Irregular Army Read online

  Despite continued military assurances that it was not a problem, they gave the game away when the financial crisis hit and their recruitment problems abated. In 2009 the military met its recruitment targets for the first time since 2004 and pledged to lock out those with criminal records once again. Brigadier General Joseph Anderson, deputy commander of the US Army Recruiting Command, said that the “adult major misconduct” waiver, given for felony offenses, was now closed, and additionally those with a history of juvenile criminal activity would not be allowed to recruit without a high school diploma.127 It was an admission of guilt, but for many in Iraq and Afghanistan, like Genei Nasir al-Janabi, it was too late. In February 2008, Staff Sergeant Michael A. Hensley was put on trial after he had ordered the shooting of an unarmed civilian near Iskandariya, a city in central Iraq. Hensley claimed he had to issue the order because al-Janabi had discovered his unit’s hiding place, but he was later found guilty of placing a rifle next to al-Janabi’s body to buttress his claims that the unit had been under attack. It was a harrowing case. “I put him face down on the ground, with my knee in his back. He started to make a lot of noise. He started to cry . . . he was yelling, I was trying to shut him up,” said Hensley in his testimony.128 The incident came on the back of a hard campaign against the insurgency in Jarf Sakhr, thirty-five miles southwest of Baghdad. The defense attorney for Evan Vela—the soldier on trial for murder after having carried out Hensley’s order—blamed the intense regimen for the tragedy, a fair criticism as we will see. “They have no superpowers,” he said. “When pushed beyond human ability to absorb sleep deprivation, heat exhaustion, and post-traumatic stress disorder you can expect bad judgment.” Hensley added that this was nothing out of the ordinary: “We had been losing a lot of people without doing anything . . . My sergeant major told me he wanted to produce more kills and I was the guy to make it happen.”129 The placing of an AK-47 next to the body was, as we have seen, common procedure. It was impossible to verify Hensley’s claims about the episode, although his past should have alerted the military authorities. According to a family who lived in the same area as Hensley, they were so worried about his conduct nine months before his deployment that they secretly filmed him. They recounted how one morning they had awakened to screams to see Hensley threatening a woman inside a vehicle. He had pounded the car so hard that a police report said he “had bloody knuckles, and the windshield of the Jeep was broken.”130 Hensley pleaded no contest to the charges of disorderly conduct. Subsequently the eighteen-year-old who filmed the incident said: “He obviously wasn’t stable, just from seeing him the 20 minutes I did.”131 The military was given a perfect excuse to bar his enlistment: Hensley had already served six months probation for a drunk driving conviction in Georgia. But they took him anyway.

  The War on Women

  The proliferation of serious criminals in the military was, as mentioned, among the reasons for the huge rise in crimes against female service personnel—particularly sexual abuse and rape—during the War on Terror. Andrea Neutzling was one unfortunate witness who left her decade of service in the US military during the War on Terror with deep mental and physical scars, the most painful of which were inflicted not by the enemy but by her comrades-in-arms. It wasn’t meant to be like this. She had wanted to follow in her family’s footsteps when she signed up for the US army in 1999: her great-grandfather had served in the Marine Corps in World War Two and Korea, while her uncle was in the navy and her dad an army veteran. It ran in the family, but she was the first woman to serve. “It was an important thing in that respect,” she tells me. She signed on the dotted line when she was nineteen, but had started talking to recruiters when she was much younger. “I always knew it was what I wanted to do,” she says.

  Originally from a small town on the banks of the Ohio River, Neutzling was deployed to Camp Bucca in southern Iraq in the middle of 2005 as part of a military police unit where she would oversee the care of new Iraqi detainees. One day after work, still acclimatizing to her new surroundings, she waited for a friend to join her for a workout at the gym. “While I was waiting for him, two guys came up and started talking to me,” she says. At the time she was living in an eight-woman tent while the group waited for their residency halls to be finished. “They were with the unit I was replacing so I went into the living quarters with them when they asked.” The men lived in a so-called “pod,” a small two-man room. “I went into there and I sat in there with the two and they were drinking Crown Royal, which is kinda like a whisky, you drink it with 7-Up or Sprite, but they shouldn’t have been drinking alcohol. I’m not sure how they got it.” Over the next twenty minutes they would brutally rape and physically assault her. “They grabbed a hold of me and told me that ‘we’re all gonna have some fun’ and if I didn’t go along with it they would be beat me and leave me naked in front the shopping facility on the base.” Understandably terrified, Neutzling focused on trying to keep herself alive, choosing not to fight back. “It was two against one so I kinda did the whole self-preservation thing, I had kids I wanted to come home to.” The men raped her repeatedly while verbally abusing her. “One guy was putting finger nails down my back and calling me a ‘whore’ and a ‘fat pig’ and that I should be grateful for all the attention I was getting from them.” After the attack, the men told her to keep her mouth shut but didn’t appear overly concerned about any consequences. “One of them pinched the inside of my thigh and told me that I should go and I shouldn’t tell anybody about it.”

  Amazingly this wasn’t the first time Neutzling had been sexually assaulted while in the military. In 2002, while serving in Korea, a drunk colleague had abused her outside a latrine. Back then, when she had told her commanders, they handed out the non-sentence of five days of base restriction for the man. For this reason, after the attack at Bucca, she was reticent about telling her commanders again. “Women knew it wouldn’t be good for your career to make a fuss,” she says. In Iraq, she didn’t say anything to anybody for a week after the incident, until another woman in her unit said the men were showing a video of the rape and bragging about it. At that point she told her command. “The woman who told me was our armorer, she gave us our ammo and weapons, and when she told me that, I asked her if she wanted my ammo, because I would have shot them.” The men were scheduled to leave in three weeks and they left on time, facing no charges—a situation that remains to this day. The battalion commanders told her explicitly that the reason was they “didn’t want to leave anybody behind.” If the men had been charged, they would have had to stay in Iraq or be sent to Kuwait, and been out of action for a long period the military could ill afford. In fact, the only person to get reprimanded was Neutzling herself, who was married at the time and later chastised by her commander for “committing adultery.” He told her that since the military considered the incident a case of “forced consent,” an oxymoronic term for a situation where the victim is drunk or goes along with the sexual activity for his or her own protection, he considered her behavior infidelity. Sympathy was equally lacking elsewhere. The chaplain merely told her it couldn’t have been rape because she didn’t act like a rape victim: she wasn’t visibly upset or crying. “But if he had come during the first three days afterwards, I was sleeping with my M-16 locked and loaded,” she says. The military’s tactic of looking the other way worked: when no one wanted to do anything for her, she just tried to block it out by concentrating on work. “I busted my butt doing my job over there,” she says. Often working twelve-hour days, she was instrumental in setting up important procedures for separating detainees, after she found Sunnis and Shias were being put in the same living quarters. But none of this was rewarded as it should have been, simply because she hadn’t kept her mouth shut. At the end of her tour, the brass merely gave her a “certificate of achievement,” a minor recognition of service. Others who had done much less work received Bronze Stars and Army Commendation medals. Neo-Nazis had often done a lot better.

  Neutzling expli
citly blamed the opening up of the military to criminals (alongside its failure to kick out service members guilty of misconduct) for the treatment she received. “When I first got in they didn’t have those looser standards and the first time I saw any type of sexual harassment or anything I was based in Arizona for my job training,” she says. “Some guy was done for sexual assault and they sent him up the river, they spoke to every female and he got dishonorable discharge.” But this all changed after 9/11. “After that you could get waivers for pretty much anything, including sex crimes and other violent offenses.” She is now part of a lawsuit against the Pentagon which was filed in early 2011 and includes seventeen other service members who were subjected to sexual assaults and rape while serving in the armed forces.132 It names as defendants Defense Secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, whom it blames for a culture of punishment against women who report sexual crimes and the failure to prosecute the offenders. The charge sheet does not include Rumsfeld’s opening up of the military to assorted criminals—but it could have. The lead lawyer on the case, Susan Burke, said the scale of the problem became clear when the lawsuit was made public and hundreds of women (and men) contacted her with similar stories. “We received a significant outpouring of support from both women and men soldiers,” she told me. “In addition, we have been approached by many more rape survivors.”

  The lawsuit blew the lid on what had become a huge problem for the US military. By 2009, one in three of the 20,000 active-duty women serving the US military had reported being the victim of a sexual assault while serving—double the rate for civilians. Since the Pentagon began tracking assaults in 2006 under pressure from Congress, the reporting rate has risen every year.133 The situation was so bad during the most fraught years of the War on Terror that the Pentagon belatedly decided to apply a Band-Aid, creating the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, or SAPRO. “What we saw during the first part of the Iraq war under Rumsfeld was that he loosened standards to what were serious crimes—rape, grand larceny—that would normally disqualify folks,” says Greg Jacobs, policy director of the Service Women’s Action Network, an organization focused on the assault and sexual abuse of women in the military. “They let a bunch in, which was a problem.” In 2009 the Pentagon reported 3,230 incidents of sexual assault which represented an 11 percent increase from the previous year. In combat zones, specifically Iraq and Afghanistan, it was even worse—rising by 16 percent.134 In fact, US women service members are today more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than to be killed by enemy fire. No one knows how many Iraqi or Afghan women and girls have been subjected to similar atrocities, although cases like the rapes and murders in Yusufiyah suggest it was equally endemic, and went equally unpunished. We will never know the full truth.

  A further problem for women service members is that the military handles assaults of this kind in a different way than civilian law does. Military discipline is set up to ensure good order in the ranks, not justice for victims. In other words, the military handles sexual assault like it’s a matter of personal misconduct rather than a criminal offense. In New York, for example, rape is a Class B felony carrying a sentence of ten years in jail; in the military, however, you are in minority if you go to jail for rape. When the need for troops was most chronic this wiggle room allowed many rapists to escape punishment. Furthermore, the Pentagon itself estimates that as few as 13.5 percent of sexual assaults are reported and even those rarely end in prosecutions.135 While 40 percent of sexual assault allegations in the civilian world are prosecuted, the number is just 8 percent in the military.136 Pentagon policy also dictates that any physical evidence of a rape should be destroyed after five years, making it much harder for a service member who has been sexually assaulted to file a legal or benefit claim after they leave the military. Likewise, if the perpetrator commits another crime there’s no record of the previous incident, giving them even less of an incentive to clean up their act. “Sexual assault is one of our nation’s most underreported violent crimes, and is a problem worldwide. Unfortunately, our military is not immune to larger societal problems,” Kaye Whitley, director of SAPRO, told me. “What is evident in the larger society is also reflected within the military.” She did not mention how much worse it was for service members than for regular civilians.

  Pressure from within the military as well as the latest lawsuit has had an effect on the debate in Washington, but it came far too late for thousands of women and men whose lives had already been needlessly wrecked. In April 2011 a bipartisan bill was introduced into Congress which will allow sexual abuse victims the automatic right to legal counsel, the right to a base transfer, the right to maintain confidentiality when speaking with commanders and medical staff, and will provide greater training in sexual assault prevention and response. Many asked why it had taken a decade to get to this point and why the link between the loosening of standards and the deterioration of the behavior of soldiers was still not being made, although it was clear to everyone that it was a major factor. The military had become the perfect place to be a criminal simply because in it normal legal constraints didn’t apply. You could commit rape and know that there was very little chance of any penalty arising let alone a criminal prosecution. And it wasn’t just rape. The military was turning a blind eye to a host of other prohibited and criminal activities as it tried to keep troop levels up, including the use of alcohol and illegal drugs, which are ostensibly banned in the military. “They didn’t even get in trouble for having alcohol!” said Andrea Neutzling, exasperated at the complete impunity of the men who raped her. Unfortunately, this was not as surprising as she assumed.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sick, Addicted, and Forsaken

  SIPPIN’ ON GIN AND HAJJI JUICE

  Alcohol and drug use starts a cascade of worse problems. It’s like throwing gasoline on fire.

  Dr. Richard McCormick, retired director of mental

  health for the state veterans affairs system in Ohio, 20081

  In early 2004 reports began to emerge of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, or Baghdad Correctional Facility as it was rechristened post-invasion. It was a notorious venue for torture and general barbarity during Saddam Hussein’s twenty-five-year reign, and rumors were flying around that similar atrocities were now taking place under the auspices of the US military. It wasn’t long before the mutterings were confirmed and photographs surfaced showing the physical and sexual abuse of the Iraqi detainees by grinning American troops. These included pictures of naked Iraqis piled on top of each other in a pyramid of human bodies, and of electrode treatment, among other horrors. It was a turning point in the public perception of a war we had been told was undertaken to defend human rights and democracy. The personal attempts by Donald Rumsfeld to cover it up, and his disregard for the Uniform Code of Military Justice that set the stage for the torture, likely signaled the first step towards his ignominious departure two years later. But in the long and heated debate that followed the revelations, one crucial topic was breezed over and barely considered. Many of the soldiers who had carried out the torture and humiliation of the Iraqi detainees had been drunk at the time. During its brief period under US control, Abu Ghraib had been turned into a swinging frat party with the free-flowing alcohol and ritual acts of humiliation that accompany such events on American campuses. The problem was known widely among the service members in the prison (and the military brass); in fact, weeks before the photographs were made public, commanders at Abu Ghraib had launched a crackdown on the alcohol abuse amid persistent rumors about intoxicated guards soliciting sex from Iraqi prostitutes. One army analyst at the time recalled a senior prison and interrogation officer bellowing at them: “There’s a prostitution ring and a liquor smuggling ring . . . I’m going to pursue it and I hope there’s no military intelligence people involved.”2

  His hopes on that score weren’t realized, but the military’s blushes were saved somewhat by a media blackout. In the flood of news coverage about th
e torture scandal, only one newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, gave serious coverage and investigative resources to the issue of alcohol abuse. In a 2004 article it reported that some officers thought alcohol consumption had been a contributing factor. At least one prisoner told investigators that they frequently smelled alcohol on the guards’ breath in the cellblock where most of the abuses occurred.3 Apparently there was even an Alcoholics Anonymous chapter at the prison. “I remember one soldier telling me he gave a [vendor] a twenty and he brought him back a bottle of alcohol,” said one intelligence analyst at the prison. “They would try to bring it to you as a gift,” added Lieutenant Antoine Brooks of the 870th MP Company. An investigation into abuses at the prison had cited two cases of military police officers being pulled up for alcohol consumption, but the incident was in May 2003, before Abu Ghraib was turned into an American detention center.

  Since alcohol is strictly forbidden by the US military, how was this flagrant breaking of the rules allowed to go on for so long? How had this feted “liberation” turned into a frat party within a year? In truth, the obscenities at Abu Ghraib were merely the tip of a problem that penetrated deep into every level of the occupation forces during the War on Terror. The military could no longer afford—in monetary or manpower terms—to lay off or treat its most vulnerable soldiers, including alcoholics and drug addicts, and Iraqi and Afghan civilians often paid the price for their intoxication. Of course, that wasn’t the message the military was putting out. In fact, looking at the discharge figures for alcohol and drug abuse during the most critical years of the War on Terror, they could be interpreted as a cause for celebration. Ostensibly, the US military enjoyed one of the most successful periods in its history in tackling alcoholism and substance abuse. According to figures obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, failure in the drug rehabilitation program resulting in discharge fell from 164 in 2002, the first full year of war, to a mere 51 in 2006. Failure in the alcoholism rehabilitation program fell from 271 in 2002 to 143 in 2006.4 Aside from the military, there was one other group who saw this as a welcome progression: those agitating for greater rights for addicts. Robert J. Lindsey, of the National Council on Alcohol and Drug Dependence, told me, “military discrimination against alcohol and drugs users has certainly been an issue of huge concern in the past. There is absolutely no question that addiction to alcohol and drugs should be treated as a health problem not as a disciplinary one.” But the War on Terror bought hope. “It’s encouraging to see the numbers [of discharges] declining,” he continued. “We hope that means more people are getting help.” Although, he added, “It could mean they are more desperate for troops.”