. And we’re crushing the Iraqi people.”
Matthew Childers was a corporal in the Marines. He served twice in Iraq. “After going through the process of boot camp, I was proud of myself and believed I was doing the right thing,” he says. “They have a way of making you look up to people and instill pride within yourself for what you’re doing. They also joke with you and sing cadences about killing people.” The training, he says, puts pressure on soldiers “to be the stereotypical marine, ruthless and merciless.” In Iraq, he says, his unit abused prisoners and Iraqi civilians who were the victims of their nighttime raids, mostly innocent victims of faulty intelligence. Childers also has vivid memories of a man who came to the Marines holding a terribly burned baby, asking for medical help. The Marines turned him away.
Sam Lynch was a conscientious objector who supervised medical services for Iraqi detainees. He says most American doctors at his clinic refused to take care of the prisoners, so he had to rely on less-trained medics. Two thirds of these detainees were later released for lack of evidence against them. Doctors also refused to treat Iraqis who worked at the base. Although he and the other medics tried to care for the Iraqis, he says, “I did an injustice to these people by not demanding that the doctors actually see them.”
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