Читать книгу Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan - Aaron Glantz - Страница 13

Jon Michael Turner

Lance Corporal, United States Marine Corps, Automatic Machine-gunner, Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines
Deployments: Haiti; between Fallujah and Abu Ghraib;
March 2006, Ramadi
Hometown: Burlington, Vermont
Age at Winter Soldier: 22 years old

There’s a term, once a marine, always a marine; but there’s also the term, eat the apple, fuck the Corps. I don’t work for you no more. [After saying that line, Turner rips off the medals he received for his service in Iraq and Haiti and threw them to the ground. Medals discarded included the Purple Heart, National Defense Service Medal, Army Expeditionary Medal, Iraq Campaign Medal, Global War on Terror Service Medal, Humanitarian Service Medal, and a Combat Action Ribbon. After doing so, he received a standing ovation from his fellow veterans.]

I want to start by showing you a video of the Executive Officer of Kilo Company. We had gotten into a two-hour long firefight, and it was over for quite some time, but he still felt the need to drop a five-hundred-pound laser-guided missile on northern Ramadi.

[Turner shows a video of the XO gloating after ordering the dropping of the bomb. In the video, the officer says:] “I think I just killed half of the population of northern Ramadi, fuck the red tape. It doesn’t fucking matter.”

We had gotten our Rules of Engagement brief at Camp Ramadi. Just after we had gotten that brief, our first sergeant had pulled my platoon aside and stated, “If you feel threatened in any way, shape, or form, take care of the threat, and we’ll deal with it later.” With that being said, “mistakes” were made on several occasions.

One incident involved an Iraqi guy we called “Mr. Wilson.” My post was post Alpha, at the government center in the southwest corner. His house was directly across the street. We had a high suicide-vehicle-borne IED threat that day, and this car drove rapidly around the corner. I fired one 50-caliber machine gun round in his direction, and it ricocheted off the ground through the floorboard of the car, through his shin, and then through the roof. The car immediately came to a stop, and out of the car came seven of his daughters and Mr. Wilson himself.

A 50-caliber round is about six inches long, and the projectile is about an inch and a half long. The one shot at Mr. Wilson was a slap round, which has a polyurethane base and a titanium tip. When the projectile exits from the 50-caliber machine gun barrel, it spreads open so goes into your body leaving a hole about four inches and exits leaving you with next to nothing.

On patrol, when mistakes were made we carried “drop weapons.” We took weapons from the Iraqi police during our first deployment. We took their weapons and carried them around with us, in case we messed up and shot the wrong person.

Anytime we went into a house, we took the firing pins out of their weapons. Every household is allowed to have one AK-47 for their own protection, but the weapons wouldn’t fire after we took out the firing pins. Therefore, they had no protection.

[Turner shows a photo of the brain matter of an Iraqi killed by a member of his unit, sitting across the cushion of a car’s front seat.] For those of you who don’t know, that is brains. That was not my kill; that was one of my friends’.

When we did make mistakes, we had no respect for Iraqi bodies afterwards.

That is a man’s face on April 2, 2005, at Abu Ghraib. We sustained a very highly coordinated attack, and the next day we went ahead and had to search the premises for any remains. That face, or that part of the face, was found and put on top of a Kevlar, so a picture could be taken of it.

We had a mortar attack at Camp India, which was in between Camp Fallujah and Abu Ghraib. This was a twelve-year-old boy who was building our camp for us, and he took a piece of shrapnel to the head.

On April 18, 2006, I had my first confirmed kill. He was an innocent man. I don’t know his name. I call him “the Fat Man.” During the incident, he walked back to his house and I shot him in front of his friend and father. The first round didn’t kill him after I’d hit him in his neck. Afterwards, he started screaming and looked right into my eyes. I looked at my friend I was on post with, and I said, “Well, I can’t let that happen.” I took another shot and took him out. The rest of his family carried him away. It took seven Iraqis to carry his body.

We were all congratulated after we had our first kills, and that happened to have been mine. My company commander personally congratulated me. This is the same individual who stated that whoever gets their first kill by stabbing them to death would get a four-day pass when we returned from Iraq.

My third confirmed kill was a man riding his bicycle. We had Laura Logan from CBS with us, but she was with the other squad. It was later on in the day, and we went ahead and took out some individuals because we were excited about the firefight we had just gotten into. And we didn’t have a cameraman or woman with us.

Anytime we did have embedded reporters with us, our actions changed drastically. We never acted the same. We were always on key with everything, did everything by the book.

House raids: Because we were a grunt battalion, we were responsible for going on several patrols. A lot of the raids and patrols we did were at night at around three o’clock in the morning. We kicked in doors and terrorized families. We segregated the women and children from the men. If the men of the household gave us problems, we’d take care of them any way we felt necessary, whether it be choking them or slapping their head against the walls.

On my wrist, there is Arabic for “fuck you.” I got it put on my wrist just two weeks before we went to Iraq, because that was my choking hand and anytime I felt the need to take out aggression, I would go ahead and use it.

I’m going to show you a video of the Fatimid mosque minaret. It is riddled with bullet holes. The holes in the top of it were from mortars. A tank round went into the minaret even though we weren’t sure if we were taking fire. It is illegal to shoot into a mosque unless you are taking fire from it. There was no fire that was taken from that mosque. It was shot into because we were angry. This video shows the tank round that went into the minaret.

[The video plays. A soldier inside the tank jokes over the radio:] “We are on ice cream trying to suppress the blue and white minaret.... Go ahead, take another round at that building, at that mosque over there. Another round, Kilo Two. Fuck yes. Awesome.” [Video ends.]

There are many more stories and incidents for me to talk about although we don’t have the time. Everyone sitting up here has these stories, and there’s been over a million troops that have gone in and out of Iraq, so the possibilities are endless.

The reason I am doing this today is not only for myself and for the rest of society to hear. It’s for all those who can’t be here to talk about the things that we went through, to talk about the things that we did.

Those four crosses and this memorial service were for the five guys in Kilo Company, Third Battalion, Eighth Marines that we lost. Throughout our unit, we had eighteen that got killed.