Winter Soldiers Tell Tales of Dehumanization
New America Media, News Report, Aaron Glantz, Posted: Apr 05, 2008
Editor’s Note: More than 200 veterans attended the Winter Soldier hearings, a four-day event in March featuring testimony from soldiers who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The dehumanization of Iraqis was discussed by many in attendance. Aaron Glantz is the author of two upcoming books on Iraq: The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans (UC Press) and Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations (Haymarket). He edits the website WarComesHome.org. Photograph of Geoff Millard by Esther Manilla.
Mike Prysner, 24 years old, was told that racism no longer existed in the military when he first joined up in the summer of 2001.
“We would sit through mandatory classes and every unit had this representative to ensure that no elements of racism could resurface,” he said. Prysner was deployed to Iraq with the 10th Mounted Division in March 2003.
“Then September 11th happened and I began to hear new words like ‘towelhead’ and ‘camel jockey,’ and the most disturbing: ‘sand nigger.’ These words did not initially come from my fellow soldiers but from my superiors: my platoon sergeant, my company first sergeant, my battalion commander. All the way up the chain of command these terms, these viciously racist terms were suddenly acceptable.”
Prysner was one of more than 200 veterans who attended the Winter Soldier hearings organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) held in mid-March. Like the other veterans assembled in Silver Springs, Maryland, Prysner spoke openly about what he saw and did during his tours in Iraq.
“When I got to Iraq in 2003, I learned a new word: ‘Haji,’ ” he said. “Haji was the enemy. Haji was every Iraqi. He was not a person, or a father, or a teacher, or a worker.”
In his speech, Prysner noted the irony of the word haji as a derogatory term. In Islamic culture, he noted, every Muslim strives to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, called a Haj. A Muslim who has completed that pilgrimage is a Haji. “Essentially, we took the best thing in their culture and turned it into the worst thing,” Prysner said.
Geoff Millard, a former sergeant in the New York Army National Guard, spoke about his time stationed at Camp Speicher near Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit. He said during his deployment he heard high-ranking officials use the word haji to refer to all the Iraqi people.
Millard, like the other veterans at the gathering, linked the needless deaths of innocent civilians to a culture of racism and dehumanization of the enemy that’s part and parcel of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The former National Guard sergeant spoke about one incident he witnessed in the summer of 2005 when a machine gunner in his unit opened fire on an Iraqi vehicle that was driving quickly toward a U.S. military checkpoint and killed an entire Iraqi family.
“He killed a mother, a father and two children,” Millard said. “The boy was four, and the daughter was three.”
That evening, Millard said he was in a briefing where the chain of command was informed of the shooting.
“After the officer in charge briefed it to the general in a very calm manner, a commander turned in his chair to the entire division-level staff, and he said—and I quote—‘If these f------g hajis learned to drive, this s--t wouldn’t happen.’”
Millard said he looked around the room at the other officers and the other enlisted men, mostly higher ranking than himself. “I didn’t see one dissenting body language, one disagreeing head nod,” he said. “Everyone was in agreement that it’s true, if these f-----g hajis learned to drive, this s--t wouldn’t happen. I couldn’t believe it, but it was true. That stayed with me the rest of my tour.”
As Millard spoke to the gathering in Silver Spring, former Marine Corps Arabic linguist David Hassan sat in the back of the room nodding in agreement. Hassan, whose father is Egyptian, had grown out his beard and wore a black and white checkered keffiyeh around his head. He served in Anbar Province doing electronic surveillance and translated interrogations in 2005.
“I used the word,” Hassan told me. “The military’s not just a job, it’s a culture. It pervades every aspect of your life and when you’re surrounded by it 24 hours a day the culture seeps into you, and I guess – in retrospect – I had to adopt the dehumanizing of the Iraqi people to be okay with what I was a part of.”
But like the other veterans at Winter Soldier, Hassan said he couldn’t be a part of that dehumanization anymore.
“I feel an obligation to speak out against this war,” he said. “I feel like I was sold, for the majority of my life, a fallacious view of what war is and what war does to people and having seen that that’s a lie – I have an obligation to speak out against it.”
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