News & Politics > Special Report

No Worse Enemy: A Marine Breaks His Silence
By Natasha Saulnier

With the escalation of violence now engulfing Iraq, Jimmy Massey, 31, a Staff Sergeant in the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Weapons Company, has decided to break his silence and speak out about us abuses on the ground there. A 12-year Marine veteran, recruiter, and trainer, Massey was in charge of a platoon of 30 snipers. “In a month and a half, my platoon and I killed more than 30 civilians. We would take over villages and control checkpoints. My men and I would fire warning shots at oncoming vehicles. But if they didn’t stop, we didn’t have any qualms about loading them up,” he says.

After serving in the first waves of attacks in the war against Iraq, Massey said his farewell to arms on April 18, 2003, and was honorably discharged in November. Today, back home in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, Massey wants to bring down the walls of ignorance blinding his compatriots to the realities of the ground war in Iraq, and to rid himself of the remorse that keeps him awake at night. “I’m embarrassed by what we’ve done over there, and I’m on a redeeming and spiritual mission to heal so I can sleep again. When I read about the mutilated, charred bodies of the Blackwater mercenaries in the news, all I thought was that we did the same thing to them. They would see us debase their dead all the time. We would be messing around with charred bodies, kicking them out of the vehicles and sticking cigarettes in their mouths.”

Another soldier, a 23-year-old Marine who returned from Iraq last fall and wishes to remain anonymous, adds, “We would defecate on and run over dead Iraqi bodies.”

Several Marines who have attested to similar experiences remain too frightened of reprisals from the Marine Corps to disclose their names publicly. While Massey hopes that his testimony will inspire others to speak out, he too has had moments of fear. “I have always been aggressive in everything I’ve done and I have been about my stance. I told them when I left, ‘I am going to tell everybody about what I have done.’ I have to tell you, I feared for my life on the drive home from California to North Carolina.”

Checkpoint Homicide
A scene plays out over and over again in Massey’s memory, prodding his conscience at every turn. It is early April 2003, on a road in suburban Baghdad, shortly after the invasion of Iraq. “It was very warm that day, and Baghdad hadn’t fallen completely. A red Kia Spectra sped toward our checkpoint at about 45 miles per hour. We fired a warning volley above it but the car kept coming. Then we aimed at the car and fired with full force. I made eye contact with the driver. The Kia came to a stop right in front of me, three of the four men shot dead, the fourth wounded and covered in blood. When he saw that his brother, the driver, was dead, he collapsed and fell to the curb, waving his arms frantically. And when we were pulling his brother out, he started running and screaming, ‘Why did you kill my brother?! We didn’t do anything!’”

A knot in his throat, Massey pauses before continuing in a low voice: “We searched the car and found no weapon. We called the medics. They arrived 20 minutes later and dumped the bodies on the side of the road. After the shooting, a team of reporters came up. We were told to ‘get them out of here quickly.’ A little later, the same scenario was repeated with two more vehicles. We killed three more civilians. It was a real bad day.” Repeatedly, Massey watched as badly injured Iraqis were “tossed on the side of the road without calling medics.”

He held out for a month and a half in this upside-down universe where, he says, “We were told that Iraqis were loading ambulances up with explosives and that soldiers were dressed as civilians. But when we realized we were hearing no explosions, we started to wonder. Iraqi military compounds had nothing in them, except for dismantled tanks, equipment that was barely functioning, and barracks that looked like ghost towns.” For a while, as several of his platoon members expressed their concern to him about the high number of civilian casualties, Massey repeatedly told them, “Suck it up, we’ve got a job to do.”

But on the 7th of April, Massey himself voiced doubts to his commanding officer. “I told him I felt like we were committing genocide in Iraq, that we were doing harm to a culture…[that] we were killing lots of civilians. He said nothing and walked away. I knew my career was over.” Later, says Massey, his superior unleashed a downpour of insults: “You’re a poor leader. You’re faking it. You’re a conscien-tious objector, you’re a wimp.” Massey kept a cool face. Then the naval psychiatrist diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, and the Marines offered him a desk job. “I had seven more years until retirement from the Marine Corps, but I told them I didn’t want their money anymore.”

No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy
As Massey describes the combat tactics, he reflects on the new slogan adopted by the Marines. “They’re training the next generation of soldiers with this motto: ‘No better friend, no worse enemy.’ With the new motto comes a new brainwashing. It’s like, ‘We’re gonna kill you, and we’re gonna turn around, give you candies, and bandage you up.’ One day we would go into a city and set up road blocks where civilian casualties would take place, and then the next morning we would undertake a humanitarian mission. How do we expect people who’ve seen their brothers and mothers killed to turn around and welcome you with open arms?

“I’m often asked about rules of engagement. We, the Americans, are the ones who make the rules of engagement. When it’s convenient, you can write new rules and delete old rules,” says Massey. The 23-year-old Marine quoted earlier agrees with Massey. “One day, I watched as the Marine Corps pushed the bodies of 47 Iraqis into a mass grave with a bulldozer. I don’t know if they were civilians but they looked like it because some of them were wearing dress shoes like loafers. Our sergeant was looking for bombs with metal detectors. Then he went out on the bodies and picked them for jewels and money. He also took their IDs and sold them to Marines for trophies to show off when they’d come back to the us.”

According to Massey, the new slogan encapsulates the increased desensitization now required of the Marines for the war on terror: “You’re forced to become like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.… You have to have a psychopathic mentality. Within 30 seconds, you’re supposed to turn it off and on again and do humanitarian work and then off again.” He adds that there is something more pernicious, a subliminal component in the desensitization techniques Marines are subjected to in their three-month training camps. Somehow it’s more twisted than the simple chants that rise from the field: “Throw some candy in the school yard / watch the children gather round / Load a belt in your M-50 / mow them little bastards down!”

Spooks
Overkill seems to weigh heavy on the minds of the Marines interviewed. “Iraq was devastated in the south,” says Massey. “The closer to Baghdad, the nicer it got. [Iraqi] military compounds were deserted, tanks were barely salvageable. I saw nothing but civilian casualties and cowboys riding in, guns blazing. There really was no major battle but we had an overabundance of weaponry at our disposal and we used it.”

Lance Corporal Michael Hoffman, a 24-year-old Marine who recently returned from Iraq, corroborates this point, saying, “We used improved conventional weapons which explode in the air and contain 88 grenades each. That was all we used. I can count on my hand the times we didn’t use them.”

Much more secretive, the actions of the Special Forces—and in particular Task Force 121, created especially for the Iraq campaign by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and composed of members of the Delta Forces, Navy Seals, and the CIA Paramilitaries, aka the “Spooks”—may be even more incriminating. Massey’s platoon carried out four raids with the Spooks and one raid with the Special Forces. “We would go into villages and stick C-4 explosives on the doors of supposed Saddam loyalists, and we would ransack their houses like the Gestapo. The Spooks would wait until we blew them up and secure the occupants inside, then they would go in. They never found anything except for large quantities of money.” What happened to the occupants? “The Spooks would put them on the floor and take over. We would leave and I don’t know what happened to them but I heard from intelligence reports that some occupants were blown up.”

This is the war that Massey refused to participate in—a war where the lines between civilians and military are blurred, and where soldiers who are fighting a phantom army require their victims to see them as saviors. According to Massey, it puts in context the killing of the Blackwater employees, which he sees as an act of retaliation from the Iraqis for the atrocities perpetrated on them instead of an attempt to “stop progress toward democracy,” as described by President Bush.

“The Marines were brainwashed to kill the enemy, now they’re brainwashed to kill civilians,” says Massey. “They used to be trained to meet the enemy on the battlefield. But in Iraq, there’s no enemy.” Lance Corporal Hoffman confirms, “When we were in training we would get target descriptions. [In actual battle] we never got target descriptions though we were expecting them. We were told not to worry about clearing targets, they were cleared by higher headquarters. We were just given the target and told to shoot. We had no idea what we were shooting at. Then they would tell us what we shot but we didn’t know if it was true.”

—Translated from the French by Stephan Smith

Natasha Saulnier is an independent journalist based in New York and published in Libération, l’Humanité, and other French publications as well as several online publications, including Common Dreams, Truth Out, and Greg Palast.com.