Made into killers, soldiers turn to violent crime

‘They think you can just come home and turn it off’

By Matt Wedemeyer

The author is a member of March Forward!, an organization of veterans and service members who stand against war and racism.

In a series of recent articles, a Colorado-based newspaper documented the crimes committed by soldiers from a single unit while in Iraq and after they returned home.

The Gazette of Colorado Springs, Colo. conducted interviews over the course of several months with soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division’s Brigade Combat Team and their families, and reviewed medical and military records, court documents, and photographs.

“Toward the end, we were so mad and tired and frustrated,” said Daniel Freeman. “You came too close, we lit you up. You didn’t stop, we ran your car over with the Bradley.”

In response to roadside bombings soldiers would routinely “just light the whole area up,” said Anthony Marquez. “If anyone was around, that was their fault. We smoked ‘em.” (Associated Press, July 27)

According to The Gazette, soldiers from the Fourth Brigade cited as the sources of their trauma the gruelingly long deployments, repeated redeployments despite devastating injuries, and some of the bloodiest combat seen in the course of the war.

The unit was deployed for a year to some of the deadliest regions of Iraq in September 2004. While there, 64 of the unit’s soldiers were killed and more than 400 were wounded—double the average, according to officials at Fort Carson. In 2007, the unit was sent to Baghdad for 15 months. It is currently serving in Afghanistan.

In a December 2007 letter to the Inspector General’s Office of Fort Carson, John Needham, a soldier with the Fourth Brigade, described a number of crimes soldiers committed in Iraq. Among them was the story of a man who was shot in the head during interrogation, then attached to a Humvee and driven through the streets. Needham told of a young boy who was shot for no apparent reason while passing soldiers on a bicycle. (Associated Press, Jul 27)

After returning home, many of the soldiers of the Fourth Brigade predictably failed to readjust to civilian life. Soldiers were involved in brawls, beatings, rapes, DUIs, drug deals, domestic violence, shootings, stabbings and kidnapping. Others just killed themselves.

In 2006, Marquez shot and killed a drug dealer after shocking him with a stun gun when a marijuana sale went bad. He is currently serving a 30-year prison term at Bent County Correctional Facility. “If I was just a guy off the street, I might have hesitated to shoot,” he said. “But after Iraq, it was just natural.” (Associated Press, July 27)

Jomar Falu-Vives is currently awaiting trial for the alleged drive-by shootings of two people last year. He has also been implicated in another drive-by shooting in 2007.

Both Falu-Vives’ wife and mother reported to his Fort Carson commanders that he was behaving violently. His mother, Lt. Col. Marta Vives, an Army nurse in a Combat Stress Team, told commanders that her son was not receiving any help from the Army for his condition.

“There is still a stigma behind getting help,” said Vives. “That is the hardest part. It is still seen as a sign of weakness.” (Associated Press, July 27)

Needham eventually tried to commit suicide while in Iraq after surviving six roadside bombs. After returning home in 2007, he was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and was hospitalized. Needham was eventually discharged, but only after the aggressive intervention by his family. Two months later, Needham was arrested for the rape and murder of 19-year-old Judilianna Lawrence.

“They trained them to kill, then when they didn’t have enough men for the surge, they pushed these guys until they broke, then threw them away,” said Needham’s father, Michael. (Associated Press, July 27)

In response to the surge in violent crimes by its soldiers, the Department of the Army released its own investigation into the matter in mid-July. Predictably, its conclusions largely exonerate the U.S. military of any responsibility for the heinous crimes committed by the killers they created.

The report states that the spike in criminal behavior among soldiers is a product of combat stress combined with mental health and substance abuse issues. It conveniently ignores the fact that the mental health and substance abuse issues are in fact a consequence of “combat stress”—a euphemism for the trauma from the horrors of war.

Soldier violence: Par for the course

Incidents of U.S. combat soldiers committing violent crimes after returning home are nothing new. Following the Persian Gulf War in 1991, numerous violent crimes were committed by veterans upon their return: the murder of a mother of two who was stabbed up to 40 times; the triple homicide of three University of Arizona professors, followed by the perpetrator’s suicide; the murder and sodomy of an 11-year old girl in Kosovo; and the murder of a soldier’s girlfriend and her three children.

At Fort Benning Army Post outside Columbus, Ga., four U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers killed their wives within a six-week period after returning home from the war in Afghanistan in 2002. Two of them committed suicide shortly thereafter.

A year later, five other Fort Benning soldiers were connected to three local murders, each of them occurring within a two-week period. All five were from the 15th Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Infantry Division, which engaged in some of the bloodiest battles and longest deployments in Iraq at that time.

Rates of fire: WWII to Vietnam

Based on his post-combat interviews with World War II soldiers, Army historian Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall concluded that only 15 to 20 percent of individual riflemen fired their weapons at enemy soldiers. His fundamental conclusion—that human beings are not, by nature, killers—was repeatedly validated by numerous subsequent studies.

In 1946, the U.S. Army accepted Marshall’s conclusions and adopted new innovations in combat training that would push troops to overcome their resistance to killing. Abstract targets such as bulls-eyes were replaced with realistic, human-like pop-up targets that fell when hit. Psychologists asserted that this type of conditioning would reliably influence the primitive mid-brain—the dominant part of the brain during the intense stress of combat—to overcome its innate resistance to killing.

The application of these basic psychological conditioning techniques subsequently increased the rate of fire by soldiers to approximately 55 percent in the Korean War and 95 percent in the Vietnam War.

The deadly effectiveness of this form of training is validated by the comments of Kenneth Eastridge, an infantry specialist also with the 4th Brigade Combat Team from Fort Carson.

“The Army pounds it into your head until it is instinct: Kill everybody, kill everybody,” Eastridge said. “And you do. Then they just think you can just come home and turn it off.” (Associated Press, July 27) 

Today, Eastridge is serving 10 years for accessory to murder.

Who are the real criminals?

The crimes of occupying soldiers are always well known to occupied peoples. But too often, the crimes committed under occupation are concealed by layers and layers of deception and self-deception inside the occupying imperialist country.

Such deception originates in the upper echelons of the wealthy ruling class and its institutions, which inculcate chauvinism and racism in the minds of workers by means of incessant propaganda. Politicians and the media work together to blind the public to the horrors committed by “their” government and “their” army.

It is only when soldiers bring home the brutality ingrained into them during training and combat experiences that the citizens of imperialist countries are forced to grapple with the reality of war.

Rank-and-file soldiers are paying a steep price for these horrific crimes, while the true culprits of such brutality go unpunished. The officers, the political decision-makers and the corporate media agents that promote and carry out U.S. military policy must be held individually and collectively accountable.

The war planners in Washington and the commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan, are guilty of the daily horror that poor and working class youths from the United States have been forced to perpetrate against countless victims in Iraq and Afghanistan. March Forward! demands that they be tried and convicted as war criminals.

This is not our war!
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