Combat Vets Say Iraqis Right To Fight Occupation

Daryl Anderson, 22
I’m from Lawton, Ky.

I was stationed in Eastern Germany with the Army. On Jan. 15, 2004, my contingent was sent to Iraq. We stayed in Baghdad for seven months, where I was wounded and awarded a Purple Heart.

After that I was sent back to Germany, where I trained for six months for another tour of duty in Iraq. On Christmas, on leave in the U.S., I decided that I couldn’t go back to Germany and from there to Iraq. If I went back to Baghdad I would have been asked again to kill people, civilians, and I just couldn’t do that anymore.

I got in the Army to get an education, to get out of a bad neighborhood. Yes, I eventually got it, but at a great price.

First steps you take in Baghdad, you realize that there’s death and destruction all over the place. No weapons of mass destruction in sight.

We’re fighting people that we’re supposed to help, but in fact they hate you and every time you walk down the street they shoot at you because you occupy their country.

You’re asked to get in their houses, in their businesses, block the roads, but you’re an occupying power, you’re messing up their daily life. You’re not a liberator. You raid their houses and kill their family.

If I was in their position, if a foreign power had occupied the U.S., I would do the same. I don’t mean to say that they should kill American soldiers, but if I were an Iraqi I would be fighting alongside my neighbor to free my country and to defend my family, my house.

Because you’re in Iraq in a kind of war situation and unable to distinguish friends from foe, you adopt these drastic measures. You commit these crimes, these acts that you would never do under normal conditions.

And even though in your unit everybody is against what you’re doing, nobody can say anything because you’ll end up in jail. That’s not what I had imagined when I enlisted.

Ivan Brobeck, 19

I was in the Marines. I joined in June 2003, and after boot camp in March of 2004 I was sent directly to Iraq. This wasn’t at all unsettling to me. You see, I went into the Army because I wanted to fight the bad guys.

In school during history classes I learned that the Army and the Marines had done all these wonderful things, and it all sounded so patriotic and I wanted to do the same. I wanted to fight for freedom.

I didn’t care, and I still don’t care, if I died fighting for a good and noble cause, which is what I wanted to do.

In Iraq, I found myself being the problem instead of the solution.

A problem in a normal town, in the life of normal people, like the people here in Toronto, trying to go about their life and risking getting shot at by me. Innocent people getting killed for misunderstandings, and for even more trivial things. I found myself in situations with my partners where we had to shoot at speeding cars, at people that probably were just trying to get out of our way.

All these insurgents, as they call them, they’re not. They’re people who have nothing left. There was this guy who was mad at us because we had killed his family. Wife, children, everybody but him had been killed. He was seeking some kind of retribution. That is not an insurgent, that’s a desperate man.

My ethnic background is Salvadoran; my mom is from El Salvador. So the fight against tyranny is something that is dear to me, considering the history of El Salvador.

I believed that the war in Iraq was a just war, and it was not. Now, before I get involved again, I really have to see somebody overcoming my country with weapons in hand.

http://www.militaryproject.org/arti...