3-16-08, 9:11 am

More than 100 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, many family members of veterans, and experts gathered this weekend, Mar. 13 - Mar. 16, to testify about their experiences of the wars. The event, titled Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan, was held at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Maryland and was sponsored by the Iraq Veterans Against the War. Though the event was closed to the general public, an international audience viewed the event live online and by satellite.

Shoot First, Question Later

On Friday, Mar. 14, two panels titled Rules of Engagement (Parts 1 and 2) heard 16 veterans courageously discuss their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The veterans on these panels talked mainly about how military commanders allowed and encouraged declining standards embodied in the Rules of Engagement (ROE), military orders that outline how troops must respond in situations in which they encounter enemies, potential enemies, and noncombatants while in a combat zone.

Jason Lemieux, a former US Marine sergeant who served in three deployments in Iraq from the invasion to 2006, described an increasingly weakened ROE in Iraq as a failure of military command and a 'moral disgrace.'

Marines were authorized, he said, to use deadly force against anyone who held a shovel, used a cell phone, held binoculars, or appeared in public after curfew. Marines were not held accountable for determining whether an individual posed a real threat or was a noncombatant before killing that person, he testified.

Lemieux recalled one commander telling his marines, 'Better them than us.' Indeed, he said, commanders told marines openly that if they violated the ROE they would be protected, and throwaway weapons were regularly used to hide a killed Iraqi's noncombatant status.

Jon Turner, who also served with the Marines in Iraq, said Marines frequently hid this behavior from the US media. 'When we had embedded reporters,' he stated, 'our actions changed drastically. We did everything by the book.'

After giving a lengthy account of various activities he now finds morally objectionable, Turner apologized. 'I'm sorry for the hate and destruction I inflicted on innocent people,' he said. 'I'm sorry for the things I did. I am no longer the monster I once was.'

Logan Laituri, an elite trained 82nd Airborne US Army soldier, said he didn't want his comments viewed as an attack on the US military. 'I was committed to the military,' he said. He was critical of the war when it began, but believed he could do good to help the people of Iraq improve their country.

Over the course of several months in Iraq, he said, he reacquainted himself with his Christian faith and sought conscientious objector status having come to believe that his faith rejected violence.

His commanders reacted angrily, he testified. They accused him of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Laituri pointed out, however, that at least two conscientious objectors had won the Congressional Medal of Honor for their contributions in noncombat roles. He told his commanders he was willing to return to Iraq in a noncombat role, but they labeled him as inflicted with 'maladjustment disorder' and kept him from redeploying with his unit.

Laituri recalled that in the time he spent in the combat zones, his commanders refused to hand down a definitive ROE. 'We never got a concrete ROE that told us what our mission was,' he said.

For example, he said, he never knew that the use of white phosphorous artillery rounds was banned, but his unit regularly fired them randomly in Iraq for training purposes.

He also testified that in 2004, his commanders ordered an attack on Samarra. Laituri said that his commanders rationalized that since they had warned the civilian population that an attack was coming, the city was a 'free fire zone' and that soldiers could kill any person they encountered with impunity.

Others on the panels talked about physically abusing Iraqi and Afghan civilians, shooting noncombatants, firing into private property, attacking civilian targets both deliberately and unintentionally, torture, and a host of brutal actions during their service in the war zones.

Most appeared to attribute these apparent atrocities to personal failings and military culture, but most directly to the failure of the commanders to elaborate and adhere to a strict ROE that was as concerned with guaranteeing the lives and dignity of the people they were told they were liberating as protecting US troops.

US Army veteran Garret Reppenhagen summed it thusly: 'The men I served with were honorable. They were good soldiers. They went there to do good.'

The failure of commanders to insist on and enforce a concrete ROE, however, ensured that mistakes and atrocities would be committed. 'By the time I left Iraq,' Reppenhagen testified, 'it was pretty much a far gone conclusion to shoot at anybody we thought was a threat.'

'The truth of the matter,' he concluded, 'is that the war is the atrocity.'

Coming Home

On as separate panel, veterans and the family members of veterans testified about their struggles with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other afflictions resulting from the war and the difficulties with gaining access to the Veterans Affairs medical system for care.

Kevin Lucey made an emotional plea for us all to remember the men and women like his son, Jeffrey, who died as a result of the war.

Jeffrey Lucey committed suicide in 2004 after returning home from a five-month tour with a Marine truck battalion in Iraq.

Exemplifying the impact of the war on many thousands of returning veterans, Lucey was severely traumatized by what he saw and did there (his platoon at one point transported Iraqi prisoners). Lucey unsuccessfully sought treatment at several VA facilities for many months before his death.

The treatment was slow in coming, said his father, Kevin. The night before his death, Jeffrey approached his father in the living room where the two men, father and son, held each other silently for a lengthy period of time.

The next evening, when Kevin Lucey returned home from work, he said, 'I held my boy one more time as I lowered his body from the rafters of the basement ceiling and removed the garden hose from his neck.'

A VA counselor was supposed to have met with Jeffrey for the first time that day, but missed the appointment.

Now an advocate against the war with Military Families Speak Out, Kevin Lucey blames George W. Bush's war in Iraq as well as lack of funding and huge bureaucratic roadblocks for veterans to gain access to the VA for the loss of his son's life.

'Many say honor and support our troops but rarely mean it,' he said. 'We need the administration to stop the talk about how they support the troops and actually do it. It is not right for people to use our loved ones for political gain.'

Lucey called on the administration 'to end this war and not to begin another by choice.' He further appealed to the major veterans organizations such as the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars to pressure the administration and Congress to provide adequate funding for the VA and to initiate real reforms.

He was followed by Eugene Martin, of AFSCME, the government employees union that organizes health care workers and other staffers in many VA facilities, who criticized federal funding of the VA. Currently, 600,000 disability claims are backlogged because staffing shortages prevent speedy handling of these cases, he said.

Discretionary funds for VA put at risk delivery of benefits, health care, purchasing medical equipment, and staffing at VA hospitals and other facilities, he added. Funds designated for medical care are often diverted to non-medical spending like outsourcing services and bonuses for upper management, said Martin.

'There's a tremendous roller-coaster of discretionary funding that has a tremendous impact on the VA's ability to care for veterans,' Martin noted. 'We wave the flag and say we love our veterans but then we treat our veterans this way.'

As many as 500,000 veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq suffer fro PTSD and other 'invisible' wounds. It may require success lawsuit against the VA filed by the Veterans for Common Sense before the government is forced to provide adequate care for returning troops.

--Reach Joel Wendland at