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written in june 2004
They are Roger, Allen, Ed, and Ivan. They were officers, a simple
soldier, a chaplain. Our special envoy in Iraq, Sara Daniel, met
them several months ago in Falluja, Ramadi, Baghdad, and Sadr
City. She went to see them again in the United States, where,
in spite of their return to civilian life, they remain haunted
by their terrors and nightmares and also, sometimes by the suffering
they inflicted on Iraqis.
Captain Roger Elliott, 35 years old, 490th Battalion, Sadr City
"This man who dragged his child's body around..."
In the Sadr City City
Hall, that November morning, the atmosphere was tense. Some days
before, the American soldiers guarding the City Hall had shot
down the Iraqi mayor they had just chosen... because he refused
a body search at the entrance of the City Hall, demanding that
he be shown the respect due his office. Captain Roger Elliott,
who was in charge of getting the new municipal council off the
ground, had not been there when the Mayor, Mohanned, died. He
thinks that he could have prevented the drama. At the time, he
didn't evade any of our questions. This officer, Mayor of Hudson
Oaks, Texas in civilian life, had even stated that he appreciated
his Sadr alter ego: "Mohanned stood up to us; that was a
good thing, a little like the French when they said no in the
Security Council. We didn't free the Iraqis so they could become
our servants."
More than skeptical
about the conduct of the war and the reasons given by the Bush
administration to justify starting it, Captain Elliott thought
that by his personal conduct, he could all the same make a difference
in Iraq. We saw him spend a whole day trying to convince an Iraqi
businessman to reduce the price of domestic propane to a reasonable
level. After the security problem in the cities, the price of
propane was the next most urgent problem in Baghdad. The price
went from 300 dinars before the war to 6000 afterwards. Under
the amused eye of a beautiful American soldier of Palestinian
origin who thought he was making a big effort for nothing, the
soldier tried to reach an agreement with the sheik, who didn't
want to reduce his margin...
All his men described
the captain as a hero. One of them told us about an episode from
an attack they underwent when the captain jumped on top of an
Iraqi prisoner to protect him from the bullets. "I can tell
you that that wouldn't have been my first reaction," acknowledged
Sergeant Billy Moore, who was present at the time. Tormented,
assailed with questions, Elliott thought that a man of honor had
to try to redeem an army's aberrations by his personal conduct.
In Houston, where
we rediscovered him, the captain, who had undergone several attacks
during which he had been lightly wounded, is still haunted by
the same questions. Because of his insomnia, his waking in the
night drenched in sweat, the army doctors think he's suffering
from post-traumatic stress syndrome caused by the attacks. Elliott,
however, believes that his stress actually derives from the contradictions
he had to manage while doing his "duty" in Iraq.
And then, he has memories
that assault him. The image of this man who dragged the dead body
of his child day after day around a stadium broke his heart. The
unknown faces of Iraqis he had to fight and whose fate he tries
to imagine. Because he thought he could be useful, Captain Elliott
didn't refuse to serve in Iraq, but he asserts that that would
not have prevented him from refusing to obey certain orders. He
still doesn't understand some of his superiors' decisions; however,
if he's sent back to Iraq, Captain Elliott will accept his mission.
In spite of his malaise. In spite of the questions that haunt
him. In spite of his wife Diane and two children he's already
left for a year.
Captain Allen Vaught,
32 years old, 490th Battalion, Baghdad and Fallujah
"We showed our worst face."
We had met him one
November evening inside Camp Marlboro, one of the American bases
in Sadr City, Baghdad's Shi'ite neighborhood. Warm and open, the
reservist, a Dallas lawyer in civilian life, was delighted to
finish his mission in Sadr City after the tensions of Fallujah.
He didn't want to die in a war that left him perplexed. During
a dinner in a camp cafeteria plunged in darkness, we ate a piece
of dried up meat and a disgusting purée by the light of
a pocket flashlight. Abu Brahim, the Iraqi chauffeur who had just
broken the Ramadan fast was speechless before the soldiers' destitution,
unable to swallow the revolting food.
Allen told us how
surprised he was not to have been welcomed as a liberator, by
the tenacious hostility of Fallujah residents: " They were
250,000 people who all hate us. Three days didn't go by without
an attack." However, even if this Democrat didn't believe
the reasons invoked for an attack, he tried to do his best, to
help individuals. He laughed as he remembered the day when his
squadron, at residents' request, had organized a new soccer field
with goals and nets on some Fallujah commons. "The next day,
everything had been looted. They even stole the mud from the ground!
How can you help people who have been reduced to stealing mud?"
And then things got
worse in Sadr City and Allen was wounded when a bomb hit his Humvee
while he was driving two Iraqis suffering from Hepatitis C to
a military dispensary. At the time, the army doctors didn't immediately
recognize the gravity of the captain's condition. When he was
returned to his unit, he was transported by bus from Fort Bragg,
in North Carolina, to Texas. "A little as though you did
Paris-Moscow by car..."
We rediscovered him
in New York, where he was on a business trip, and then in his
native Texas. Feverish, bitter, haunted by nightmares, he looked
lost in the New York hotel bar. His spinal column, broken in four
places, hurt. "He takes everything on, but he has trouble
even carrying his briefcase," confided one of his colleagues,
"and he can't get demobilized. Obviously, they need soldiers.
We have to send over troops so they can send home coffins..."
Allen does not want
to return to Iraq. "Since the war, it's become a terrorist
factory, a new Pakistan. And then we showed our worst face there."
The lawyer was deeply distressed by the Abu Ghraib tortures. He
would never have tolerated the slightest uncalled-for move with
regard to a prisoner. When the Captain realized that his translator
Zia was in league with the guerilla, he was unhappy: "I had
showed him the photos of my family, of my ranch. I thought he
was my friend, but he wanted to kill me. And yet, until he went
to Abu Ghraib, I shared my food and my water with him. At that
time, supplies weren't coming in and we only had a few mouthfuls
a day..." The lawyer had begun to take steps to bring one
of his unit's translators to Dallas: " Two of our other translators
have just been assassinated, so I'm going to do my duty by this
man, because the situation is not going to get any better."
In his house in Texas,
Allen has a photo of his uncle and the war trophies of this US
Air Force officer of German origin who fought during the Second
World War and was taken prisoner by the Nazis: "That's it;
that's my idea of the American army." Allen drives a big
4x4. Sundays, he goes hunting with his friends on his parents'
ranch, target shooting or killing water moccasins. He's kept his
M-16 from Iraq, which he's transformed into a semi-automatic.
He's stuck a "Vote
Kerry" sticker on his windshield. "I'm going to keep
on fighting for my ideas. I'm going to run for the Senate, even
if it's a lost cause in Texas." When he came back from Iraq,
his mother hoped that he would have become very religious. "I
believe in God. But here, if you're a Democrat, people think you
hate Jesus-Christ. In some churches, those who are pro-choice
aren't allowed to take communion..."
What was the biggest
mistake the Americans made in Iraq, according to him? "To
impose Jeffersonian democracy from one day to the next right after
a dictatorship! What a joke! I was only a little cog in the machine
and I knew that wouldn't work. But our biggest mistake was not
confiscating weapons. We left them so they could defend themselves
and they defended themselves against us."
Captain Ed Palacios,
41 years old, 490th Battalion, Ramadi and the Syrian border
"If I had only known how to save little Tiba..."
He has presence, the
bearing of a court martial officer. From father to son, the Palacios
are soldiers. Ed's biggest disappointment was when he failed the
test to become a marine because of a wound on his foot. A Republican,
the only thing that could keep him from voting for Bush in the
elections is if they find the administration lied "deliberately"
about the weapons of mass destruction. A soldier down to the tips
of his fingernails, the Texan computer scientist expresses himself
calmly until we ask what his best memory of the war in Iraq is.
Then he bursts into tears. Here is his memory. A recitation cut
by tears.
"Her name was
Tiba Ayad. I was at the Heat City Hall, on the Syrian border,
and all the Iraqis regarded me with suspicion, but one man dared
come up to me. When I asked him what I could do for him, he asked
me to help him take care of his sick child. I was touched that
he was so concerned about his daughter's health that he was willing
to face the contempt and hostility of the others. Tiba was 4 years
old. I loved her immediately. She was suffering from a form of
cancer and the chemotherapy they were giving her in Iraq didn't
work. I organized things so she could go to Jordan where the queen
takes care of sick children. The helicopter was ready. The family
was delighted. But at the very last minute we learned that the
Queen of Jordan wasn't taking in any more children. So I contacted
Doctors of the World and they told me to bring her to Baghdad.
I took her in a taxi to the capital. The doctor accepted her and
a plane was to fly her to Greece two days later. I thought we
had succeeded, but two weeks later, Tiba and her father returned
to Heat. The coalition had not let them leave. The Greeks didn't
have the necessary papers. In the end, I was able to organize
a landing of a Greek military plane in Kuwait. She only had to
be taken there. An American military plane was supposed to take
her from Baghdad to Kuwait, but Tiba's condition had deteriorated
to the point that they refused to take her. The military doctors
were able to stabilize her and she was finally able to leave.
When I learned she
had arrived in Greece, that was the best day of my service over
there. However, she died a few days later. We had waited too long.
That is my most painful memory, because, you know, I had the feeling
that if I could save her, only her, then I would not have come
to Iraq for nothing."
Soldier Ivan Medina,
22 years old, 3rd Infantry Division, from Kuwait to Baghdad, then
Fallujah
"They sent us there to settle a family quarrel."
A WestPoint officer
and a military chaplain in dress uniform: Ivan had just completed
eleven months of service in Iraq when they were seen in the doorway
of his little house in Middletown: the duo that haunts the nightmares
of all families of American soldiers. They stood there under the
American flag come to bring some more bad news. His twin brother,
Irving, had just been killed by a grenade fired on his convoy
in Baghdad. A shard had opened his skull. Ten hours later, he
was dead. His father's tears, his mother's cries in Spanish as
she tried to get rid of the deathly messengers. "We've received
some money from the army: twelve thousand dollars. That's the
price for the life of a United States' army soldier," Ivan
observes bitterly. The walls of his room are covered with photos
of the twins at all the different stages of their lives. Inseparable.
But even though he had just lost his double, his friend, every
window of the house was still decorated with an American flag.
It is love for the country that welcomed him that decides him
to break the omerta that forbids soldiers from saying what they
think of the war. And then, because he was the only boy in his
family still living, Ivan was able to leave the army. So in spite
of his shyness and this hair on his tongue that bothers him, he
launches himself "in the name of all the soldiers who are
looking for a way to get out of Iraq."
All the Medina children,
originally from Mexico City, enrolled in the army "to do
something for this country. And especially to pay for college."
In Middletown, a little township three hours away from New York,
now gangrenous from unemployment and Latino gangs, army recruiters
tap directly into schools, promising a golden future to new recruits.
"In my class, 25% of the students enlisted." It was
Jenny Medina, now 26 years old, who opened the way for her brothers.
For her, things have turned out well; she hasn't -yet- been sent
to Iraq. Thanks to her legal competence she was able to make a
round of the whole United States with the army. Ivan et Irving
would have preferred to stay in Afghanistan. They never believed
in the Iraq war. "For me, it was clear right from the start
that it was an unjust war that had only two motives: oil and the
Bush father and son vendetta against Saddam. My brother and I
felt like we were being sent over there to Iraq to settle a family
quarrel." Chaplain's assistant, charged with the spiritual
guidance of four companies inside the third infantry division
of 125 men each, Ivan heard hundreds of terrified young people's
confessions, traumatized from having killed people: "Eighteen
year old kids who picked up human remains, who saw their pals
come back in bags." During the war, from Kuwait to Baghdad,
even Ivan, assistant chaplain though he was, had to kill men.
"I don't complain about the feddayin, it was either them
or us. But many didn't want to fight. And then, of course, I think
about it again and again, about the families that are waiting
for the men whom we killed, these men who are never coming back.
Like Irving. " His worst memory goes back to the day Baghdad
was taken. "We were happy; we had made good progress. And
then there was this missile attack. It was like in a movie; it
went really fast and very slow at the same time. The cries. The
faces. The flying body parts..." And then in Fallujah, where
Ivan served three months. Fallujah and its "collateral damage":
"Smart bombs don't exist. We killed so many innocent people."
But what shocked the young man the most was the attitude of some
officers who, when they made a mistake covered up for each other
and made simple soldiers pay for their mistakes. According to
him, bad treatment of prisoners started well before Abu Ghraib
prison. "When we took Baghdad, some officers started to revenge
themselves on simple looters. They were bloody, their bodies covered
with bruises. I told the chaplain about it, but at a certain level,
the affair was covered up." Today, Ivan has decided to campaign
against George Bush. "This man must be driven out. Contacts
renewed with the international community. For any good to come
out of this war, we should never have gone and waged it."
Sara Daniel
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