Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan

Testimony given in two parts for the Rules of Engagement panel of Winter Soldier: Iraq & Afghanistan on March 15, 2008. As part of the event, I was also interviewed by Truthout and my testimony appeared in a book by the same name by Aaron Glantz.

Part 1

(I have some images also — if you could load the first one.)

My name is Logan Mehl-Laituri [transcribed as "Logan military"]. I currently reside in Camden, New Jersey — the fourth most dangerous city in the U.S. I moved there after I got out, to avoid running away from the violence I experienced in Iraq. It's my hope that if I can stop running from it, embrace it — not embrace it, but not let it conquer me — that's, I think, what's had the most healing effect on me.

A lot of people have asked me why I'm here today. I was a cynic when I joined IVAW — I was very hesitant to advocate for meeting with the troops. I've had a change of heart. That being said:

I enlisted in the United States Army on February 16th, 2000. I stepped onto active duty on August 9th of that same year. I was immediately assigned to the 82nd Airborne — I went through Airborne training. I was there just under two years. On September 11th, I was in the dentist's chair, getting three teeth pulled, so I got the privilege of watching the news for the next three days straight.

When the prospect of Afghanistan came up, I volunteered to go. I was an E-3 at the time — I didn't have enough rank to pull the strings to get into the right brigade, so I didn't get to go. My second option: I decided to reenlist for Hawaii, and the 25th Infantry Division, and go "green to gold" to become an officer. So I was very committed to the military when I initially enlisted — well, not only that, I also mostly did it for college money.

[next slide]

Deployment

About a year into my time in Hawaii, I deployed on January 19th, 2004. I was with 1-14 Infantry, the "Golden Dragons," 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division — at that point still a light infantry unit; now it's a Stryker unit.

[This next slide is] an image of writing on a bathroom wall at FOB Warrior, Kirkuk Air Base. One of my compatriots apparently decided to list the different places our battalion had seen. I'm showing it to you because it's hard for me to say that we had any real amount of predictability in Iraq.

After two months at [an airfield south of Kirkuk — transcribed as "Zermatt," almost certainly not the actual name, unclear], we picked up and were assigned as the quick reaction force for the country. So I traveled to all these different FOBs — some of these names are uncertain in the source recording:

• FOB Bernstein — initially [location unclear]
• FOB Duke, outside Najaf
• FOB Marez, in Mosul
• FOB Warrior, in Kirkuk
• FOB Sykes, in Tal Afar
• Operation Baton Rouge, around Samarra
• FOB McHenry, [back] in Hawaii [likely referring to garrison duty at Schofield Barracks after redeployment]

We redeployed on February 15th, 2005. I came back with a lot of [things I was carrying] — I didn't really do too much with it. After about six months, because of a lot of different things going on in my life, I began to re-embrace [my] Christian faith. I'd told myself I was Christian basically my whole life, and I came to see that faith obligates me to nonviolence.

The CO Packet

I applied to be a conscientious objector. I specifically asked my unit, my commander, to return to Iraq without a weapon — I asked to be a non-combatant. Through the process of being a CO, and having an interview with a psychiatrist, I was given a diagnosis of "maladjustment disorder," because every soldier is trying to be an infantryman first — the idea of a soldier going to battle without a weapon is incomprehensible. The reality is, we have two Congressional Medal of Honor winners who were conscientious objectors: Desmond Doss, World War II, and Thomas Bennett, killed in Vietnam. Both were unarmed medics, and I wanted to carry on that legacy. I felt very strongly about nonviolence, and about providing alternatives to violence in the middle of combat.

As a result, my commanders became convinced I had some grand scheme against the Army. They told me I was aiding the enemies of America, that I didn't deserve my rank — E-5, at the time. They reassigned me — after I had to apply pressure, because they were sitting on my application without doing anything — to a rear detachment battalion. One of the most difficult days of my life was August 7th, 2006: watching my unit deploy without me, knowing I wouldn't be there with them.

I got out of active duty on November 21st, 2006. I was in the West Bank at the time, after a month of terminal leave. My MSO — my military service obligation, my IRR time — expired February 15th of this year [2008].

[next slide]

Preface

I want to preface what I'm sharing by stating that nothing I say today should be misconstrued as an attack on the military. I've witnessed my fair share of bad social and economic situations that have been alleviated by enlistment in the Army. Furthermore, one's experience in the service is less dependent on the institution itself than on the people you share that experience with — and, as we've seen and will continue to see, many members of the Armed Forces have displayed the capacity to abuse the authority granted them by their rank or office. Finally, it's my personal opinion that militarization causes significant, often irreversible injury to one's physical, social, and spiritual health.

I was a forward observer, on active duty for six years. I'm not sure if anyone else has noticed — I want to make a quick comment about the word "occupation," having heard witness accounts today. The first sense of "occupation" is obvious: we're occupying a sovereign nation without the consent or support of the international community. But there's a second sense — I noticed this sitting in the first panel this morning — that there's a disturbing minority who enter Iraq with a profit motive, who make their money there, and whose occupation is to extend and prolong this war to the benefit of their pocketbooks. I thought that was really interesting — my mind works fast, but that's the thought I had.

[next slide — end of Part One]

Part Two

Rules of Engagement

As I said, my unit moved around a lot. This picture was taken in Mosul, just prior to the elections in January 2005, and it's fairly representative of most of my time there. The ROE would change — first of all, it was mostly verbal. We were never given ROE cards. [Someone flashed an ROE card in front of everybody this morning during the panel — that was actually the first time I'd seen one; I thought it was more like one of the "stress cards" people get in basic training.] It was mostly rumors — we never got any concrete ROE that actually defined our mission, or what levels of aggression we were allowed.

We were told there were four S's, maybe five — let me see if I remember correctly: signal, shout, shove, shoot. Sorry — signal, shout, show, shove, shoot. That was the extent of what our ROE was, on a running basis. The one rule we could always count on: if you feel threatened, don't hesitate to use your weapon, if you feel it's necessary. That was our license — if something happened, we could always say we felt threatened. I observed that happen a couple of times with other members of my unit.

The ROE for indirect assets — artillery, mortars — was always really clear; very restrictive, in my experience. But for automatic weapons or rifles, it was never very clear, and that's where I think that image is very powerful.

One thing people don't always understand — I can only speak to this because I was a forward observer — is that when we were in a static position, or visited an FOB that had artillery or mortars sitting for more than a week or two, you have to register the guns: to weather conditions, and other factors. So every now and then forward observers were tasked to sit on an OP and watch rounds being fired — "training," if you want to call it that, since we did use it to train up some of our younger soldiers. But essentially what we were doing was firing rounds into Iraq because we were bored. I didn't understand until recently that white phosphorus isn't supposed to be used against, or near, civilian targets — that's what we used as training rounds, in what were "hasty" impact areas in Iraq. So it's important to realize it's not just the operations themselves — what we did for training also had a significant impact on the surrounding community.

Jason Lemieux also mentioned a very permissive ROE. I experienced the same thing in [Najaf? — transcribed as "the Joff," unclear] in 2004 — July, I want to say — rolling into the city. Muqtada al-Sadr was our enemy at that time; we were told anybody in black clothing with a green headband was fair game to shoot. I never experienced it directly, but it was made very clear that this was "the uniform of the enemy," and we should feel free to take them out whenever necessary. That was the closest I think we got to conventional warfare, which is what I'd trained on for five years before I went to Iraq.

Another time: Samarra, October 2004. I was part of Operation Baton Rouge — my platoon was attached to, I believe, 1-6 Armor. We were the first light infantry to enter the city of Samarra from the west. We'd trained up for Fallujah — we were told this was a litmus test, to see what procedures we'd need to incorporate into the attack on Fallujah in November.

On the second day, on the roof of a school, we set up a security position. One of the snipers — let me backtrack a little. Going into Samarra, we were told all the civilians had been informed we were coming, and that we had a very permissive ROE because they'd been told to stay in their houses or evacuate the city. The following day, one of the snipers saw a man crossing the street with a bag in his hand and shot him — within the ROE, but I don't think that would, for me, satisfy my own ethical restrictions.

One more, quickly — to clarify something already mentioned about the National Training Center at Fort Irwin: after three weeks "in the box" at Fort Irwin, my battalion commander sat my company down for a pep talk, and made it explicitly clear that if there was a problem — if the wrong person went down — they would plant weapons to make sure we were protected. Several months later, on their second deployment — would have been my second deployment too — two members of my old unit were brought up on an Article 32 charge for premeditated murder. [The commander] was relieved of command, and I'm curious why he was only relieved, when he'd clearly set the atmosphere that allowed incidents like that to occur.

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Unnecessary Loss of Life

I'll try to make this as brief as possible. On the subject of unnecessary loss of life — I'm afraid you might not be able to see this image very well — the turning point of the war for me came on November 16th, 2004. I was on a convoy — a presence patrol, actually a "[Rocket Man]" patrol, looking for [insurgent] mortar teams — and we got a call to assist another unit that'd had an accident. A convoy vehicle had overturned into a reservoir, resting partly in the water and partly on land. I was asked to get in the water and look for bodies.

About an hour into it, after I'd gotten out of the water, I was circling the vehicle looking for things to do, when I saw a set of legs sticking out from what used to be the door of the Humvee. At first glance I thought it was [wreckage — original unclear here]. We'd been talking to another soldier pinned by the vehicle, who we'd given morphine to. I checked the legs, tapped them — didn't get a response. I pointed the medics toward it; I thought it was a casualty, that we needed to give him attention. The response was: "He's too far gone — we need to focus on the people who have a chance."

For an hour and a half I fretted about what to do. To explain: combat triage is actually the opposite of triage in a hospital, where you rush the most urgent cases to the operating room. In combat, if someone doesn't have a chance, you make it as comfortable as possible for them to die.

Finally a crane came, lifted the vehicle, got the guy out who was pinned by his leg — we'd already been injecting him with morphine — and the Special Forces medics got the other guy up. He had a pulse, he was still alive. I heard over the radio, going back to Kirkuk, that he'd died before he could reach the clinic. For some reason that struck me pretty hard — for nine nights I didn't sleep.

I realized there was a good chance he died hearing everybody around him, knowing nobody was coming to his aid. In the tents at night, in the pitch dark, I couldn't stop thinking about how it felt to be trapped under a Humvee, maybe not able to catch a breath, crying for help. And then I got really disturbed when I realized that despite all the Iraqi bodies I'd seen throughout my time in Iraq, it took an American soldier — someone of my own race, creed, and skin color — to wake me up out of that kind of slumber.

To illustrate it a little — please forgive me for this necessarily harsh image — imagine you wake up one morning, and in your wallet you find a membership card, if they still have them, from the KKK, with your name on it. And you realize that for four years of your life you were taught to think a certain way about a certain group of people. Imagine what that must feel like, and what it would take to overcome that going forward.

Closing

I want to close, real quickly, with why I do this. Martin Luther King said, of the war in Vietnam — and I would repeat this of the War on Terror:

I oppose this war because I love America. I speak out against this not in anger, but with a great sorrow in my heart. I speak out against this war because I'm disappointed with America. There can be no great disappointment where there is no great love. I'm disappointed with our failure to deal forthrightly and positively with the evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. We are presently moving down a dead-end road that will lead to national disaster.

And I don't want a national disaster. Thanks for letting me share.

[Applause] Thank you very much.