So it turns out that a couple of the soldier's involved in this are better humans than a lot of the posters in this thread. I suppose that's a comforting thought. In any case, I felt this was worth a bump.

http://www.truthout.org/soldiers-wikileaks-company-apologize-violence58714

Quote :

"We are both soldiers who occupied your neighborhood for 14 months. Ethan McCord pulled your daughter and son from the van, and when doing so, saw the faces of his own children back home. Josh Stieber was in the same company but was not there that day, though he contributed to the your pain, and the pain of your community on many other occasions. There is no bringing back all that was lost. What we seek is to learn from our mistakes and do everything we can to tell others of our experiences and how the people of the United States need to realize what we have done and are doing to you and the people of your country. We humbly ask you what we can do to begin to repair the damage we caused. .... We acknowledge our part in the deaths and injuries of your loved ones as we tell Americans what we were trained to do and what we carried out in the name of "god and country". The soldier in the video said that your husband shouldn't have brought your children to battle, but we are acknowledging our responsibility for bringing the battle to your neighborhood, and to your family. We did unto you what we would not want done to us."

Some further reading on the subject: http://www.truthout.org/iraq-war-vet-we-were-told-just-shoot-people-and-officers-would-take-care-us58378

[Edited on April 20, 2010 at 1:39 PM. Reason : :]

4/20/2010 1:18:38 PM

ah good, so two enlisted guys who are no longer in the service and weren't the helo crew who are being crucified for this video by people in this thread have taken it upon themselves to speak out against the government, all the while weaving in their own anti-government sentiment vis a vis the treatment of soldiers after returning from the war zone.

like anyone really thinks those kids deserved it or something.

[Edited on April 20, 2010 at 1:42 PM. Reason : .]

4/20/2010 1:32:29 PM

^^that's actually good to read, and i'd like to think (optimistically, of course) that it demonstrates the level of sympathy many soldiers would display when occupying a foreign country.

Quote :

"when you embed yourself with insurgents, you lose all right to fairness if you get killed."

-- goalielax

Quote :

"like anyone really thinks those kids deserved it or something."

-- goalielax

[Edited on April 20, 2010 at 9:57 PM. Reason : don't let me stop you from contradicting yourself]

4/20/2010 9:52:59 PM

^ Do you find something contradictory in those statements? I don't.

4/20/2010 9:59:09 PM

^I see it.

Those kids were with the insurgents so they forfeit any right to fairness. So because they're with insurgents they deserved to die.

[Edited on April 20, 2010 at 10:02 PM. Reason : .]

4/20/2010 10:01:44 PM

because clearly those children deliberately chose to accompany those people

4/20/2010 10:17:12 PM

lol - because when I was talking about embedding with insurgents, I was of course speaking of little children.

seriously, what kind of logic did you use to deduct that I or anyone else would ever talk about kids being embedded? i figured it was blatantly obvious to everyone that embedding is something that is used to specifically address the actions of the Reuters photographer and driver in this situation.

[Edited on April 20, 2010 at 10:39 PM. Reason : .]

4/20/2010 10:32:56 PM

if those kids were 16, you'd find them guilty of "embedding." you're just using the term as a veil to retroactively assign guilt by association to those that you deem worthy. convenient. don't fool yourself into thinking you were being specific with your language. you were not.

[Edited on April 20, 2010 at 11:16 PM. Reason : ]

4/20/2010 11:14:55 PM

And the back pedaling begins. What else you selling?

4/20/2010 11:33:25 PM

lord have mercy

4/20/2010 11:34:15 PM

Make up your mind already...not that anyone takes you seriously around here.

4/20/2010 11:41:00 PM

ITT the liberals grasp for straws as they attempt to equate

1) an adult choosing to join himself with a group of insurgents as they enter an active combat zone

and

2) a five year old being dragged along by his guardians



I think this pretty much signals the end of their argument.

4/20/2010 11:44:30 PM

lol - well please don't let me stand in the way of you putting words into my mouth

especially given that the beginning sentence of that post you cherry picked my quote from was

Quote :

"no, the consensus is that it was too bad there was a photographer embedded with the insurgents"

thus establishing who I was speaking of when I was using the word embed

furthermore, at the end of the very same post I said

Quote :

"except for the photog embedded with terrorists and other people who drag kids into a battle"

thereby EXPLICITLY differentiating between who was embedded (the photog) and who was drug into the area of engagement (the kids)

[Edited on April 20, 2010 at 11:57 PM. Reason : .]

4/20/2010 11:51:20 PM

Quote :

" liberals"

Who the fuck you calling a liberal? lol

4/21/2010 12:02:31 AM

Quote :

"The promise we make to our sources is that not only will we defend them through every means that are available technological, legally, and politically, but we will try and get the maximum possible political impact for the material that they give to us."

-Julian Assange on the Colbert Report.

4/21/2010 9:57:30 AM

Wired.com: At the time you arrived on the scene, you didn’t know what had happened, is that right?

Ethan McCord: Right. We were engaged in our own conflict roughly about three or four blocks away. We heard the gunships open up. [Then] we were just told … to move to this [other] location. It was pretty much a shock when we got there to see what had happened, the carnage and everything else.

Wired.com: But you had been in combat before. It shouldn’t have surprised you what you saw.

McCord: I have never seen anybody being shot by a 30-millimeter round before. It didn’t seem real, in the sense that it didn’t look like human beings. They were destroyed.

Wired.com: Was anyone moving when you got there other than the two children?

McCord: There were approximately two to three other people who were moving who were still somewhat alive, and the medics were attending to them.

Wired.com: The first thing you saw was the little girl in the van. She had a stomach wound?

McCord: She had a stomach wound and she had glass in her eyes and in her hair. She was crying. In fact, that’s one of the reasons I went to the van immediately, because I could hear her crying. It wasn’t like a cry of pain really. It was more of a child who was frightened out of her mind. And the next thing I saw was the boy…. He was kind of sitting on the floorboard of the van, but with his head laying on the bench seat in the front. And then the father, who I’m assuming was the father, in the driver’s seat slumped over on his side. Just from looking into the van, and the amount of blood that was on the boy and the father, I immediately figured they were dead.

So, the first thing I did was grab the girl. I grabbed the medic and we went into the back. There’s houses behind where the van was. We took her in there and we’re checking to see if there were any other wounds. You can hear the medic saying on the video, “There’s nothing I can do here, she needs to be evac’d.” He runs the girl to the Bradley. I went back outside to the van, and that’s when the boy took, like, a labored, breath. That’s when I started screaming, “The boy’s alive! The boy’s alive!” And I picked him up and started running with him over to the Bradley. He opened his eyes when I was carrying him. I just kept telling him, “Don’t die; don’t die.” He looked at me, then his eyes rolled back into this head.

Then I got yelled at by my platoon leader that I needed to stop trying to save these mf’n kids and go pull security…. I was told to go pull security on a rooftop. When we were on that roof, we were still taking fire. There were some people taking pot shots, sniper shots, at us on the rooftop. We were probably there on the roof for another four to five hours.

Wired.com: How much sniper fire were you getting?

McCord: It was random sporadic spurts. I did see a guy … moving from a rooftop from one position to another with an AK-47, who was firing at us. He was shot and killed.

After the incident, we went back to the FOB [forward operating base] and that’s when I was in my room. I had blood all down the front of me from the children. I was trying to wash it off in my room. I was pretty distraught over the whole situation with the children. So I went to a sergeant and asked to see [the mental health person], because I was having a hard time dealing with it. I was called a pussy and that I needed to suck it up and a lot of other horrible things. I was also told that there would be repercussions if I was to go to mental health.

Wired.com: What did you understand that to mean?

McCord: I would be smoked. Smoked is basically like you’re doing pushups a lot, you’re doing sit-ups … crunches and flutter kicks. They’re smoking you, they’re making you tired. I was told that I needed to get the sand out of my vagina…. So I just sucked it up and tried to move on with everything.

I’ve lived with seeing the children that way since the incident happened. I’ve had nightmares. I was diagnosed with chronic, severe PTSD. [But] I was actually starting to get kind of better. … I wasn’t thinking about it as much. [Then I] took my children to school one day and I came home and sat down on the couch and turned on the TV with my coffee, and on the news I’m running across the screen with a child. The flood of emotions came back. I know the scene by heart; it’s burned into my head. I know the van, I know the faces of everybody that was there that day.

Wired.com: Did you try to get information about the two children after the shooting?

4/21/2010 4:00:41 PM

McCord: My platoon sergeant knew that I was having a hard time with it and that same night … he came into the room and he told me, hey, just so you know, both of the children survived, so you can suck it up now. I didn’t know if he was telling me that just to get me to shut up and to do my job or if he really found something out. I always questioned it in the back of my mind.

I did see a video on YouTube after the Wikileaks [video] came out, of the children being interviewed. … When I saw their faces, I was relieved, but I was just heartbroken. I have a huge place in my heart for children, having some of my own. Knowing that I was part of the system that took their father away from them and made them lose their house … it’s heartbreaking. And that in turn is what helped me and Josh write the letter, hoping that it would find its way to them to let them know that we’re sorry. We’re sorry for the system that we were involved in that took their father’s life and injured them. If there’s anything I can to do help, I would be more than happy to.

Wired.com: Wikileaks presented the incident as though there was no engagement from insurgents. But you guys did have a firefight a couple of blocks away. Was it reasonable for the Apache soldiers to think that maybe the people they attacked were part of that insurgent firefight?

McCord: I doubt that they were a part of that firefight. However, when I did come up on the scene, there was an RPG as well as AK-47s there…. You just don’t walk around with an RPG in Iraq, especially three blocks away from a firefight…. Personally, I believe the first attack on the group standing by the wall was appropriate, was warranted by the rules of engagement. They did have weapons there. However, I don’t feel that the attack on the [rescue] van was necessary.

Now, as far as rules of engagement, [Iraqis] are not supposed to pick up the wounded. But they could have been easily deterred from doing what they were doing by just firing simply a few warning shots in the direction…. Instead, the Apaches decided to completely obliterate everybody in the van. That’s the hard part to swallow.

And where the soldier said [in the video], “Well, you shouldn’t take your kids to battle.” Well in all actuality, we brought the battle to your kids. There’s no front lines here. This is urban combat and we’re taking the war to children and women and innocents.

There were plenty of times in the past where other insurgents would come by and pick up the bodies, and then we’d have no evidence or anything to what happened, so in looking at it from the Apache’s point of view, they were thinking that [someone was] picking up the weapons and bodies; when, in hindsight, clearly they were picking up the wounded man. But you’re not supposed to do that in Iraq.

Wired.com: Civilians are supposed to know that they’re not supposed to pick up a wounded person crawling in the road?

McCord: Yeah. This is the problem that we’re speaking out on as far as the rules of engagement. How is this guy supposed to [decide] should I stop and pick them up, or is the military going to shoot me? If you or I saw someone wounded on the ground what is your first inkling? I’m going to help that person.

Wired.com: There was another attack depicted in the video that has received little attention, involving a Hellfire and a building that was fired on.

McCord: I wasn’t around that building when it happened. I was up on a rooftop at that time. However, I do know some soldiers went in to clear that building afterwards and there were some people with weapons in there, but there was also a family of four that was killed.

I think that a Hellfire missile is a little much to put into a building…. They’re trained as soldiers to go into a building and clear a building. I do know that there was a teenage girl [in there], just because I saw the pictures when I was there, that one of the soldiers took.

Wired.com: Have you heard from any other soldiers since the video came out?

McCord: I’ve spoken with one of the medics who was there. He’s no longer in the Army. When this video first came out, there was a lot of outrage by the soldiers, just because it depicted us as being callous, cruel, heartless people, and we’re not that way. The majority of us aren’t. And so he was pretty upset about the whole thing…. He kept saying, we were there, we know the truth, they’re saying there was no weapons, there was.

I’ve spoken with other soldiers who were there. Some of them [say] I don’t care what anybody says … they’re not there. … There’s also some soldiers who joke about it [as a] coping mechanism. They’re like, oh yeah, we’re the “collateral murder” company. I don’t think that [the] big picture is whether or not [the Iraqis who were killed] had weapons. I think that the bigger picture is what are we doing there? We’ve been there for so long now and it seems like nothing is being accomplished whatsoever, except for we’re making more people hate us.

Wired.com: Do you support Wikileaks in releasing this video?

McCord: When it was first released I don’t think it was done in the best manner that it could have been. They were stating that these people had no weapons whatsoever, that they were just carrying cameras. In the video, you can clearly see that they did have weapons … to the trained eye. You can make out in the video [someone] carrying an AK-47, swinging it down by his legs….

And as far as the way that the soldiers are speaking in the video, which is pretty callous and joking about what’s happened … that’s a coping mechanism. I’m guilty of it, too, myself. You joke about the situations and what’s happened to push away your true feelings of the matter.

There’s no easy way to kill somebody. You don’t just take somebody’s life and then go on about your business for the rest of the day. That stays with you. And cracking jokes is a way of pushing that stuff down. That’s why so many soldiers come back home and they’re no longer in the situations where they have other things to think about or other people to joke about what happened … and they explode.

I don’t say that Wikileaks did a bad thing, because they didn’t…. I think it is good that they’re putting this stuff out there. I don’t think that people really want to see this, though, because this is war…. It’s very disturbing.

4/21/2010 4:01:06 PM

so, in summary;

ROE were followed correctly
it sucks that children were involved
there were weapons found and US ground troops were being fired upon in the immediate area
US troops immediately gave aid to the innocents and evac'ed them to medical facilities
this soldier has PTSD and didnt like the way his Sgt talked to him
this soldier doesnt believe we should be there as a matter of opinion
this soldier opines on another situation were the bad guys used innocents as shields and blames US forces
ROE were followed correctly

does that about cover it?

/thread

4/22/2010 11:13:38 AM