Winter Soldier Project - Iraq

Winter Soldier by Iraq Veterans Against the War, 2008, Excerpts

We raided countless residences. Most of the time we’d show up, at like 3 in the early hours of the morning, bust into the house, systematically clear every room, pointing semiautomatic and automatic weapons in their faces, and screaming at them in a language they didn’t understand. I don’t know where the intelligence was coming from, but we barely ever found anything in these houses. While searching the people taken fomr their homes, marines would hit them in the genitals or poke them with the muzzle of their rifle.

I threw families onto the street in Iraq, only to come home and find families thrown onto the street in this country, in this tragic and unnecessary foreclosure crisis. Our enemies are not five thousand miles away, they are right here at home. 

Wrong House

One of the first houses we raided was supposedly the home of a former Ba’ath official. It was the middle of the day when we arrived in the neighborhood. The raid started when the armored cavalry unit that was with us rolled over the front wall of the house. I was second in the stack formation of troops that went through the gate. There was an older female who was in the courtyard and she was screaming something unintelligible in Arabic. One of the soldiers behind me apparently thought that she was a threat. He butt stroked her in the face, knocked her to the ground, and someone after him zip-tied her and took her out into the front yard.

We proceeded to ransack the house. I was in the master bedroom. There were dressers and wardrobes; the wardrobes were locked. We pulled the doors off. We turned everything in the room upside down. We went through everything, turned the refrigerator upside down and broke the stove. We searched through the house and had everyone including the children zip-tied on the front lawn.

Then someone in my chain of command realized that we had the wrong home. We were on the wrong street. The home we were supposed to have raided was actually behind this house on another street. So we went and raided that house.

Forced Eviction

We never got any explanation for our orders. We were only told that a group of five or six houses was now property of the U.S. military, and we had to go in and make those families leave their houses. We went to the houses and informed the families that their homes were no longer theirs. We provided then no alternative, nowhere to go, no compensation. They were confused and very scared. They did not know what to do and would not leave, so we had to remove them.

One family in particular, a woman and two small girls, a very elderly man, and two middle-aged men; we dragged them from their house and threw them into the street. We arrested the men because they refused to leave, and we sent them to prison.

Iraqi Mother Perspective

It was almost one in the morning, Zainab and I were awake. Everyone else was asleep. We heard airplanes far away, then closer. Then we heard the sounds of tanks in the street. All of a sudden, my bedroom windows broke. So we ran into the living room and the windows there broke. So we ran to the kitchen and the windows broke.

The freezer moved across the kitchen with such force, the doors opened. The tiles fell off the wall. I went back into the living room and all of the sudden I saw American soldiers. There was chaos in the house. They started shooting at the walls. They even shot the fish tank. They started to search everything. They shot at the doors, the bathroom, at Ahmed’s bedroom.

They were taking things and my daughter had been studying for her mid-term exams, and her books were on the floor. They started taking her books and putting them into a bag. I asked my son to ask them to leave the books, they were French lesson books. They hit my son on the head. They hit him so hard his neck almost broke.

There was a lot of destruction to the house. It’s not so much the money as the psychological suffering that we endured and are still enduing. When I think of the raid, it was misery. I still remember my daughter screaming. She kept screaming and crying. It still affects her. We took her outside while they were working of fixing our house. When she hears a noise she screams: “The Americans! The Americans are coming!” The girl gets scared.