In 1777 the United States was on the verge of losing the War of Independence. George Washington’s troops had suffered a string of defeats and had to retreat to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where they suffered through a brutally cold winter. Undernourished and poorly clothed, two thousand soldiers died of typhus, typhoid, dysentery, and pneumonia. Others began to desert.
Even Washington worried that he might have to give up. “Unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place,” he wrote, “…This Army must inevitably…starve, dissolve, or disperse, in order to obtain subsistence in the best manner they can.”1
But the words of the great revolutionary Thomas Paine rallied the troops. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” Paine wrote. “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”
Members of Iraq Veterans Against the War said they were showing that kind of courage when they gathered in March 2008 at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Maryland to talk about what they saw and did while deployed overseas. They called the event Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations.
Over four days of gripping testimony, dozens of veterans spoke about killing innocent civilians, randomly seizing and torturing prisoners, refusing to treat injured Afghans and Iraqis, looting, taking “trophy” photos of the dead, and falsifying reports to make it look as though civilians they killed were actually “insurgents.” Their goal: to show that high-profile atrocities like the torture of prisoners inside Abu Ghraib and the massacre of twenty-four innocent civilians at Haditha were not isolated incidents perpetrated by a “few bad apples,” but part of a pattern of increasingly bloody occupations.
They also demonstrated, by relating their firsthand experiences, how the military occupation of a foreign country inevitably leads to an increase in racism, dehumanization, and sexism directed both outward at the enemy and inward into the soul of the servicemember. Many of the veterans who testified apologized to their peers and to the American and Iraqi people. Others (and sometimes these were the same veterans) used their testimony to try to break their fellow citizens out of a collective apathy that allows the war and occupation to continue.
“These are the consequences for sending young men and women to battle,” former Marine Corps Rifleman Vincent Emanuele said in one of Winter Soldier’s opening panels. “What I’d like to ask anyone who’s witnessing this, or anyone who’s viewing this testimony, is to imagine your loved ones put in such positions. Your brothers, your sisters, your nieces, your nephews, your aunts, and your uncles, and more importantly, and maybe most importantly, to be able to put ourselves in the Iraqis’ shoes who encountered these events every day and for the last five years.”
In organizing Winter Soldier, IVAW took its inspiration from Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), which organized a precedent-setting gathering in 1971 in Detroit. At that time, the United States had reached a point in the Vietnam War very similar to the Iraq War in 2007. Public opinion had moved decidedly against the war, coalition partners like Australia and New Zealand were withdrawing their troops, and the Pentagon Papers, which had just been released, documented a long history of official lies. And yet the war continued, as President Richard Nixon pushed ahead with an expansion of U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, which included the invasion of Cambodia.
Vietnam Veterans Against the War were determined to play a role in changing the course of the war. They gathered in Detroit to explain what they had really done while deployed overseas in service of their country. They showed, through first-person testimony, that atrocities like the My Lai massacre were not isolated exceptions.
“[The 1971] Winter Soldier heralded a significant change of opinion in the American public toward Vietnam veterans,” wrote historian Gerald Niccosia in Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans Movement, “not only in terms of a new willingness to hear their side of things, but also in the amount of respect and credibility they were accorded.”2
Over a dozen members of Congress endorsed the gathering. Senator George McGovern of South Dakota and Congressman John Conyers of Michigan called for full congressional investigations into charges leveled by the veterans at the Winter Soldier hearings. Three months later, twenty-seven-year-old Navy Lieutenant John Kerry, who had served on a Swift boat in Vietnam, took VVAW’s case to Congress and spoke before a jammed Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. Television cameras lined the walls and veterans packed the seats.
“Many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia,” Kerry told the committee, describing the events of the Winter Soldier gathering. “It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit—the emotions in the room, and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.”
In one of the most famous antiwar speeches of the era, Kerry concluded, “Someone has to die so that President Nixon won’t be—and these are his words—‘the first president to lose a war.’ We are asking Americans to think about that, because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”3
Members of Iraq Veterans Against the War hoped that Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan would play a similarly historic role. So far, however, they’ve run up against indifference at high levels of Congress and the corporate media. Though the March 2008 gathering was timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and was held in Silver Spring, Maryland, less than ten miles from the White House, the personal testimony of hundreds of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans garnered scant coverage. The Washington Post buried an article on Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan in the Metro section. The New York Times, CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS ignored it completely.
Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan did garner interest from the foreign press and military publications including Stars and Stripes and Army Times. Winter Soldier also caught the eyes of members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and on May 15, 2008, the caucus invited nine veterans to speak on Capitol Hill. “We now have an opportunity to hear not from the military’s top brass but directly from you,” Caucus Co-chair Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey of California said, “the very soldiers who put your lives on the line to carry out this president’s failed policies.”
Again, the vast majority of mainstream media outlets passed on covering the Progressive Caucus forum on Winter Soldier, and, as of this writing, no standing committee of the House or Senate has extended an invitation to IVAW like the one extended to John Kerry in 1971 by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and its prestigious chair, William Fulbright.
Members of IVAW find these developments upsetting but not discouraging. Many say it’s more important to organize within the ranks of the military than inside the halls of Congress. Many observers believe the army is already close to its breaking point. In February 2008, General George Casey, the Army chief of staff, said, “The cumulative effects of the last six-plus years at war have left our Army out of balance.”4
Casey told the Senate Armed Services Committee that cutting the time soldiers spend in combat is an integral part of reducing the stress on the force. In 2007, Senate Republicans and President George W. Bush sabotaged Democratic attempts to ensure troops as much rest time at home as they’d spent on their most recent tour overseas. Cycling troops through three or four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan has been the only way Bush has been able to maintain a force of more than 140,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Many of IVAW’s most active members are veterans who served one tour in Iraq and then filed for conscientious-objector status or went AWOL to avoid a second deployment.
“We don’t need to rely on the mainstream media,” said Aaron Hughes, a former Illinois National Guardsman who drove convoys in Iraq. “We’re building up this community that’s saying: ‘I don’t have to follow these illegal orders. I do have a voice. And you know what, I’m not going to let a politician or