VFP-Chapter 1002008 Scholarship

2008 Scholarship Application

2008-02-02T17:49:00.000-09:00

Eligibility: Class of 2008 at Juneau-Douglas High School or Yaakoosge Daakahidi Alternative High School, or Juneau home school students graduating this academic year. Members of Veterans for Peace and their families are ineligible. There is no GPA or financial need requirement for this scholarship.

Amount: $1,000 disbursed to the college or post-secondary school of your choice, and applied to tuition, fees and textbooks.

Award Date: 2008 at JDHS awards ceremony

Application Deadline: Monday, April 28, 2008

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Here’s Your Assignment: Imagine that your best friend or a relative is considering enlisting in the military. Write a letter of not more than 1500 words to the person.

What concerns would you express to that person? What factors do you think the person should consider before deciding whether to enlist? What questions should he or she be asking? What people and sources of information should he or she consult? What would you do if you were in that person’s shoes? Your letter should show that you can imagine the needs and pressures that are motivating the person to consider enlisting. What alternatives to military service might the person be wise to consider?

IMPORTANT: Before writing your letter, read or view the resources provided on this blog site. You may also consult other resources of your choice. Demonstrate your own critical thinking about the information available, pro or con, concerning military service and how it can affect a person for better or worse.

Entries will be judged on the quality of expression, the accuracy of information, and depth of thought reflected.

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Submit your letter in the text of an email message or as an attachment in Microsoft Word or Adobe Reader (.pdf) format, to scholarship@vfpjuneau.org. Include your name, address, phone number and email address.

By submitting an application you are certifying that your entry is completely your own work; however, you may obtain feedback from teachers or other mentors. All Submissions become the sole property of Veterans for Peace Chapter 100, and may be published in part or in whole. VFP reserves the right not to award a scholarship if satisfactory entries are not received.

For more information, email inquiries to:

scholarship@vfpjuneau.org

Check out the videos below

2008-02-01T17:45:00.000-09:00

WARNING: Some of the videos on this page contain disturbing language, images and violence.

Before You Enlist [14:31]

2008-01-30T18:12:00.000-09:00

The Ground Truth - Part 2 [9:49]

2008-01-29T21:50:00.000-09:00

The Ground Truth - Part 3 [9:56]

2008-01-28T17:07:00.000-09:00

The Ground Truth - Part 4 [9:43]

2008-01-27T17:10:00.000-09:00

Aimee Allison on Military Counter-Recruiting [3:07]

2008-01-25T17:14:00.000-09:00

Aidan Delgado [13:10]

2008-01-24T17:18:00.000-09:00

Army Strong (U.S. Army ad) [2:33]

2008-01-23T17:27:00.000-09:00

I Won’t Back Down (U.S. Army ad) [1:30]

2008-01-21T18:25:00.000-09:00

U.S. Marine Corps ad [7:38]

2008-01-21T17:32:00.000-09:00

Marines ad [1:00]

2008-01-20T17:34:00.000-09:00

Navy Seals ad [0:35]

2008-01-18T17:37:00.000-09:00

U.S. Navy ad [0:15]

2008-01-17T17:39:00.000-09:00

U.S. Air Force ad [1:04]

2008-01-16T17:40:00.000-09:00

Excerpts from The Deserter's Tale

2007-12-30T20:27:00.000-09:00

Excerpts from Joshua Key, The Deserter’s Tale: The Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away from the War in Iraq. (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007)

[pp. 36-39]
For folks like us who were poor and getting poorer by the day, the posters suggested that getting a job with the armed forces would be like winning the lottery. The difference, of course, was that almost nobody wins the lottery. But just about anybody can get into the armed forces – unless he or she is as poor as I was. It had been humiliating to be booted out of the marine recruiting center, two years earlier, because of my debts and growing family. This time, I would have to be honest about my situation, but I sure hoped they would take me.

When I walked in I saw recruiters behind six desks. I walked up to a staff sergeant whose name was something along the lines of Van Houten. . . .

Van Houten had a stack of papers on his desk and a pen in his hand.

“All right with you if I ask a few questions?” he said.

“Sure.” . . .

Van Houten began with the basics. What was my full name? Where did I live? Where and when was I born? What were the names of my father and mother, and where and when were they born? What was my education? Was I married? How many kids did I have?

I told him everything, but Van Houten slowed down a bit when we got to my family situation.

“What is your wife’s name?”

“Brandi Key.”

“Maiden name?”

“Johnson.”

“And your kids?”

I told him about Zackary and Adam and said we had a third child on the way.

He raised one finger, stopped me right there, and spoke in a low, confidential tone.

“All right, not another word about your wife being pregnant, is that understood? We leave that part out. You can’t enlist if you’ve got three children, but if everything else checks out I can get you in if we leave that part out.” . . .

Van Houten told me to keep one or two other details to myself as well. He would not take down information about the two herniated disks from an early back injury, because he said that could complicate my entry into military life. He didn’t want me to say anything about the time I had been arrested for assaulting a police officer. When I began to raise the matter of my debts, which had made it impossible for me to join the marines, he stopped me once more. “I won’t ask and don’t you tell,” he said.

[pp.44-45]
Finally, in mid-April 2002 – just a month shy of my twenty-fourth birthday – I learned from Van Houten that the army had cleared all of my medical tests and paperwork. I was fit to join the United States Army, he said, and I would do my country proud. He explained that I would receive $1,200 a month in salary and commit to a three-year contract. He did not tell me what I would learn only later – that the army could recall me anytime it wanted up to seven years after I signed up. . . .

Two other noncommissioned officers looked over my shoulder, turned the pages of the contract, skipped over the fine print, and pointed out all the X’s where I was to sign my name. I signed where they pointed and believed what I was told. I was a bloody fool to do so.

On April 13, 2002, I entered into a contract with the U.S. Army. Eighteen days later I was sent to basic training in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.

[pp. 47-50]
I turned twenty-four just a few days after arriving at boot camp. I didn’t tell anybody, because I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself. If anybody notices you or stops to speak to you at boot camp, it’s bad news for sure. The name of the game is to stay out of sight of anybody in any position to rain down punishment. . . .

Among the three hundred recruits, about a third of us were white, another third black, and another third Latino. There were just two women. As we went through the seventeen weeks of basic training, we were all shouted at, insulted, awoken abruptly, and kept off balance by sergeants whose job it was to break us down and build us back up in their own mold.

If somebody failed to do something properly, every recruit in the company would be punished. That quickly taught us to hate laggards and people who just couldn’t follow orders quickly enough.

I must say that I loved boot camp. I was good with guns, didn’t mind the exercise, and felt myself swell with patriotism and pride when our commanders told us that Americans were the only decent people on the planet and that Muslims and terrorists all deserved to die.

On day, all three hundred of us lined up on the bayonet range, each facing a life-size dummy that we were told to imagine was a Muslim man.

As we stabbed the dummies with our bayonets, one of our commanders stood on a podium and shouted into a microphone: “Kill! Kill! Kill the sand niggers!”

We, too, were made to shout out “Kill the sand niggers” as we stabbed the heads, then the hearts, and then slashed the throats of our imaginary victims.

While we shouted and stabbed, drill sergeants walked among us to make sure that we were all shouting. It seemed that the full effect of the lesson would be lost on us unless we shouted out the words of hate as we mutilated our enemies.

I shouted as loud and stabbed as mercilessly as any man on the range, and I slowly began to feel that I was somebody important. I was no longer a fast-food delivery man earning a pittance for a wage plus tips and all the pizza I could eat. I was no longer wondering how I could possibly put enough food on the table for Brandi and the boys. I was not an American soldier, and proud to think of myself as a perfect killing machine. I felt patriotic and invincible. I believed every word I was told, including that it was the job of the American army to keep order in the world. Our commanders told us that people who were not Americans were “terrorists” and “slant eyes.” They said that Muslims were responsible for the September 11, 2001, attacks on our country, that the people of Afghanistan were “terrorist pieces of shit that all deserved to die.”

[p. 50]
Iraqis, in the mouths of the officers and soldiers of the United States Army, were never Iraqis. And Muslims were never civilians. Nobody once mentioned the word “civilian” in the same breath as “Iraq” when I trained to become a soldier. Iraqis, I was taught to believe, were not civilians; they were not even people. We had our own terms for them. Our commanders called them ragheads, so we did the same. We called them habibs. We called them sand niggers. We called them hajjis; it wasn’t until I was sent to war that a man in Iraq explained to me that hajji was a complimentary term for a Muslim who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. In training, all I knew was that a hajji was someone to be despised, The hajjis, habibs, ragheads, and sand niggers were the enemy, and they were not to be thought of with a shred of humanity. No wonder my wife and I both thought, by the time I flew overseas to war, that all Muslims were terrorists and all terrorists were Muslims and that the only solution was to kill as many Iraqis as possible.

[p. 57]
I believed the reasons that President George W. Bush gave for beginning the Iraq War on March 20, 2003. I had faith in my country and accepted what I was told: Iraq was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and harboring terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks on the United States. I accepted the argument that is was time to overthrow Saddam Hussein and bring democracy to Iraq. I wasn’t eager to fight, but I would follow my commanders. As I’ve stated, I thought it was better for me to help stomp out terrorism and defend America than to leave the job to my own children.

[pp. 213-214]
If you have beaten or killed an innocent person, and if there remains a shred of conscience in your heart, you will not likely avoid anguish by saying you were only following orders. We each have to find what we believe to be the right way to live. When we prosecute an unjust war, or commit immoral acts in any war at all, the first victims are the people who were unfortunate enough to fall into our hands. The second victims are ourselves. We damage ourselves each time we violate our own true beliefs, and the wrongs we commit weigh on our shoulders to the grave.

I cannot say exactly what would have happened if I had refused to blow apart the homes of Iraqis; if I had refused to send every male over five feet in height to American detention centers. I imagine that I would have been humiliated and punished by my superiors. I may have been beaten. Perhaps they would have sent me home to prison or disgrace. . . .

I am ashamed of what I did in Iraq, and of all the ways that innocent civilians suffered or died at our hands. The fact that I was only following orders does not lessen my discomfort or ease my nightmares. After I came across the four decapitated bodies by the side of the road in Ramadi, and saw soldiers in my own army kicking the heads for their own amusement, I began to dream of the incident and of the rolling heads. Though I had arrived after the murder, the very fact that I saw the results and was part of the machine that committed the act weighed on my soul and weighs on it still.

[p. 210]
There are certain things that I avoid these days, such as alcohol and crowds, because I fear they will trigger more of my own blackouts. I know that thousands of American soldiers have abused drugs or committed suicide after returning home from war. It would be easy to follow in the steps of many in my own family and drown my shame and my sorrows in alcohol. Alcohol, however, could lead to the very problem of suicidal depression that has plagued vets for generations. I won’t go down that road. I have a wife and four children who need me, and they are the single greatest reason why I want to stay alive and to lead a good life. As for the big city, well, I remain an Oklahoma boy at heart, and I like wide-open spaces, so I have fled Toronto and settled in the Canadian prairies.

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“From 'Gook' to 'Raghead'”

2007-12-29T20:41:00.000-09:00

By Bob Herbert, Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times, May 2, 2005

I spent some time recently with Aidan Delgado, a 23-year-old religion major at New College of Florida, a small, highly selective school in Sarasota.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, before hearing anything about the terror attacks that would change the direction of American history, Mr. Delgado enlisted as a private in the Army Reserve. Suddenly, in ways he had never anticipated, the military took over his life. He was trained as a mechanic and assigned to the 320th Military Police Company in St. Petersburg. By the spring of 2003, he was in Iraq. Eventually he would be stationed at the prison compound in Abu Ghraib.

Mr. Delgado's background is unusual. He is an American citizen, but because his father was in the diplomatic corps, he grew up overseas. He spent eight years in Egypt, speaks Arabic and knows a great deal about the various cultures of the Middle East. He wasn't happy when, even before his unit left the states, a top officer made wisecracks about the soldiers heading off to Iraq to kill some ragheads and burn some turbans.

"He laughed," Mr. Delgado said, "and everybody in the unit laughed with him."

The officer's comment was a harbinger of the gratuitous violence that, according to Mr. Delgado, is routinely inflicted by American soldiers on ordinary Iraqis. He said: "Guys in my unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by in their Humvee and shatter bottles over the heads of Iraqi civilians passing by. They'd keep a bunch of empty Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over people's heads."

He said he had confronted guys who were his friends about this practice. "I said to them: 'What the hell are you doing? Like, what does this accomplish?' And they responded just completely openly. They said: 'Look, I hate being in Iraq. I hate being stuck here. And I hate being surrounded by hajis.' "

"Haji" is the troops' term of choice for an Iraqi. It's used the way "gook" or "Charlie" was used in Vietnam.

Mr. Delgado said he had witnessed incidents in which an Army sergeant lashed a group of children with a steel Humvee antenna, and a Marine corporal planted a vicious kick in the chest of a kid about 6 years old. There were many occasions, he said, when soldiers or marines would yell and curse and point their guns at Iraqis who had done nothing wrong.

He said he believes that the absence of any real understanding of Arab or Muslim culture by most G.I.'s, combined with a lack of proper training and the unrelieved tension of life in a war zone, contributes to levels of fear and rage that lead to frequent instances of unnecessary violence.

Mr. Delgado, an extremely thoughtful and serious young man, balked at the entire scene. "It drove me into a moral quagmire," he said. "I walked up to my commander and gave him my weapon. I said: 'I'm not going to fight. I'm not going to kill anyone. This war is wrong. I'll stay. I'll finish my job as a mechanic. But I'm not going to hurt anyone. And I want to be processed as a conscientious objector.' "

He stayed with his unit and endured a fair amount of ostracism. "People would say I was a traitor or a coward," he said. "The stuff you would expect."

In November 2003, after several months in Nasiriya in southern Iraq, the 320th was redeployed to Abu Ghraib. The violence there was sickening, Mr. Delgado said. Some inmates were beaten nearly to death. The G.I.'s at Abu Ghraib lived in cells while most of the detainees were housed in large overcrowded tents set up in outdoor compounds that were vulnerable to mortars fired by insurgents. The Army acknowledges that at least 32 Abu Ghraib detainees were killed by mortar fire.

Mr. Delgado, who eventually got conscientious objector status and was honorably discharged last January, recalled a disturbance that occurred while he was working in the Abu Ghraib motor pool. Detainees who had been demonstrating over a variety of grievances began throwing rocks at the guards. As the disturbance grew, the Army authorized lethal force. Four detainees were shot to death.

Mr. Delgado confronted a sergeant who, he said, had fired on the detainees. "I asked him," said Mr. Delgado, "if he was proud that he had shot unarmed men behind barbed wire for throwing stones. He didn't get mad at all. He was, like, 'Well, I saw them bloody my buddy's nose, so I knelt down. I said a prayer. I stood up, and I shot them down.' "

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“The last days of Private Scheuerman”

2007-12-28T20:48:00.000-09:00

“The last days of Private Scheuerman”

By Kimberly Hefling, Associated Press Writer
Yahoo! News, December 19, 2007

Private First Class Jason Scheuerman nailed a suicide note to his barracks closet in Iraq, stepped inside and shot himself.

"Maybe finaly I can get some peace," said the 20-year-old, misspelling "finally" but writing in a neat hand.

His parents didn't find out about the note for well over a year, and only then when it showed up in a government envelope in his father's rural North Carolina mailbox.

The one-page missive was among hundreds of pages of documents the soldier's family obtained and shared with The Associated Press after battling a military bureaucracy they feel didn't want to answer their questions, especially this: Why did Jason Scheuerman have to die?

What the soldier's father, Chris, would learn about his son's final days would lead the retired Special Forces commando, who teaches at Fort Bragg, to take on the very institution he's spent his life serving — and ultimately prompt an investigation by the Army Inspector General's office.

The documents, obtained by Freedom of Information Act requests filed by Chris Scheuerman, reveal a troubled soldier kept in Iraq despite repeated signs he was going to kill himself, including placing the muzzle of his weapon in his mouth multiple times.

Jason Scheuerman's story — pieced together with interviews and information in the documents — demonstrates how he was failed by the very support system that was supposed to protect him. In his case, a psychologist told his commanders to send him back to his unit because he was capable of feigning mental illness to get out of the Army.

He is not alone. At least 152 U.S. troops have taken their own lives in Iraq and Afghanistan since the two wars started, contributing to the Army's highest suicide rate in 26 years of keeping track. For the grieving parents, the answers don't come easily or quickly.

For Jason Scheuerman, death came on July 30, 2005, around 5:30 p.m., about 45 minutes after his first sergeant told the teary-eyed private that if he was intentionally misbehaving so he could leave the Army, he would go to jail where he would be abused.

When the call came out over the unit's radios that there had been a death, one soldier would later tell investigators he suspected it was Scheuerman.
___

Scheuerman spent his early years on military posts playing GI Joe. The middle child, he divided his time after his parents' divorce between his mother's house in Lynchburg, Va., and his father's in North Carolina where he went to high school.

He was nearly 6 feet tall and loved to eat. His mother, Anne, said sometimes at 10 p.m. she'd find him defrosting chicken to grill.

Likable and witty, he often joked around — even dressing up like a clown one night at church camp, said his pastor, Mike Cox of West Lynchburg Baptist Church. But he had a quiet, reflective side, too, and sometimes withdrew, Cox said.

"You always knew how he felt. He wore his emotions on his sleeve," his mother said. "If he was angry, you knew it. If he was upset, you knew it."

Scheuerman liked military history and writing, but decided college wasn't for him. After a short stint in landscaping, he followed what seemed an almost natural path into the military. His mother had spent a year in the Army, and his father, a physician's assistant, retired as an Army master sergeant. One of his two brothers also joined and is now in Afghanistan.

He enlisted in 2004 and was sent to Iraq from Fort Benning, Ga., in January 2005 with the 3rd Infantry Division. On leave a few months later, Scheuerman told his father he was having a hard time with combat and killing people.

"I've seen war," his father said. "I told him that a lot of what he was seeing was normal. That we all feel it. That we're all afraid."

Back in Iraq, things didn't improve. One soldier — whose name was blacked out on the documents like most others — said he saw Jason put the muzzle of his rifle in his mouth, and told investigators other soldiers had seen him do something similar.

"He said it was a joke," the soldier said. "He said he had thought about it before but didn't have a plan to do it."

Scheuerman was reprimanded for not bathing or shaving and spending too much time playing videogames. He misplaced a radio and didn't wear parts of his uniform. Sometimes, Scheuerman was singled out for punishment, one soldier told an investigator. "I don't know why," the soldier said. Another said his noncommissioned officers were yelling at him "more days then not."

His platoon sergeant said in a disciplinary note that Scheuerman's actions put everyone in danger. "If you continue on your present course of action, you may end up in a body bag," he wrote.

In another, his squad leader said, "You have put me into a position where I have to treat you like a troublesome child. I hate being in this position. It makes me be someone I don't like."

Scheuerman was made to do push-ups in front of Iraqi soldiers, which humiliated

As he was punished, "it appeared as though he was out of touch with reality; in a world all his own," his platoon sergeant said in a report.

After the punishment, Scheuerman slept on the floor of his unit's operation's center in Muqdadiyah, about 60 miles north of Baghdad.

An Army chaplain who met with him about a month before he died said his mood had "drastically changed." He said Scheuerman demonstrated disturbing behavior by "sitting with his weapon between his legs and bobbing his head on the muzzle." He told Scheuerman's leaders to have his rifle and ammunition magazine "taken from him immediately" and for him to undergo a mental health evaluation.

Scheuerman checked on a mental health questionnaire that he had thoughts about killing himself, was uptight, anxious and depressed, had feelings of hopelessness and despair, felt guilty and was having work problems. But in person, the psychologist said, he denied having thoughts of suicide.

Less than a week later, Scheuerman's mother got an e-mail from her son telling her goodbye. She contacted a family support official at Fort Benning and later received a call saying her son had been checked and was fine. Later, her son sent her an instant message and said her phone call had made things worse.

The same day as her call, Scheuerman's company commander requested a mental evaluation, noting that the private was a "good soldier" but displays "distant, depression like symptoms."

Visiting with the psychologist for the second time, Scheuerman said he sometimes saw other people on guard duty that other soldiers do not see, suggesting he was hallucinating. And he said that if he wasn't diagnosed as having a mental problem, he was going to be in trouble with his leader. Yet he again denied being suicidal, the psychologist reported.

The psychologist determined Scheuerman did not meet the criteria for a mental health disorder, and that a screening test he had taken indicated he was exaggerating. He told Scheuerman's leaders he was "capable of claiming mental illness in order to manipulate his command."

Still, when he sent Scheuerman back to his barracks, he told the private's leaders that if Scheuerman claimed to be depressed, to take it seriously. He recommended Scheuerman sleep in an area where he could be watched, that most of his personal belongings and privileges be taken away for his safety.

The evaluation "created in the leaders' minds the idea that the soldier was a malingerer all along," an officer from his unit evaluating the case as part of a post-suicide investigation would later determine.

Shortly after the psychologist's determination and a few weeks before he died, Scheuerman's Internet and phone communication were shut off. His parents did not hear from him again.

The night before he shot himself, his rifle — which had since been returned to him — was found in a Humvee. The next morning, one soldier said Scheuerman "was quiet and seemed depressed. He said he had a rough night and didn't sleep well."

Later that day, he was punished again and given 14 days of extra duty.

Scheuerman had tears in his eyes, but one of his noncommissioned officers said he was surprisingly calm before he went to his room, weapon in hand.

"I told him to go upstairs and clean his gear and change his uniform," his squad leader told investigators. "I was soo angry with him, I went outside to smoke and talk to someone so I didn't blow up."

Less than an hour later, he said he heard someone yelling that Scheuerman had done something.

"At that point, I knew I was already too late," he said.

Scheuerman's body was discovered in a closet, blood streaming from his mouth.
___

Initially, Scheuerman's father said he trusted the Army would investigate his son's death and take action.

"I did not want to believe that it was as bad as I thought it was, so I chose not to make hasty judgments," Scheuerman said from his kitchen table, sitting beside his ex-wife, whom he plans to remarry. "I chose to systematically try to get all the information that I could and once I received all the information I could, my worst fears were realized."

Each document that arrived brought more pain.

When a copy of his son's suicide note appeared, Scheuerman broke down crying. In the note, his son said he wanted to say goodbye, but his ability to contact the family was taken away "like everything else." He said he'd brought dishonor on his family and his Army unit.

"I know you think I'm a coward for this but in the face of existing as I am now, I have no other choice," Scheuerman wrote. "As the 1st Sgt said all I have to look forward to is a butt-buddy in jail, not much of a future."

Chris Scheuerman wants to see a more thorough investigation, and some of his son's leaders punished — perhaps even criminally charged — and the psychologist brought before a medical peer review committee. "We will not see a statistical decrease in Army suicides until the Army gets serious about holding people accountable when they do not do what they are trained to do," he said.

Citing privacy, Maj. Nathan Banks, an Army public affairs officer, declined to discuss the case.

Eventually, Jason Scheuerman's father sought the assistance of Rep. Bob Etheridge, D-N.C., who spoke with Army Secretary Pete Geren on Oct. 1 and asked him to initiate an investigation by the Inspector General's Office. Geren agreed.

The Scheuermans say they hope the investigation will bring about changes that will prevent other suicides.

"The people that I trusted with the safety of my son killed him, and that hurts beyond words because we are a family of soldiers," Scheuerman said.

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Excerpt from “War Torn: Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles”

2007-12-27T20:57:00.000-09:00

By Deborah Sontag and Lizette Alvarez
The New York Times, January 13, 2008

Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: “Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.” Pierre, S.D.: “Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.” Colorado Springs: “Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.”

Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.

The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment — along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems — appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction.

Three-quarters of these veterans were still in the military at the time of the killing. More than half the killings involved guns, and the rest were stabbings, beatings, strangulations and bathtub drownings. Twenty-five offenders faced murder, manslaughter or homicide charges for fatal car crashes resulting from drunken, reckless or suicidal driving.

About a third of the victims were spouses, girlfriends, children or other relatives, among them 2-year-old Krisiauna Calaira Lewis, whose 20-year-old father slammed her against a wall when he was recuperating in Texas from a bombing near Falluja that blew off his foot and shook up his brain.

A quarter of the victims were fellow service members, including Specialist Richard Davis of the Army, who was stabbed repeatedly and then set ablaze, his body hidden in the woods by fellow soldiers a day after they all returned from Iraq.

And the rest were acquaintances or strangers, among them Noah P. Gamez, 21, who was breaking into a car at a Tucson motel when an Iraq combat veteran, also 21, caught him, shot him dead and then killed himself outside San Diego with one of several guns found in his car.

Tracking the Killings

The Pentagon does not keep track of such killings, most of which are prosecuted not by the military justice system but by civilian courts in state after state. Neither does the Justice Department.

To compile and analyze its list, The Times conducted a search of local news reports, examined police, court and military records and interviewed the defendants, their lawyers and families, the victims’ families and military and law enforcement officials.

This reporting most likely uncovered only the minimum number of such cases, given that not all killings, especially in big cities and on military bases, are reported publicly or in detail. Also, it was often not possible to determine the deployment history of other service members arrested on homicide charges.

The Times used the same methods to research homicides involving all active-duty military personnel and new veterans for the six years before and after the present wartime period began with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

This showed an 89 percent increase during the present wartime period, to 349 cases from 184, about three-quarters of which involved Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. The increase occurred even though there have been fewer troops stationed in the United States in the last six years and the American homicide rate has been, on average, lower.

The Pentagon was given The Times’s roster of homicides. It declined to comment because, a spokesman, Lt. Col. Les Melnyk, said, the Department of Defense could not duplicate the newspaper’s research. Further, Colonel Melnyk questioned the validity of comparing prewar and wartime numbers based on news media reports, saying that the current increase might be explained by “an increase in awareness of military service by reporters since 9/11.” He also questioned the value of “lumping together different crimes such as involuntary manslaughter with first-degree homicide.”

Given that many veterans rebound successfully from their war experiences and some flourish as a result of them, veterans groups have long deplored the attention paid to the minority of soldiers who fail to readjust to civilian life.

After World War I, the American Legion passed a resolution asking the press “to subordinate whatever slight news value there may be in playing up the ex-service member angle in stories of crime or offense against the peace.” An article in the Veterans of Foreign Wars magazine in 2006 referred with disdain to the pervasive “wacko-vet myth,” which, veterans say, makes it difficult for them to find jobs.

Clearly, committing homicide is an extreme manifestation of dysfunction for returning veterans, many of whom struggle in quieter ways, with crumbling marriages, mounting debt, deepening alcohol dependence or more-minor tangles with the law.

But these killings provide a kind of echo sounding for the profound depths to which some veterans have fallen, whether at the bottom of a downward spiral or in a sudden burst of violence.

Thirteen of these veterans took their own lives after the killings, and two more were fatally shot by the police. Several more attempted suicide or expressed a death wish, like Joshua Pol, a former soldier convicted of vehicular homicide, who told a judge in Montana in 2006, “To be honest with you, I really wish I had died in Iraq.”

In some of the cases involving veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, the fact that the suspect went to war bears no apparent relationship to the crime committed or to the prosecution and punishment. But in many of the cases, the deployment of the service member invariably becomes a factor of some sort as the legal system, families and communities grapple to make sense of the crimes.

This is especially stark where a previously upstanding young man — there is one woman among the 121 — appears to have committed a random act of violence. And The Times’s analysis showed that the overwhelming majority of these young men, unlike most civilian homicide offenders, had no criminal history.

“When they’ve been in combat, you have to suspect immediately that combat has had some effect, especially with people who haven’t shown these tendencies in the past,” said Robert Jay Lifton, a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance who used to run “rap groups” for Vietnam veterans and fought to earn recognition for what became known as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

“Everything is multicausational, of course,” Dr. Lifton continued. “But combat, especially in a counterinsurgency war, is such a powerful experience that to discount it would be artificial.”

Few of these 121 war veterans received more than a cursory mental health screening at the end of their deployments, according to interviews with the veterans, lawyers, relatives and prosecutors. Many displayed symptoms of combat trauma after their return, those interviews show, but they were not evaluated for or received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder until after they were arrested for homicides.

What is clear is that experiences on the streets of Baghdad and Falluja shadowed these men back to places like Longview, Tex., and Edwardsville, Ill.

“He came back different” is the shared refrain of the defendants’ family members, who mention irritability, detachment, volatility, sleeplessness, excessive drinking or drug use, and keeping a gun at hand.

“You are unleashing certain things in a human being we don’t allow in civic society, and getting it all back in the box can be difficult for some people,” said William C. Gentry, an Army reservist and Iraq veteran who works as a prosecutor in San Diego County.

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Excerpt from “Iraq: The Hidden Human Costs”

2007-12-26T21:11:00.000-09:00

By Michael Massing
The New York Review of Books (December 20, 2007)

As probing and aggressive as the reporting from Iraq has been, it is subject to many filters. There are, for example, "family viewing" standards that make it difficult for journalists to write frankly about such sensitive aspects of military life as the profane language soldiers often use. It's also hard for journalists to get an accurate sense of what soldiers really think. Through embedding, reporters have enjoyed remarkable physical access to the troops, but learning about their true feelings is far more difficult, all the more so since soldiers who speak out too freely can be prosecuted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Finally, there are limitations imposed by the political climate in which the press works. Images that seem too graphic or unsettling can cause an uproar. When, for instance, The New York Times in January 2007 ran a photo of a US soldier lying mortally wounded on the ground, the paper was angrily accused of showing disrespect for the troops. More generally, the conduct of US soldiers in the field remains a highly sensitive subject. News organizations that show soldiers in a bad light run the risk of being labeled anti-American, unpatriotic, or—worst of all—"against the troops." In July, for instance, when The New Republic ran a column by a private that recounted several instances of bad behavior by US soldiers, he and the magazine were viciously attacked by conservative bloggers. Most Americans simply do not want to know too much about the acts being carried out in their name, and this serves as a powerful deterrent to editors and producers.

Books are less susceptible to such pressure and as a result can be far more pointed. The picture they present is not always bleak. They describe many affecting scenes in which soldiers try to do good, administering first aid, handing out food, arranging for garbage to be picked up. For the most part, the GIs come across as well-meaning Americans who have been set down in an alien environment with inappropriate training, minimal cultural preparation, and no language skills. Surrounded by people who for the most part wish them ill and living with the daily fear of being blown up, they frequently take out their frustrations on the local population. It's in these firsthand accounts that one can find the most searing descriptions of the toll the war has taken on both US troops and the Iraqi people.

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For the entire article: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20906

“The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness”

2007-12-25T21:16:00.000-09:00

“The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness”
The Nation, July 30, 2007

Over the past several months The Nation has interviewed fifty combat veterans of the Iraq War from around the United States in an effort to investigate the effects of the four-year-old occupation on average Iraqi civilians. These combat veterans, some of whom bear deep emotional and physical scars, and many of whom have come to oppose the occupation, gave vivid, on-the-record accounts. They described a brutal side of the war rarely seen on television screens or chronicled in newspaper accounts.

Their stories, recorded and typed into thousands of pages of transcripts, reveal disturbing patterns of behavior by American troops in Iraq. Dozens of those interviewed witnessed Iraqi civilians, including children, dying from American firepower. Some participated in such killings; others treated or investigated civilian casualties after the fact. Many also heard such stories, in detail, from members of their unit. The soldiers, sailors and marines emphasized that not all troops took part in indiscriminate killings. Many said that these acts were perpetrated by a minority. But they nevertheless described such acts as common and said they often go unreported--and almost always go unpunished.

Court cases, such as the ones surrounding the massacre in Haditha and the rape and murder of a 14-year-old in Mahmudiya, and news stories in the Washington Post, Time, the London Independent and elsewhere based on Iraqi accounts have begun to hint at the wide extent of the attacks on civilians. Human rights groups have issued reports, such as Human Rights Watch's Hearts and Minds: Post-war Civilian Deaths in Baghdad Caused by U.S. Forces, packed with detailed incidents that suggest that the killing of Iraqi civilians by occupation forces is more common than has been acknowledged by military authorities.

This Nation investigation marks the first time so many on-the-record, named eyewitnesses from within the US military have been assembled in one place to openly corroborate these assertions.

While some veterans said civilian shootings were routinely investigated by the military, many more said such inquiries were rare. "I mean, you physically could not do an investigation every time a civilian was wounded or killed because it just happens a lot and you'd spend all your time doing that," said Marine Reserve Lieut. Jonathan Morgenstein, 35, of Arlington, Virginia. He served from August 2004 to March 2005 in Ramadi with a Marine Corps civil affairs unit supporting a combat team with the Second Marine Expeditionary Brigade. (All interviewees are identified by the rank they held during the period of service they recount here; some have since been promoted or demoted.)

Veterans said the culture of this counterinsurgency war, in which most Iraqi civilians were assumed to be hostile, made it difficult for soldiers to sympathize with their victims--at least until they returned home and had a chance to reflect.

"I guess while I was there, the general attitude was, A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi," said Spc. Jeff Englehart, 26, of Grand Junction, Colorado. Specialist Englehart served with the Third Brigade, First Infantry Division, in Baquba, about thirty-five miles northeast of Baghdad, for a year beginning in February 2004. "You know, so what?... The soldiers honestly thought we were trying to help the people and they were mad because it was almost like a betrayal. Like here we are trying to help you, here I am, you know, thousands of miles away from home and my family, and I have to be here for a year and work every day on these missions. Well, we're trying to help you and you just turn around and try to kill us."

He said it was only "when they get home, in dealing with veteran issues and meeting other veterans, it seems like the guilt really takes place, takes root, then."

The Iraq War is a vast and complicated enterprise. In this investigation of alleged military misconduct, The Nation focused on a few key elements of the occupation, asking veterans to explain in detail their experiences operating patrols and supply convoys, setting up checkpoints, conducting raids and arresting suspects. From these collected snapshots a common theme emerged. Fighting in densely populated urban areas has led to the indiscriminate use of force and the deaths at the hands of occupation troops of thousands of innocents.

Many of these veterans returned home deeply disturbed by the disparity between the reality of the war and the way it is portrayed by the US government and American media.

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For the entire article: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070730/hedges