...Ladies and gentleman, things like that happen every day in Iraq. We react out of fear, fear for our lives, and we cause complete and utter destruction...
...But as time went on and the absurdity of war set in, they started taking things too far. Individuals from my unit indiscriminately and unnecessarily opened fire on innocent civilians as they?re driving down the road on their own streets. My unit?individuals from my platoon would fire into the grills of these cars and then come back in the evenings after missions were done and brag about it. They would say, ?Hey, did you guys see that car I shot at? It spewed radiator fluid all over the ground. Wasn?t that cool?? I remember thinking back on that and how appalled I was that we were bragging about these things, that we were laughing, but that?s what you do in a combat zone. That is your reality. That is how you deal with that predicament...
...And that woman began to tell us a story. Just a few months prior to this, her husband had been shot and killed by a United States convoy, because he got too close to their convoy. He was not an insurgent; he was not a terrorist. He was merely a working man trying to make a living for his family. To make matters worse, a few weeks later, there was a Special Forces team who operated in the Kindi area. And as you know, Special Forces do clandestine operations. And so, even though this was my unit?s area of operation, we didn?t know what the Special Forces teams were actually doing there. They holed up in a building there in the Kindi Street area and made a compound out of it. A few weeks after this man died, the Special Forces team got some intelligence that this woman was supporting the insurgency. And so, they conducted a raid on her home, zip-tied her and her two children, threw them on the floor. And I guess her son was old enough to be perceived as a possible threat, so they detained him and took him away. For the next two weeks, this woman had no idea whether her son was alive, dead or worse. At the end of that two weeks, the Special Forces team rolled up, dropped her son off and, without so much as an apology, drove off. It turns out they had found they had acted on bad intelligence. Ladies and gentleman, things like that happen every day in Iraq. We?re harassing these people, we?re disrupting their lives...
...I was applying pressure to my trigger, getting ready to fire on the vehicle, and out of nowhere, a man came off of the side of the road, flagged the car down and got it to pull over. He walked around to the driver?s side door, opened it up, and out popped an eighty-year-old woman. Come to find out, this woman was a highly respected figure in the community, and I don?t have a clue what would have happened had I opened fire on this woman. I would imagine a riot...
...Ladies and gentlemen, I hate guns. I spent ten years in the military, and I carried two of them on my side in Iraq, but I think they should be melted down and turned into jewelry. To this day, that is the worst thing that I have ever done in my life. I am a peaceful person, but yet in Iraq I drew down on an eighty-year-old geriatric woman who could not see me, because I was in front of a desert-colored vehicle?or, excuse me, desert-colored building wearing desert-colored camouflage...
...But I have an image that is burned into my mind to this very day. And I remember a man running towards me at the front of the checkpoint, carrying a young seventeen- or eighteen-year-old Iraqi guy, very thin, very sort of pale. He came running to me with this guy and laid him at my feet. I looked down at him, and the guy was missing from here to here of his arm, and his forearm was only held on by a small flap of skin. The bones were protruding, and it was bleeding profusely. He had shrapnel wounds all over his torso. And when I log-rolled him onto his side to check his rear for wounds, I noticed that his entire left butt cheek was missing, and it was bleeding profusely, and it was pooling blood. And to this day, I have that image burned in my mind?s eye. Almost every couple of days, I will get a flash of red color in my mind?s eye, and it won?t have any shape, no form, just a flash of red. And every time, I associate it with that instance. So not only are we disrupting the lives of Iraqi civilians, we?re disrupting the lives of our veterans with this occupation...
...You know, conservative statistics say that the majority of Iraqis support attacks against coalition forces, the majority of Iraqis support us leaving immediately, and the majority of Iraqis see us as the main contributors to the violence in Iraq. This gives us a view at the prevailing sentiment in Iraq. And I?d like to explain it to everyone this way, especially in the South, because it rings with some semblance of truth to people down there. If a foreign occupying force came here to the United States, and regardless of what they told us, whether they told us they were here to free us, to liberate us and to give us democracy, do you not think that every person that owns a shotgun would not come out of the hills and fight for their right to self-determination...
...And I?d like to sum it up like this: the prevailing sentiment in Iraq is this?another time that I was out on patrol in the Kindi Street area?as I said, part of our mission was to meet and greet the local population and find out what their problems were?and so, I approached a man with my interpreter on the side of the road, and I asked him, I said, ?Look, are your lives better because we?re here? Are you safer? Do you feel more secure? Do you feel like we are liberating you?? And that man looked at me straight in the eye, and he said, ?Mister, we Iraqis know that you have good intentions here. But the fact of the matter is, before America invaded, we didn?t have to worry about car bombs in our neighborhoods, we didn?t have to worry about the safety of our own children as they walked to school, and we didn?t have to worry about US soldiers shooting at us as we drive up and down our own streets..."
...Ladies and gentlemen, the suffering in Iraq is tearing that country apart. And ending that suffering begins with a complete and immediate withdrawal of all of our troops. Thank you very much...
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