Читать книгу Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan - Aaron Glantz - Страница 14

Clifton Hicks

Private, United States Army, Cavalry Scout C Troop, First Squadron, First U.S. Cavalry Regiment
Deployment: May 2003–July 2004, Southern Baghdad
Hometown: Gainesville, Florida
Age at Winter Soldier: 23 years old

Before I begin, I have a brief statement: For the infantrymen, scouts, and tankers of C Troop First Squadron, First United States Cavalry Regiment, there are few words which can express my admiration. I can merely say that I love them with all of my heart and that I would never have made it home alive without such worthy and courageous troopers at my side. These were men who risked everything for a cause they believed was just and true. They left behind their families, their friends, and their lives. They endured the unendurable. They did this not for greed, or jealousy, or hatred, but for the sake of love, and for that they are beyond judgment. I am no judge, and I did not come here to pass judgment either on my fellow soldiers or the officers who once commanded us in war. I’m here today to pass judgment on war itself.

First item, April 2004, free-fire zone in the Abu Ghraib neighborhood of Baghdad: During Operation Blackjack, I was instructed by our troop commander, a captain, that one sector was now a free-fire zone. He told us there were “no friendlies in the area.” He said, “Game on. All weapons free.”

Upon arrival in the neighborhood, the streets were littered with wreckage of vehicles. Who knows if it’s a civilian vehicle or an enemy vehicle? There’s no way to tell. In addition, there wasn’t a single building that hadn’t had a hole shot through it or something exploded inside of it. The streets were littered with human and animal corpses. I did not see military gear or weapons of any kind on any of the bodies.

I did not fire my weapon on this operation, but other members of my unit embraced the weapons-free order by firing indiscriminately into occupied civilian vehicles and at civilians themselves. They used personal weapons like rifles, vehicle-mounted weapons such as machine guns, and coaxial machine guns of various caliber. I swear until the day I die, I did not see one enemy on that operation. Judging from what I saw on the ground, the majority of those so-called KIAs were civilians attempting to flee the battlefield.

This is what happens when a conventional force such as the U.S. military attacks a heavily populated urban area. We’re not bad people. We were there because we thought that we were gonna make things better, because these people wanted us to be there. We showed up and realized that there’s a whole bunch of people that wanted to kill us. Guess what? They look just like the folks who don’t want to kill us. How were we gonna sort them out? The only way to ensure our survival was to make sure that we put them in the dirt before they put us in the dirt, to put it bluntly.

In November 2003, an AC-130 gunship attacked a five-building apartment complex: People shot at us from these buildings. We all thought they were calling in mortar fire on our post. There were a handful of enemy fighters who tried to kill Americans out of these apartment buildings, but they were also just regular apartment buildings occupied by families. People were out on the balconies getting fresh air. There was laundry hanging off every balcony. The place was heavily populated. Besides having a handful of people with rifles who didn’t really know how to shoot them and a handful of people who spotted for mortars, it was packed full of innocent families and it was in no way a legitimate military target.

But one day the squadron commander, who was a lieutenant colonel, rode by in his personal Humvee and they shot at him. So the command went around and told everybody that at ten o’clock that night they were gonna put on a show for us. So this AC-130 showed up and didn’t just strafe or shoot a few rounds here and there; it approached and launched sustained attack on those buildings.

I don’t recall exactly how long it circled. These planes circle until they expend their ammunition. The main weapon they used in this raid was the 40mm cannon, which loads automatically and can fire a round every half second or so. The 40mm round is like a hand grenade, and it fired maybe a hundred rounds.

On January 21, 2004—I have the exact dates because I wrote about all this in my journal—a civilian was run over by one of our Humvees and left for dead. We had been on a long night mission. We had been out all night and were tired, wanted to go home and hit the rack. There had been a lot of shooting that night. It had been a real bad night and we just wanted it to be over. We wanted to go home.

The guys ahead of us arrived at the gate when they apparently ran somebody over. I knew the guys in that Humvee. The driver’s one of my best friends, and the staff sergeant in command was also a very close friend. Later he was killed over there. The staff sergeant ordered the driver to continue driving and then ordered everyone on patrol not to say anything about it. He did this not because he was afraid of getting in trouble for killing somebody, but because he didn’t want to have to wait around and fill out a report. He didn’t want to be inconvenienced. They just wanted to go home and go to sleep.

As I said in my opening statement, these troopers are not bad people. These are people like any of us, but when put in terrible situations they respond horribly. When you are around that much death, running over some guy who was standing in the road is not a big deal. What’s a big deal is being separated from your cot another two or three hours, having to talk about it.

So they didn’t say anything, and we rolled up on them. We were the idiots who stopped and called it up and we got stuck out there for three hours, and after that, we made sure that if we saw anybody dead or anything like that we just kept going because it wasn’t worth the trouble.

February 21, 2004—civilians killed and wounded by American small arms fire.

It was during another nighttime patrol. This was an unusually friendly neighborhood, where people came out and waved. People didn’t seem to hate us. We were riding around and we heard an IED blast up ahead and AK-47 fire. Then we heard M-16s firing back, which are our rifles. We could tell that some of our people were in a fight. We raced ahead, eager to get some of the action, but by the time we showed up, the fight was over.

So there was the patrol of 82nd Airborne guys, infantry guys, and Humvees and they were packed in these unarmored fiberglass Humvees with machine guns pointing out on either side. They were attacked by two or three insurgents. They were in an open field, laying in a ditch across on their left. On their right was a civilian neighborhood, with housing for disabled military families from the Iraqi army.

The Airborne guys had taken fire from the left. Some of the guys also had heard gunfire coming in from the right, so the whole platoon returned fire in both directions. When the firing stopped, they sent some guys who ran out into the field. They didn’t find any insurgents. They looked for blood trails, didn’t find any blood trails. They didn’t find anything but some empty shell casings. The rest of them immediately dismounted and kicked in the door of this house that they had taken fire from. They were gonna raid the house and maybe catch the guy who had been shooting at them.

When they kicked in the door of this house, what they found was an entire extended Iraqi family celebrating a wedding. For those of us who have been in Iraq or at least in Baghdad, you know that any excuse they have is a good excuse to get on the roof and shoot their guns in the air. It’s a celebratory thing. We’ve all heard of celebratory fire being mistaken for hostile fire and this is a textbook case of that. Old Grandpa was on top of the roof cuttin’ loose with his rifle because he was so happy that his daughter was getting married. Meanwhile this 82nd patrol in his front yard gets ambushed from across the road and they returned fire in both directions.

They hit three people inside the wedding party. One was an adult man, who was slightly wounded, another young girl of maybe ten was slightly wounded. But there was another girl who was six or seven and she was dead. I was in the gunner’s hatch of the Humvee. I didn’t get out and go inside the house, but I looked through the doorway and that was the first time that I had ever seen a six-year-old girl dead.

This happens every day. People always say, “Yeah, well, that’s war,” and that is war, and that’s especially this war. Little girls get killed by soldiers in Iraq every day, not because we want to, but just because it happens. What happened next was that the 82nd patrol just mounted up and left it with us. It was our responsibility. Once again, we got stuck calling this up. We called it up to our Tactical Operations Center, and we told them what happened. They told us to continue mission. They said, “Charlie Mike” and that’s military jargon for continue mission.

So we hopped up in our Humvees and rode out. We didn’t even have a translator and we didn’t speak Arabic. We couldn’t say “sorry.” We just hopped in our vehicle and rode off.

For obvious reasons, it’s difficult to get up here and talk about these things. But what’s also difficult is that right after this happened, we never talked about it again. We drove away. We didn’t even tell the other guys back at the post about this. This was something that we just stuffed it the back in our minds and we thought, “Well, these things happen.” It was just forgotten and then the occupation dragged on.