Iraq III: 'I Wanted to Kill People'

Like Andrew Tilghman, I was a reporter f0r Stars and Stripes. I worked for the old Pacific edition out of Tokyo during the Vietnam War. Andrew works for the modern day Stripes and was embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq.

I made sure that I talked to the little guys because they knew what was really going on. Andrew too, although he never could have imagined writing the following words when he interviewed a 21-year-old private from West Texas who talked about killing Iraqis as if it was no big thing:

It was February, and we were at his small patrol base about 20 miles south of Baghdad. "The truth is, it wasn't all I thought it was cracked up to be. I mean, I thought killing somebody would be this life-changing experience. And then I did it, and I was like, 'All right, whatever.' "

He shrugged.

"I shot a guy who wouldn't stop when we were out at a traffic checkpoint and it was like nothing," he went on. "Over here, killing people is like squashing an ant. I mean, you kill somebody and it's like 'All right, let's go get some pizza.' "

At the time, the soldier's matter-of-fact manner struck me chiefly as a rare example of honesty. I was on a nine-month assignment as an embedded reporter in Iraq, spending much of my time with grunts like him -- mostly young (and immature) small-town kids who sign up for a job as killers, lured by some gut-level desire for excitement and adventure. This was not the first group I had run into that was full of young men who shared a dark sense of humor and were clearly desensitized to death. I thought this soldier was just one of the exceptions who wasn't afraid to say what he really thought, a frank and reflective kid, a sort of Holden Caulfield in a war zone.

But the private was Steven D. Green.

The next time I saw him, in a front-page newspaper photograph five months later, he was standing outside a federal courthouse in North Carolina, where he had pled not guilty to charges of premeditated rape and murder. The brutal killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and her family in Mahmudiyah that he was accused of had taken place just three weeks after we talked.

When I met Green, I knew nothing about his background -- his troubled youth and family life, his apparent problems with drugs and alcohol, his petty criminal record. I just saw and heard a blunt-talking kid. Now that I know the charges against Green, his words take on an utterly different context for me. But when I met him then, his comments didn't seem nearly as chilling as they do now.

Maybe, in part, that's because we were talking in Mahmudiyah. If there's one place where a soldier might succumb to what the military calls "combat stress," it's this town where Green's unit was posted on the edge of the so-called Triangle of Death, for the last three years a bloody center of the Sunni-led insurgency. Mahmudiyah is a deadly patch of earth that inspires such fear, foreboding and uneasiness that my most prominent memory of the three weeks I spent there was the unrelenting knot it caused in my stomach.

You can read the rest of Tilghman's account for The Washington Post here. You can read my own thoughts on the Mahmudiyah rape-murders here.

'SHOCKING FEARS AND REALITIES'

The WaPo submitted Green's comments to three psychological experts and identified him as Private X, a front-line soldier in Iraq.

Excerpts from their analyses:

These are believable and realistic conversations, even with all the contradictions and conflicted emotions. For most purposes, this soldier is a late adolescent -- exposed to shocking fears and realities.

* * * * *

What's most dramatic is this soldier saying that he went to Iraq to kill people. I have never heard that from any of the soldiers I've talked to over the last 30 years. He's the kind of soldier who I think normally would be screened out before he ever got into a combat zone. We have lowered our enlistment standards somewhat, and it would not surprise me if he came into the Army under the lowered standards.

* * * * *

You can have all these feelings and conflicts and this pain from death and loss -- what I call "angry grief" and yet still want to come back. The intensity of ties to one's unit can be enormously compelling. By holding on to that, you can fend off otherwise overwhelmingly painful emotions.

Their full comments are here.