Читать книгу Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan - Aaron Glantz - Страница 15

Steven Casey

Specialist, United States Army, Cavalry Scout
Deployment: April 2003–July 2004, Baghdad and the surrounding areas
Hometown: Farmington, Missouri
Age at Winter Soldier: 24 years old

I was in the same unit as Clif. During the November 2003 free-fire zone Clif was talking about, our Lieutenant Colonel Chuck Williams’s personal Humvee had been purportedly shot at. He did an interview with CBS the afternoon before the incident.

He said, “If you are trying to send a message by firing and harboring yourself inside of an area like this, we want to send the message right back that you can be reached. We will find you and surgically remove you.”

Spectre Gunships are not a precision weapon. There’s no precision to it as there is with surgery, so to have him use that comparison is a little odd. I have video footage of the air strike itself, and the most disturbing part was the parties on the rooftops. Our roofs were set up in a semicircle around this post, and in building after building everyone was told to grab their chairs and popcorn and jerky and go on top and watch this thing go down. I was there. I probably hooped and hollered as well. There are higher-up NCOs on the video saying, “Can you hear haji die?” “We don’t have zone five anymore because they just blew the shit out of it.” And lots of cheering. You know there are civilians there, but that’s what we’re supposed to do.

I never got a true body count out of it. We never went to inspect the rubble afterwards, but I can tell you that it happened. Clif can tell you that it happened. He was in a separate building at a different vantage point watching the same show.

Another one of their main objectives was to rid the camp of the mortar, but the mortar fire continued almost every day even after this target was destroyed, so he may have done some surgery or what have you, but I can assure you that I still have plenty of issues with loud noises caused by the mortars landing daily on and around my post, and I just don’t see any justification for it all.

I was in the forward platoon doing operations on the streets. There were no friendlies. In April of 2004 we were scheduled to go home, but due to a rise in violence we had to remain and we returned to the Operation Blackjack. We went to the city of Abu Ghraib, where we were supposed to secure and patrol.

Several buildings had already been bulldozed by American engineering companies, two had been flattened. Rubble and vehicles were piled up on the side of the road and set ablaze. That’s how they cleaned up the area and weeded out the bad guys. We were a cleanup crew after that, and we witnessed several different instances where people took advantage of the free-fire order.

I witnessed personal weapons being fired into the radiators and windshields because these vehicles were coming up the correct side of the road that we were going down the wrong way. Our orders at this point in time were to have one vehicle on each side of the highway and ensure there was no one on the highway besides us.

There’s only so much hand-waving you can really do from a vehicle, and those who didn’t turn around, unfortunately, were neutralized one way or another. I personally witnessed shots fired into windshields and radiators well over twenty different times. I personally never fired at these and used the free-fire order, but there was a lot of collateral damage. No combatant damage that I can recall at that point in time by the people I was with.

Lastly, I want to talk about the way the raids were conducted. Usually what we found, what happened in raids is what the military calls a “dry hole” or “whoops.” This happened several times.

There was one raid, just a typical night raid. It was my platoon and a couple of Bradleys. We rolled out to this house. Typically there were concrete walls around the house, with closed and secured metal gates. So we would pivot and steer the Bradleys into the walls to knock down the wall and tear down whatever security infrastructure the person’s home had. Sometimes we would even crush the vehicles parked behind the wall. After doing that, we dropped a ramp and continued inside.

Then we started hearing a lady screaming from the inside, her and her children. We get to the door and bust the door in, and take her and her children to what we call the EPW roundup area, which is where a couple of lower-enlisted soldiers would take the enemy prisoners of war, like this lady and her children, at gunpoint and hold them until the raid was complete. Next, we entered their house and destroyed it. We rummaged through her personal effects looking for weapons. We punctured the walls looking for soft spots. We’d heard the insurgents were putting things in the walls, so that was our order.

To make this long story short, we destroyed this lady’s house and we found nothing. We’ve scared her and her children to death and come to find out we were off by a number. We were supposed to raid the house across the street. I actually said, “Hey, we’ve got time. Why don’t we go?” However, we didn’t go. We chalked it up, and as Clif says, “Charlie Mike.” We went home and maybe went to bed.

This was not an isolated incident for my platoon. I can’t blame the people who did it. I was one of them. We were all good people. We were just in a bad situation and we did what we had to do to get through. So for all those in the video and that I served with, like Clifton, I have to thank them, and I hope they hear it.