Dead Check in Fallujah

Here, in the twentieth year following the US invasion of Iraq, is a copy of an unforgettable snapshot of part of that war as recorded by the Village Voice. 

Dead-Check in Falluja

by EVAN WRIGHT
November 16, 2004

In April 9, 2003, the day the statue of Saddam Hussein was being toppled in Baghdad, symbolizing the promised liberation of Iraq, I was embedded with a Marine unit engaged in fierce combat about 30 miles north of the city, on the outskirts of Baquba. Late that afternoon, the Humvee I was in was following about 50 feet behind a Marine Light Armored Vehicle when it pulled alongside a Toyota pickup pushed to the side of the road, its doors riddled with bullet holes. The head of at least one occupant was visible in the truck, but I couldn’t determine if he was moving or not. Nor did I see any weapons. As our Humvee stopped behind the truck, a Marine in the vehicle ahead of us leapt out, pointed his rifle into the window of the pickup and sprayed it with gunfire. It was a cold-blooded execution.

As we continued forward, passing the truck, I glimpsed at least two corpses sprawled on the seats, the interior spattered with blood. During the brief moment I looked, I was unable to determine whether the dead men possessed weapons. None of the four Marines in our Humvee said anything. We had been awake for more than 30 hours, much of that time under steady mortar, rifle, machine-gun, and rocket-propelled grenade fire from enemy combatants who dressed in civilian clothes and moved around on the battlefield in Toyota pickups. (To make matters even more confusing, during the height of combat farmers were racing into the surrounding fields—where enemy soldiers were shooting at us from dug-in, concealed positions—in order to rescue sheep from the gunfire.)

In the previous few minutes we had already passed more than a dozen corpses strewn by the side of the road. Some had the tops of their heads missing, expertly hit by Marine riflemen. Others were burned—still smoking, actually—having crawled out of other vehicles set ablaze by rockets fired from Marine helicopters. The execution of one or two more men wasn’t worth commenting on.

I greeted the sight of dead Iraqis in the pickup with a sense of numb relief. At least they would not be trying to kill us that day. In the preceding two-and-a-half weeks, the unit I was embedded with had come under frequent enemy attack, with three Marines wounded. There were 23 bullet holes in the Humvee I rode in—miraculously, none of the five of us inside had been hit. I had developed a strange relationship with the sight of dead Iraqis. I felt safer when I saw them.

I felt especially comforted when I saw dead men by the road still clutching weapons in their hands, a common sight. Unfortunately, of the hundreds of dead people I saw on the roads leading from the Kuwait border to Baghdad, perhaps 20 percent or more were obviously civilians. I will never forget the three or four women I saw fatally shot and partially burned, still seated in a bus on the road north of Nasiriyah. Or the little girl, about four, lying by the side of the road in a pretty dress, her legs neatly and inexplicably chopped off at the knees. Mercifully, I remember thinking at the time, she was dead like all the others.

Since my return from Iraq, I have continued to watch the horror unfold on television. It’s different seeing the violence decontextualized from the battlefield, now playing out in discrete video clips that run between ads for Chevys and the Olive Garden. Videos of militants staging beheadings against dungeon-like backdrops, with the perpetrators wearing masks and the victims in colorful jumpsuits, seem almost like grotesque TV shows.

One of the great ironies of the Bush administration, obsessed as it is with Christian values and the attendant crusade to punish what it deems obscene and lewd in the media (from Janet Jackson’s breast to Howard Stern’s speech), is that it has given us a war in which the airing of snuff films on national TV has become routine. The conflict in Iraq, as seen through news coverage, has begun to resemble the macabre underground 1980s video series Faces of Death. Throw in the images produced by the U.S. Army at Abu Ghraib, and the administration has put itself in the running to successfully compete with the BDSM side of the porn industry.

Just as I thought I was adjusting to the video carnage, NBC correspondent Kevin Sites, embedded with U.S. forces in Falluja, gave us last week’s shocker: the video of a Marine standing over a wounded, apparently unarmed Arab sprawled on the floor of a mosque and executing him with a gunshot to the head.

It brought back memories of the April 9 episode and others I witnessed in Iraq. Yet, watching this on TV, I felt the same outrage many others have expressed. American soldiers, we like to believe, don’t shoot unarmed people. Not only is this morally repugnant, but execution of wounded, unarmed combatants violates Article Three of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, which states in part that “persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely.”

Even to those unfamiliar with the Geneva Conventions, it seems obvious from the mosque video that a war crime was committed. The response from the administration and military officials has been unusually swift. Ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte conveyed his regrets to Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and vowed that “the individual in question will be dealt with.” The Marine in the video, whose name has been withheld, was pulled from duty, and his commanders issued a statement promising to investigate what they called “an allegation of the unlawful use of force in the death of an enemy combatant.” Lieutenant General John F. Sattler, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq, added in an interview, “We follow the law of armed conflict and hold ourselves to a high standard of accountability.”

One thing military officials are not saying is that the behavior of the Marine in the video closely conforms to training that is fairly standard in some units. Marines call executing wounded combatants “dead-checking.”

“They teach us to do dead-checking when we’re clearing rooms,” an enlisted Marine recently returned from Iraq told me. “You put two bullets into the guy’s chest and one in the brain. But when you enter a room where guys are wounded you might not know if they’re alive or dead. So they teach us to dead-check them by pressing them in the eye with your boot, because generally a person, even if he’s faking being dead, will flinch if you poke him there. If he moves, you put a bullet in the brain. You do this to keep the momentum going when you’re flowing through a building. You don’t want a guy popping up behind you and shooting you.”

What I’d seen on that road outside of Baquba on April 9 was a dead-check. The Marine who fired into that Toyota with wounded men inside didn’t want anybody shooting at us as we went past. It may have been a war crime, and had I possessed a video camera at the time and filmed it, the Marine who fired into the truck might have faced punishment. As it was, no one questioned the Marine’s actions.

In fact, commanders in the Marine Corps during the period I was embedded with them in the spring of 2003 repeatedly emphasized that the men’s actions would not be questioned. As one of the officers in the unit I followed used to tell his men, “You will be held accountable for the facts not as they are in hindsight but as they appeared to you at the time. If, in your mind, you fire to protect yourself or your men, you are doing the right thing. It doesn’t matter if later on we find out you wiped out a family of unarmed civilians.”

Commanders didn’t want their men to suffer casualties because they were overly constrained by rules of engagement. At the same time, Marines were constantly drilled in refraining from shooting their weapons, even at certain times when they came under fire. On one afternoon I recall in particular, the unit I was with was ordered to hold a position on the outskirts of a hostile town. For six hours, insurgents fired at the Marines from rooftops and from behind piles of rubble they’d set up in streets as barricades. But the Marines I was with, unable to pinpoint the exact locations of the enemy shooters, refused to fire back for fear of hitting civilians. The 22-year-old radio operator of the team I was with had it within his power to call in an artillery strike on the corner of the town where most of the enemy forces seemed concentrated. At one point, while I was crouched in the dirt, taking cover behind the tire of the Humvee as enemy sniper rounds popped into the dust nearby, I asked him why he didn’t call in a strike. He simply laughed at my display of fear.

There were other times when the enlisted men in the unit fell into violent quarrels with others whom they felt were too aggressive and risked civilian lives. In one instance, enlisted men nearly came to blows with an officer whom they accused of firing a weapon into a house that they believed contained civilians. Despite their concern, terrible mistakes were made. I was standing next to a 22-year-old Marine from the Humvee I rode in when he fired his machine gun prematurely at a civilian car approaching a roadblock, striking the driver, an unarmed man, in the eye. The unit was subsequently ordered to drive past the car without rendering aid. I sat next to the gunner as we crept past, listening to the dying man gasp for breath. The gunner didn’t talk for the next three days. A few days earlier, the youngest Marine on the team had shot a 12-year-old boy four times in the chest with his machine gun, mistakenly thinking a stick the boy had been carrying was a weapon. When the mother and grandmother of the boy later dragged him to the Marines’ lines seeking medical aid, the sergeant who led the team dropped down in front of the mother and cried.

The Marines constantly debated the morality of what they were engaged in. A sergeant in the platoon told me he had consulted with his priest about killing. The priest had told him it was all right to kill for his government so long as he didn’t enjoy it. By the time the unit reached the outskirts of Baghdad, this sergeant was certain he had already killed at least four men. When his battalion commander praised the unit for “slaying dragons” on the way to Baghdad, the sergeant later told his men, “If we did half the shit back home we’ve done here, we’d be in prison.” By then, the sergeant told me, he’d reconsidered what his priest had told him about killing. “Where the fuck did Jesus say it’s OK to kill people for your government? Any priest who tells me that has got no credibility.”

He and several other Marines recently returned from Iraq (many from their second tours) whom I’ve talked to about the Falluja shooting say they are not sure they would have dead-checked the wounded man in the mosque had they been in the same position. Most say they probably would have, even though the mosque had already been cleared once. “What does the American public think happens when they tell us to assault a city?” one of them said. “Marines don’t shoot rainbows out of our asses. We fucking kill people.”

Another Marine in the unit I followed—a Democrat’s dream, he returned home from fighting in Falluja in time to vote for Kerry—added, “Americans celebrate war in their movies. We like to see visions of evil being defeated by good. When the people at home glimpse the reality of war, that it’s a bloodbath, they freak out. We are a subculture they created and programmed to fight their wars. You have to become a psycho to kill like we do. To most Marines that guy in the mosque was just someone who didn’t get hit in the right place the first time we shot him. I probably would have put a bullet in his brain if I’d been there. If the American public doesn’t like the violence of war, maybe before they start the next war they shouldn’t rush so much.”

➤ Evan Wright is the author of Generation Kill, about a Marine reconnaissance unit in Iraq.

John Pavlovitz on Franklin Graham

Selling the Soul of Franklin Graham

JANUARY 6, 2019 / JOHN PAVLOVITZ

Most morally compromised men of faith don’t sell their souls all at once.

Sometimes it happens in a billion tiny transactions; a series of infinitesimal compromises over time, that are invisible to them—but not to others. They can’t see from the inside, what is so apparent from a distance.

Moment by moment, choice by choice, they begin to drift from their calling, and no one close to them ever tells them while they’re still humble and amenable enough to listen. The power they accrue begins to gradually silence dissent or to remove it from view altogether.

These men end up spending their entire lives breathing solely in the intoxicating air of sycophant’s praises; never protected from their own hubris, never cautioned against their recklessness, never alerted to the ways they’ve lost the plot or begun leasing off large sections of their credibility for temporary rewards.

Surrounded on all sides by genuflecting yes-men and women lacking the intestinal fortitude to push back against the toxic sludge pouring from their lips, they begin to feel more and more comfortable and even emboldened in it. As they do, the teachings and the words of Jesus become less and less useful, because those things begin to testify loudly against them, they start to clearly voice their opposition—and so they begin to silence them too. 

They learn instead, to bask in the applause of the salivating multitude, who gladly amen their every bitter word, no matter how reckless or incendiary—when they should be teaching them how to love more expansively. As the hateful choir cheers their ramblings, they grow more and more delusional, more and more comfortable bowing before the golden idols of their ego and ambition. With each day they slide further down the slope that leads to Hell, distracted by the buzzing noise of the crowds and unaware of the flames licking their heels.

And then one day, these professed men of God, find themselves campaigning for a predator in Alabama, disputing the value of black lives, celebrating the expulsion of refugees, vilifying an entire religious tradition, justifying the separation of families, going to battle for the NRA, passionately defending an endless parade of lies from a President—and all the while still imagining themselves fully righteous.

These are such days for men like Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr, and for those who emulate them. This is how far they have drifted, and it’s going to be almost impossible for them to make their way back, because to do that, they would have to do something they have proven unwilling or unable to do: own their mistakes, admit their failings, cop to their poor alliances, and confess their present sins in the ascension of this President.

These men need Jesus.

They need repentance.

They need to have the scales fall from their eyes, and to see accurately the horrors they’ve manufactured against so many people made in the image of God.

They need to own and confess the ways they’ve denied Jesus, the millions of millstones they’ve tied around the necks of their followers.

They need to lament becoming beholden to Donald Trump and the Republican Party and Fox News, and to the supremacists and bigots who now compromise the lion’s share of their ever-shrinking but increasingly militant white base.

They need to deeply grieve over the LGBTQ men and women whose bullying they’ve defended and blessed, the xenophobic social media rants against Muslims they’ve birthed, and the trauma to the sick and the poor who are regularly assaulted by a President the two of them have proudly hoisted upon their shoulders as good and Godly.

They need to make amends for not speaking out when that President called “shithole countries,” the very places they send Christmas shoeboxes with dollar store trinkets and promises of God’s love—or dispatch wide-eyed white missionaries bringing salvation to them in four simple steps.

They need to see the irreparable damage they’ve done to their fathers’ name, and most importantly to the name of Jesus.

But it’s likely that none of this will happen, because practically speaking, Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr are now the God they most worship—or at the very least, their Universities and ministries and the platforms they bring are. The work of these institutions is now largely overshadowed by their unwavering allegiance to this President.

In many ways, it’s little surprise that Graham and Falwell have found affinity with Donald Trump, as they are frighteningly similar animals; men cradled from birth in wealth, position, and privilege; buffeted heavily by the deep coffers of others, and handed riches and influence most people will never possess—rarely, if ever considering that they may not be worthy of it. 

Though Trump hasn’t read the Bible, let alone studied it enough to politically weaponize it the way Graham and Falwell have, in many ways the reverends are men cut from the same cloth as this President: though benefitting from every conceivable blessing and advantage this planet has to offer, they are fueled by a narrative of their unceasing persecution, believing that they are being continually assailed by the very people whose backs they’ve been standing on the whole time: the marginalized, the oppressed, the underserved—the least of these,”Jesus speaks of incarnating him.

Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell speak with a convincing religiosity; a shiny veneer of down home, America First religion that makes them impervious to accountability in the eyes of the suggestible multitudes who buy the ever angrier, ever more alarmist, ever more exclusionary gospel they now sell.

And it’s up to the rest of us to condemn and to oppose them; the Christians and the non-Christians, who know that human beings who pervert religion and leverage God in order to marginalize already marginalized people or stockpile power—are the very thing that most turned the stomach of Jesus. They are the salivating wolves in lily-white sheepskins preying upon the most vulnerable. They are the descendants of the Pharisees of Jesus’ day, who too betrayed their greatest calling because the intoxicating aroma of power was too strong to withstand.

History is recording the Evangelical Right’s abomination of a marriage with this godless President, and though there were what surely felt like short-term wins, the lasting damage to the Church will be irreparable. People outside Christianity suspecting that religious people are all hypocritical frauds, are being given plenty of evidence for it. 

Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell, and the multitude of lesser known spiritually compromised leaders, need the barrier-breaking, wall-obliterating Jesus whose name they invoke, even as they praise a President who is completely antithetical to him.

They need the knees-in-the-dirt repentance they so demand of the world, so that they can admit culpability in the violence of these days and push back against the walls and the bans and the barriers.

They need to embrace the coming of a Jesus who said that among men like them, there would be weeping and gnashing of teeth, and to break the tethers between themselves and Donald Trump.

Sadly, I don’t see that happening.

They have too much of this world to lose.

Pandemic comments

The Covid pandemic is waning as variants of the original Coronavirus-13, which seem less virulent than the original strain, appear to be reaching herd immunity in most populations. Mask suggestions are replacing mandates and the politics of blame and recrimination are back in the news at this writing. 

When I began blogging about twenty years ago one of my first interests was the looming threat of avian flu, identified about that time as a potentially deadly threat to humans should that virus, H5N1, ever mutate to become contagious among humans. If that happens the results would likely be as devastating as the Spanish Flu of 1918 which was H1N1. That epidemic (not pandemic) killed millions of people world-wide. 

During the last three years as the thought of bird flu played in the background of my mind, I have paid particular attention to the H5N1 Blog which I found about eighteen years ago. Crawford Kilian, the blogmaster, has been my go-to expert about this subject and he published an excellent commentary about the current disease two years ago which remains for me the most intelligent analysis of what happened in China. 

A COVID-19 Lab Leak in Wuhan? As a Story, It Doesn’t Hold Up

I don’t trust the theory that the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology last year. It’s too good a story to be true.

Part of my skepticism is professional: escaped viruses have been the plot gimmick for far too many terrible books and movies about pandemics and zombies and the post-apocalyptic world. Even if you’ve avoided such plots, you know the general storyline, so the lab leak isn’t a brand-new idea. It’s also like a whodunit, with the villain revealed and the other suspects exonerated.

Despite the popularity of such junk, I would find the idea difficult to pitch to a competent editor. I’d have two possible plots: the accidental escape of a wild virus, or the accidental escape of a weaponized virus.

Wuhan is a class 4 biosafety research lab with a worldwide reputation. By definition, class 4 labs maintain stringent safety standards and employ rigorously trained personnel. If the lab had accidentally released the virus, at least some of the senior staff and management would have vanished by now — or been left in place as figureheads, while new people took over the real administration. Evidence of sudden personnel transfers from other Chinese labs to Wuhan could lend a degree of plausibility to the idea. Without it, my editor would simply kick me out of their office.

As for a weaponized virus, we’ll have to build a big backstory for that plot to hold together: a coronavirus is discovered maybe 20 years ago and found to have dangerous pandemic potential. Someone in the Chinese government, knowing that other governments are doing research in biowarfare, authorizes further studies. These will involve many highly skilled specialists recruited from all over China. They will likely cease publishing their own research.

(That was how the Soviets, early in the Second World War, knew the Americans were building an atomic bomb: a young Russian physicist read some recent U.S. scientific journals and noted the absence of articles by scientists like J. Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi. He went straight to Stalin with the news.)

Let’s assume these hypothetical Chinese experts tinker with their new coronavirus and come up with what we now call SARS-CoV-2. Just as nukes need testing, so do bioweapons. Assume that thousands of convicted criminals and political dissidents make up a suitable test population, and get sick or die in satisfactory numbers.

Then assume several tests using tweaked viruses, and even better lethal results.

SARS-CoV-2 as we know it, however, seems capable of killing only about two per cent of those it infects, and old people succumb first while young people barely notice. Strategically, this is not a useful result.

Worse yet, developing this weaponized virus will take years. During those years, Chinese scientists also have to develop a vaccine to protect their general population and their army. Without a reliable, tested vaccine, available in quantities to protect 1.4 billion Chinese citizens, they’d be playing Russian roulette using a revolver with five live rounds.

Good luck developing, testing and producing such a vaccine without drawing some surprised international notice. China and the rest of the world have been exchanging information nonstop for 40 years, teaching each other’s students and establishing networks of personal connections. In other words: the West would have known if a vaccine for a weaponized virus was in the works in China.

What about Beijing’s reluctance to let outside scientists study the Wuhan lab? Even if the outsiders found no evidence of a leak, accepting even the possibility would be politically embarrassing. And all governments fear embarrassment far more than diseases.

In fair consideration of the first plot’s theory, the West has been responsible for its own stupid coverups. When a mysterious disease broke out in Haiti in October 2010, I had already inadvertently blogged about its cause: a cholera outbreak in Nepal, just before Nepali UN peacekeepers left to take up their post in Haiti’s Artibonite valley. The soldiers disposed of their shit in the Artibonite River, and thousands of Haitians died.

The Nepali connection was vigorously denied by the UN, its agent the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Well, not exactly denied — the authorities kept saying, instead, that the origin of the outbreak didn’t matter. What mattered was that the cholera had to be contained.

In reality, an American journalist, Jonathan Katz, had seen and smelled the shit being pumped out of the Nepali peacekeepers’ camp, and the Haitian government understood the source very well from the start.

But the Haitian government couldn’t directly accuse the UN of inflicting death on those it was supposed to protect. Instead, it hired a French expert, Renaud Piarroux, to confirm what it already knew; he did so, was criticized by American and UN experts, and then went on to develop the plan that finally eliminated cholera from Haiti.

The cholera outbreak in Haiti should have ruined the authority of WHO and perhaps even of the UN itself. But as it is a small, very poor Black country, its oppressors somehow found the strength to endure its misfortune.

Still, Haiti was an abject collapse of expertise under political pressure and foreshadowed WHO’s future problems in responding to serious outbreaks. It was also a lesson to other countries: honesty really is the best policy.

No government wants to be held responsible for a disease outbreak. One of the implicit obligations of any government is to look after its people’s health. In the event of an outbreak, governments from municipal to national level will always be willing to find someone else to blame. China in the 2020s is an easy target — and a familiar one.

The association of Chinese people with disease is a racist story that goes back over a century, to the 1900 outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco. American media blamed the outbreak on Chinese workers for living in squalid conditions — imposed, notably, by racist white Californians.

No one even understood yet that infected rat fleas were the plague vector. As I wrote in The Tyee in 2006, the city’s crooked mayor and equally crooked state governor vociferously denied that the plague had arrived when the first cases broke out. The media co-operated, as did state-appointed medical experts, in contravention of the opinions and authority of federal health experts. The very wealthy business leaders of San Francisco were more than happy to join in.

The initial coverup led to Chinese victims being carried across San Francisco Bay, where plague spread to East Bay rats and then to squirrels. Plague is now endemic in the U.S. Southwest. This is another reason why coverups are bad policy.

Granted, the Chinese government has not handled the pandemic as well as it might have. This is, of course, another sign SARS-CoV-2 caught it by surprise. Local party officials covered up the first cases, allowing the virus to spread across Wuhan before the national authorities in Beijing stepped in and locked down the whole province of Hubei.

Having gathered their wits, the Chinese government then ran a master class on how to smother a pandemic. This didn’t involve the magical arrival of a stockpiled vaccine — just a public lockdown on a scale never seen before. A Chinese scientist published the virus’s genome on the internet early in January; it must have taken courage, but he doesn’t seem to have been punished for it. This genome enabled western scientists to build on earlier research and develop vaccines with unheard-of speed.

Still, Chinese authorities stumbled in seeking the virus’s origin. SARS had migrated from wild animals to humans in 2003 via markets where animals were kept until bought and butchered. So SARS-CoV-2 could have done the same. At first, the outbreak seemed to have started at a market, which had been closed and disinfected before samples could be taken. Then earlier cases were reported in patients who had had no contact with the market. SARS-CoV-2 had been loose in Wuhan well before late December 2019 — and humans, rather than wild animals, could well have brought it into the market themselves.

Beijing’s policy in early 2020 seemed to be to stall on finding the source of SARS-CoV-2 while drawing attention to its response: big temporary hospitals built in Wuhan in days, thousands of health-care workers drafted to Wuhan and a dramatic drop in cases that continues to the present day.

Xi Jinping absolutely needed this outcome. The Communist Party of China draws its authority not from the democratic will of the people but from its own competence in running a country of 1.4 billion. If COVID-19 got out of control, the CPC’s claim to competence would be a joke — the kind of joke that Donald Trump made of American competence.

We can assume that Chinese efforts to find an animal source of the virus have been ongoing, and that if they found a candidate, we would know of it immediately. We can also assume that Chinese scientists have run millions of tests to find evidence of the virus from before December 2019. A handful of reports have found SARS-CoV-2 in human sewage in Barcelona, Spain, in March 2019 and in Santa Catalina, Brazil, in November 2019. Such reports have not been followed up, but they should have been.

While the absence of an animal source makes a lab leak look more plausible, it’s not evidence of a leak. At most, it means we have to keep looking, even in unlikely places.

Let’s assume that the lab leak, however improbable, actually did occur. If the Wuhan lab really was studying SARS-CoV-2, and if it somehow allowed the virus to escape, we would need a careful response. We couldn’t just blame China and ignore our own botched responses — which have led so far to at least 3.5 million deaths and 170 million COVID-19 cases.

Instead, we would need to work closely with China to identify and repair errors in the lab’s safety protocols and maintain close collegial relations with Chinese scientists. We need these scientists to help end this pandemic, and we’ll need them to forestall the next one, wherever it may originate.

This is true whether a leak occurred, or Wuhan was just the unlucky victim of the first cases of an unknown natural viral disease. We’ll find out eventually, but only through international research including Chinese scientists — not just sleuthing around the Wuhan lab.

The current government of China can be hard to live with. But in a global world facing global problems, we can’t live without it either.