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http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=11103
March 16th, 2008 3:54 am
Veterans recall horrors of war in live broadcast
By Anna Badkhen / Boston Globe
CAMBRIDGE, MA - Liz Jackson's eyes were fixed on a screen showing a live
broadcast of anguished testimonies by Iraq and
Afghanistan war veterans describing what they had seen and done during
their combat tours.
Jeffery Smith recalled how his Army unit beat and humiliated Iraqi
prisoners. Former Marine Bryan Casler recounted how
fellow Marines urinated and defecated into food and gave it to Iraqi
children. Former Marine Matthew Childers talked
about how he used to humiliate Iraqi civilians during predawn raids on
their homes. When he described turning away an
Iraqi father who was asking American troops to help the badly burned baby
he carried in his arms, Jackson began to weep
silently.
"These soldiers are saying: 'I'm complicit,' " said Jackson, 29, a
community organizer from Cambridge. "But every
American citizen who saw this happen and isn't out there protesting is
complicit. I include myself."
Hundreds of soldiers and Marines from across the country are testifying
this weekend in the "Winter Soldier: Iraq and
Afghanistan" hearings, a four-day event held at the National Labor College
in Silver Spring, Md. The event is named
after the 1971 Winter Soldier hearings in which Vietnam War veterans
testified in a Detroit hotel about war crimes they
had participated in or witnessed.
The hearings, which began Thursday and end today, were organized by the
Iraq Veterans Against War, a national antiwar
organization, and broadcast live in locations across the country. The
veterans who testified called for an immediate
withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.
"In the United States today people's minds have gotten off the war. We are
trying to get their attention," said Paul
Shannon, whose New England United antiwar network organized the live
screening shown yesterday in First Parish Unitarian
Church in Harvard Square, in a side room that was packed with about 300
antiwar activists, former troops, local
residents like Jackson, and curious passersby.
On Friday, more than a dozen Iraq and Afghanistan veterans from
Massachusetts drove to Silver Spring to observe and
participate in the hearings.
One of them, Ian J. Lavallee, an Iraq war veteran from Jamaica Plain, said
in a phone interview yesterday that although
he was not planning to testify, he wanted to attend the hearings because
it was his "duty to the people of the world" to
condemn an "occupation that is being waged in our name and with our tax
dollars."
"We dehumanized people. The way we spoke about them, the way we destroyed
their livelihoods, their families, doing
raids, manhandling them, throwing the men on the ground while their family
was crying," recalled Lavallee, 23, who
served in Iraq in 2005 and was honorably discharged from the Army in 2006
after he attempted suicide.
"I became a person I never thought I would become," he said. "It really
upset me that I did these things."
From a folding chair in the Cambridge church, a fellow veteran, Patrick
Dougherty, watched the hearings intently.
"It just takes me back there," he said. The testimonies reminded him "how
malicious we were over there."
Dougherty, who was deployed to Baghdad and Mahmoudiya for 14 months
beginning in 2003, "felt from the start that we had
no intention to win hearts and minds," he said, his hands nervously
running from the stubble on his chin to his hair and
back to his chin.
"The way we treated our detainees like animals, kept them in cages in the
hot sun all day - " said Dougherty, 24, who
studies biology at the University of Massachusetts and lives in Fields
Corner.
Dougherty was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He said he
had considered testifying at the Winter Soldier
hearings, but his doctor talked him out of it because the event could
conjure memories too difficult for the veteran to
bear.
Most of the people who came to watch the testimonies were members of
antiwar groups in Massachusetts. Jennifer Magee,
who works at Harvard University Art Museums, came because her roommate, an
antiwar activist, had told her about it.
"These are the stories you never hear in the paper," said Magee. "It's
really powerful to hear from the veterans."
Charles Gluck, a social worker from Long Island who was visiting Cambridge
yesterday, wandered in after he saw a poster
outside the church advertising the event.
"Some of the things I heard were shocking," Gluck said after listening to
several testimonies. "My hope is that a
movement like this would expand and . . . give people op****tunity to make
a more informed decision as to who the next
president will be."
No public screening of the hearings will be held today. Recordings of the
testimonies are available at
ivaw.org/wintersoldier/howtowatch.
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