"Today we bring together another fine group, another generation of men and women into the ranks of our armed forces." "Please raise your right hand and repeat after me." "I do solemnly swear..." "INDUCTEES:" "I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States the Constitution of the United States against all enemies..." "...against all enemies foreign and domestic." "...foreign and domestic." "So help me, God." "So help me, God." "Congratulations." "Let's hear it for these fine young gentlemen." "New recruits of the armed forces." "ROBERT ACOSTA:" "I live here in Santa Ana, like you know, I'm not going nowhere." "I'm not gonna do nothing." "You know, my friends are getting locked up." "So it's just like, what's the point?" "I mean, what's the point of staying here?" "You might as well just leave, and then they start..." "I talked to a recruiter, and he starts telling me..." ""Okay, you could go here, and you could go there, and you could do this and that."" "So it sounded good." "It did." "It sounded good." "I'd been encouraged to talk to a recruiter for the National Guard and so I thought that it would be a good way to get money for school and also learn medical, some medical skills." "And I went in as a medic." "I didn't join the active duty." "I joined the National Guard and my recruiter told me I would be stateside." "He said, " National Guard doesn't get deployed." ""You'll receive the college benefits." ""The only thing that will happen is if there's ever a riot or anything like that..." ""you will be deployed for that."" "But he was like, "Other than that, you won't get sent overseas."" "I grew up in a family where my father was drafted during Vietnam my grandfather was drafted during World War II ...and spent three years in the South Pacific." "And they hated the military, in large part but they got a lot out of their experiences." "So I felt like I had an obligation to give something back." "Because I didn't have to go, it didn't mean I shouldn't go." "MELISSA STOCKWELL:" "Freshman year of college..." "I would see them around campus and I kind of thought it's something I wanted to do." "I absolutely love our country." "I think it's the greatest place in the world." "And so sophomore year I signed up." "I saw Top Gun when I was in eighth grade and I just, I knew." "I knew what I wanted to do." "I knew what I wanted to be." "And then I saw Marine when I was in high school and I was like, "That's it."" "They're mean, they're tough." "They got cool uniforms and chicks dig them." "MALE NARRATOR:" "Ever wondered what it's really like to be a soldier?" "What do you got?" "I've received word from Alpha Company." "DT ready to be verified." "Verify." "MALE NARRATOR:" "Put yourself in the picture with this free video." "You'll see over 200 great jobs in the Army and over 180 in the Army Reserve." "You'll also see what skills you'll learn, how you can earn money for college even what soldiers do in their free time." "Put yourself in the picture and see what it's really like to become an army of one." "When you advertise cigarettes you see that little Surgeon General on the side, right?" "But they used to advertise cigarettes where it used to be cool." "You used to see the billboards, it used to be cool." "They advertised cigarettes on being cool." "Now you got the military." "You don't see no Surgeon General sign on it that you might die from bomb shrapnel or whatever." "That we might go to war and lose a limb." "You don't see that." "They advertise the military as being a man." ""Fight for value." "This is great for you."" "They don't tell you the consequences." "You understand?" "AIDAN DELGADO:" "I was one of those people who didn't think about the full picture of what being in military service..." "Because recruiters and Army people they soft-pedal all of the objectionable parts of the military." "I mean, you never hear recruiters say, like..." ""Oh, well, you may get a chance to shoot prisoners."" "Or, " You may get a chance to abuse Iraqi civilians."" "Or, " You may get a chance to see your friends getting killed."" "The killing and the bloody business of the military, they downplay that because parents don't wanna hear it, and people don't wanna think about it." "Is this for training purposes only?" "SOLDIER 1:" "And that little red button right there, you'll press that button." "Oh." "SOLDIER 2:" "Push it." "The closest thing to combat without pulling the trigger, is Marine Corps recruiting." "And I'm the type of person, I love a challenge." "The system is not designed for the individual recruiter to excel if you have ethical or moral, you know, dilemmas in your life." "It's a system designed to fraud and to manipulate, lie, cheat, beg, borrow and steal." "If you're willing to do that, then you'll be successful at Marine Corps recruiting." "ACOSTA:" "They know what they're doing." "They know where to go." "They know what to say." "And it's sad because it's just, like, all these guys thinking, you know..." ""For once in my life, I'm gonna leave and I'm not coming back."" "They go straight to Iraq." ""Here's the big book of all the opportunities we have in the Marine Corps." ""What do you want to do?"" "Pushed it across the desk at me." "I looked him in the eye, and I pushed it back across the desk, you know." "And I said, "I wanna be a grunt." "I wanna go blow shit up." ""That's what I wanna do."" "That's what I got to do." "I got to go blow shit up." "While you talk about health care and you talk about pay and your benefits, and, you know and all these things that are positives, without a doubt." "Educational benefits." "I mean, all these things, they're great." "That's not what your purpose is in the military." "I mean, your purpose is to kill." "I mean, that is your primary, especially as an infantryman." "I mean, make no mistake about it, that's what your purpose is, is to take life." "Aye, sir!" "Aye, sir!" "CHARLIE ANDERSON:" "It starts in basic training." "They systemically break you down." "When they bring you in they make sure that everybody shows up in the middle of the night." "They keep you up through the night." "ALL:" "Yes, sir." "Your day starts at 2:30 in the morning and that happens for the first couple of weeks." "And actually, through basic training we got up after 4:00 once because they want to keep you tired." "Because that puts everybody on the same wavelength." "DRILL SERGEANT:" "You will stay awake, you understand me?" "Yes, sir!" "Aye, sir!" "Aye, sir!" "Aye, sir!" "Aye, sir!" "Huh?" "I'm just..." "Get the frick away from me, you fricking turd!" "Come here, son." "How about you?" "You already order portholes?" "Yes, sir." "So what the fuck you coming up here for?" "The screw doesn't..." "Huh?" "Huh?" "Now get up and go!" "SOLDIERS:" "Aye, sir!" "Get!" "Move!" "SOLDIERS:" "Kill!" "Go get them!" "SOLDIERS:" "Yes, sir!" "Go get them!" "Yes, sir!" "One of the most rare discharges from the Marine Corps is an administrative discharge for failure to adapt." "Fricking bridge, son." "Now get a bridge." "Go get your fricking boot lace and do it right." "RECRUIT 1:" "Aye, sir." "What are we doing?" "RECRUIT 2:" "This recruit can't find his left moon boot, sir." "RECRUIT 3:" "This recruit can't find his left moon boot." "Well, hello, idiot!" "What do you think happened?" "It's fucking mixed up." "No, sir!" "Aye, sir." "Aye, sir!" "HUZE:" "The training program is so effective that the vast majority of individuals who go through it emerge from it as a warrior." "Harder." "War cry!" "Kill, kill!" "Say it!" "RECRUIT:" "Kill." "Louder." "Kill!" "War cry!" "DAVID GROSSMAN:" "You will read a hundred military manuals and you'll never see that four-letter word "kill."" "You will talk to military psychiatrists and psychologists." "And they will never use the word "kill"" "...and they do not want to talk about killing." "And that is a pathology." "That is dysfunctional." "HUZE:" "Taking someone's life is not something that's abnormal." "It's taking it when you're not in a state of rage." "That's abnormal." "Being able to have a sustained desire is what requires training." "Kill, kill." "Say it!" "RECRUIT:" "Kill!" "Go." "Go." "Go." "Go." "I mean, every human being, at one time or another has probably had an overwhelming urge to kill somebody." "You want to strangle that guy." "You're enraged." "You're red with rage but you didn't kill him." "Why?" "Because somewhere inside the midbrain of most healthy members of our species is a resistance to killing their own kind." "We slammed head-on into that in World War II." "We found out the vast majority of people wouldn't kill." "And so, by Vietnam, we had crafted a technique that makes killing a conditioned reflex." "We're having realistic simulations and you take realistic simulations of the weapon and you shoot the target and the target drops." "You're shooting your man-sized target and you figure..." ""Oh, it's gonna be no big deal." And you've seen enough movies." "You pull the trigger, bullet hits, they drop." "Done." "GROSSMAN:" "The hardware in enabling killing hasn't changed much." "The pistol, the rifle, hasn't changed that much." "The software has changed phenomenally." "The psychological process began months before we entered Iraq." "And there was all sorts of, like, chanting and songs about, you know..." ""Kill ragheads." "Kill Osama bin Laden."" "And then, like, the little targets that would pop up for the range training they call them, you know, bin Ladens or Taliban or other you know, ethnic things." "As well as the dehumanization, you know the hajis, the ragheads, those kind of terms." "Bomb the village Kill the people..." "Do it Throw some napalm in the square..." "Do it on a Sunday morning..." "Kill them on their way to prayer..." "Ring the bell inside the schoolhouse..." "Watch those kiddies gather around..." "Lock and load with your 240" "Mow them little motherfuckers down..." "I mean, it..." "And if you get a whole group of people singing this thing it gets kind of catchy." "It's a group dynamic." "DRILL SERGEANT:" "One, two!" "SOLDIERS:" "Kill." "HUZE:" "This is what's instilled in you." "I mean, our war cry in training, you know like when you're approaching the target and firing and live fire was "Kill babies."" "SOLDIERS:" "Kill!" "DRILL SERGEANT:" "Fuck!" "SOLDIERS:" "Kill!" "Kill!" "Songs about, you know, going to a schoolyard and breaking out your K-boy and killing the kids there." "Or going to a shopping mall and, you know, killing the women that are shopping." "I mean, these are cadence that you sing while you're jogging." "DOUGHERTY:" "They have you do all these different chants and cadences about killing and stabbing or, you know, and I just thought..." ""Oh, my God!" "I can't believe that we're saying this"" "...when I first went into basic training." "And then, as the weeks kind of went on, you just go with it and you say it and you don't really think about it anymore." "'Cause it's just..." "They're just words, you know." "But..." "So I think we're killers." "I mean, we're not killers or we're trained killers, but I don't know." "Well, am I going to be able to do this when it comes down to it?" "You know, when I'm getting shot at?" "Am I gonna flip out?" "Am I gonna cry?" "You know." "You have no idea of how you're gonna react until it actually comes." "But I wanted to know." "DRILL SERGEANT:" "Amen!" "SOLDIERS:" "Up!" "Chaplain comes out, grabs the mike." "Let us..." "Bitch." "Let us pray!" "Down!" "Amen!" "Up!" "HUZE:" "Someone, you know, or a group of people make very well-thought-out decisions about cadence, about training so that by the time you actually need it for real, you know, in a combat zone that you don't stop and become paralyzed with it." "Because then you're dead." "Everything is associated around killing." "Everything." "And I mean, sooner or later it's gonna sink in and after a while you actually wanna do it." "Because, you know, you're looking forward to go do what you've been trained for." "Well, I think that's the difference because you actually start wanting to do it." "I mean, I did it." "I wanted to do it." "I wanted that experience." "I wanted to know what it was like." "Somebody gotta be there when it gets ugly..." "Somebody gotta be there when it gets bloody..." "Somebody gotta get their hands dirty..." "Yep, it's a fucked-up job But somebody's gotta do it..." "Somebody gotta come up with a plan..." "And be there when the shit hits the fan..." "I hope y'all out there understand..." "Look, man, it's a fucked-up job..." "But somebody gotta be there when it gets ugly..." "Somebody gotta be there when it gets bloody..." "Somebody gotta get their hands dirty..." "Yep, it's a fucked-up job But somebody's gotta do it..." "The thing you have to understand about Iraq ...is that there are no front lines and rear lines." "The moment you get off the plane, you're in harm's way." "This is a new war and the action's kind of everywhere." "REIBER:" "When I was over there, we were on a constant advancement." "And so there was never a single time that we weren't open to mortar attacks we weren't open to an ambush, we weren't open to whatever it was." "ROBERT SCAER:" "There is no sanctuary in this war." "In this war, you're in combat all the time." "Not only if you're a combatant but if you're a support personnel." "You're in the war zone." "It's a street-by-street battle, a town-by-town battle and the combatants are invisible." "They look just like the people." "DOUGHERTY:" "The enemy could be anyone that you see." "You don't know where to focus your attention." "You don't know where to focus your anger." "The aggression and the hatred that would be focused on a clear enemy gets focused on every single Iraqi." "REIBER:" "It was just constant, you know, surrounded by hundreds of people hundreds of Iraqis." "The majority of them have AK-47 s." "And you're getting hit by bricks and they don't want you being there." "You're so compromised, you know." "You drive on one block and children are playing football and they're laughing and they're screaming, "America, America."" "And then on the very next block you'll get shot at, blown up, RPG." "They were telling us little kids were running up and stabbing the sides of the doors." "So we had to get ammo boxes and break them up and put them in the sides of the doors." "I mean, they weren't gonna stop bullets but they'd stop little kids trying to stab the doors." "We put sandbags in all of our vehicles." "The Army we had, we made it." "DENVER JONES:" "They show on TV ...all this high-tech equipment that we would have and all." "I never seen any of it." "I mean, like I said, I had a Vietnam-era flak vest no armored vehicles no intel no real direction." "DELGADO:" "I used to ask guys, "What are we here for?"" "You know, "What are we doing in Iraq?"" "And by and large what they said was, "We're here because of September 11."" "There was a disconnect between the facts, or, you know, the reported news and their, like, emotional justification." "Most soldiers felt that what they were doing was related to terrorism either revenge or prevention." "To us, there really was no mission." "It was just..." "The mission was, you know, just get this crap over with and go home." "MULLINS:" "I've been on over 150 combat missions and, on most of those missions, it had no purpose." "I grew up in Brooklyn." "I've been in a lot of fistfights." "And the one thing that I know is that if someone hits me first, I'm pretty much done you know, if they get a good hit in." "And that's basically what it was like in Iraq." "You wait for someone to sucker punch you so you can punch back." "SARRA:" "You take a 19-year-old kid give him a rifle and as much ammunition as he can carry or put him behind the wheel of a tank and tell him..." ""You wanna go back home to your girlfriend and all your buddies..." ""and drinking beer and MTV and Internet?" "Go destroy that city." ""Go through those guys that are trying to stop you and I'll let you go home."" ""Sir, yes, sir." "Done deal." "See you."" "MULLINS:" "Initially it's "Hey, I must do my job, " and then it becomes, "I love this job."" "All right, get the fuck in there." "MULLINS:" "Some people just love to shoot." "Trigger-happy." "And they'll shoot not even when something is wrong but when they just think something is wrong." "And I didn't wanna cross that line, you know." "SARRA:" "We had been in a firefight, we had been in an engagement." "The engagement was over and I see this woman walking out in all black." "She's got a bag on her arm, she's wearing a burka and she's walking out towards the armored vehicle." "And the guys on the amtrac start yelling, waving their hands and telling her to stop and they're raising their weapons." "And I went, "Okay, one of two things is gonna happen." ""This woman is gonna put up her hands and surrender..." ""and start talking to the Marines..." ""or she's gonna walk up to these guys and explode."" "If she blows up, she's gonna kill a bunch of those guys or wound a bunch of them." "I've got a clear shot with nothing behind her." "And this was all, I mean..." "This was split-second, like, you know..." "It happens that fast." "Pulled up my rifle, took two shots at her." "I know I probably missed the first shot." "The second shot I'm pretty sure I hit her." "And as soon as that second shot went off the guys in the other vehicle opened up and they cut her down." "She fell to the dirt and as she fell she had a white flag in her hand that she had pulled out of her bag." "At that moment, right there, I lost it." "I threw my weapon down on the deck of the vehicle." "I was crying." "I was like, " Oh, my God, what are we doing here?" "What's happening?"" "I had a gunnery sergeant who'd been in the first war, he said, "It happens." ""There's nothing you can do to bring her back." "It happens." "We gotta keep going."" "At first, you know, you think to yourself, you know..." ""Wow, what a horrible country where little kids can step on mines, you know..." ""and there's no treatment for them."" "And then you think, you know, "I'm glad I'm here to help."" "And then, as things go on you start to wonder..." ""Could it have been one of my guys that did this?" You know." ""Could it have been a cluster bomb that we dropped?"" "You know, "Could this kid have been caught in friendly fire?"" "And then you start to feel like you're just a mechanic fixing the things that your friends broke." "I remember that the first mission that we had was at a POW camp, at a prisoner of war camp." "And there we abused people, to keep them awake for long periods of time we kept them on sleep deprivation." "And this was the first mission that we had in Iraq ...and from there we moved on to firefights and raids and curfews and traffic control points." "And the killings of civilians started to pile up and it became really difficult for me morally to feel comfortable with what I was doing as a soldier." "NOEL:" "If you're killing another man a soldier and a soldier and you're killing that other soldier..." "I don't think it'd probably be so bad... 'cause you're in a war and that's the consequences of war." "You got to kill this man 'cause he's trying to kill you." "You understand?" "But this war's a different war." "This is a war you're fighting men, women and children." "When you know you gotta run these kids over when you know you gotta put a bullet in this woman and this woman is pregnant that's what messes with you." "When you're looking at these kids laying on the floor dead and you see your child's face laying on that floor that's what messes with you." "That's why is this war's so different." "'Cause you're just not killing another soldier you're killing a family." "SOLDIER:" "Jesus!" "You don't go to war in a country and not go to war with its people." "So I was seeing all of these starving kids..." "I was seeing bodies by the side of the road." "You would go through these battle zones and there would just be tons of dead people laying out in the road." "Whether they were Iraqi soldiers or Iraqi civilians wasn't necessarily clear." "Families would ask, "Can we come in and try to find our son?" ""We think you killed him last night."" "And I felt, I mean, I felt at least somewhat responsible for that." "Just like I had no control over the circumstances that put me in Iraq they had no control over the circumstances that put them and me on the same battlefield." "SOLDIER:" "Is that it or what?" "In combat, you're killing for survival." "You're backed into a corner." "You can't go home." "You're in another country 13,000 miles away from home and someone's shooting at you and your friend and the guys you've known for six, eight, ten months a year, two years, three years." "And they just shot somebody you know." "It's not about killing at that point, it's about revenge." "It's about, "We're gonna take you guys out so we can go home."" "Like you turn on the news every day and you hear a number like, you hear, like, 14 wounded and 10 dead." "I mean, all it is is a number and that's absolutely ridiculous." "It's just all they see is, you know two soldiers injured today, three soldiers injured and they think, "Okay, he'll be all right, you know." "He's just injured."" "But they don't realize injured is, you know missing both his hands or both his legs or whatever." "The number one injury in Iraq is from bullets and bombs." "The number two injury is psychological." "The number three injury is endemic disease." "ACOSTA:" "A grenade was thrown in my vehicle." "I grabbed it, tried to throw it back out." "And when I did that, it fell between my legs down on the floorboard." "So when I reached down to grab it again, I had it in my right hand and it detonated." "It went off." "It took my hand off." "It..." "I got some shrapnel in my vest, my legs were shattered." "My left leg..." "Or my right leg was broken, my left leg was shattered." "It was pretty much just, like, destroyed." "And it kind of, like, just..." "It didn't hurt at all." "It didn't hurt really at all." "But it just confused me, you know." "I was just, like, " Whoa, what just happened?" You know." "We got in-country in April of 2003." "And then I got injured in the end of April 2004." "I couldn't see anything at all." "I didn't have any eyesight for about five months." "My right eye, they said, "Possibly you have to have a cornea transplant."" "I see like 20l200 out of it, right now." "I was in a truck accident." "That's nothing heroic." "It was just..." "I was riding with this young soldier that was driving too fast and hit a hole in the highway." "And caused me come up and jam my head into the ceiling of the vehicle and then come down on my tail area and then shattered my spine." "And I'm disabled for life." "STOCKWELL:" "I was in a Humvee." "Unfortunately, they didn't have any doors on the Humvee." "An IED went off, a roadside bomb and the Humvee swerved, hit a guardrail." "And I think..." "I believe that's where my leg got caught." "It's a left leg, above-the-knee amputation." "I walked for the first time today, which was very exciting." "ROBINSON:" "Part of the reason they're surviving is that technology has given us some body armor that protects the torso but they haven't gotten to the point where they can protect the extremities." "And so guys that normally would've died in Vietnam are surviving but with horrible injuries." "None of us remember anything." "We all..." "I don't remember anything about the crash, anyway." "I had a epiphany, dream, whatever you want to call it." ""Boom." That's all any of us really remember." "That's it." "We're just flying along and "boom."" "Eighteen people out of the two helicopters died, four of us made it out." "I think the number of killed needs to be reexamined." "The number of wounded needs to be reexamined." "And I think the big question is the number of injured." "People who aren't, who don't sustain injury as a result of enemy contact directly." "I think those numbers are much higher than anybody really knows right now." "ED ELLIS:" "They don't give even the body count now." "They keep it quiet, on both sides." "So they try to keep death out of it." "This is so ironic, you know." "They have..." "This is the most profound killing machines if you could say profound is the word for it but most expert killing machines ever invented." "Yet the actual killing is kept out of the equation." "SOLDIER:" "Gun on that rooftop..." "We've increased the hit rate from around 20% just a few decades ago to around 90% today." "Now, that's about a six-fold increase in the firing rate." "And those who are firing are at least four times more likely to hit what they're shooting at." "Because instead of a panic-stricken spray-and-pray response they're actually hitting the target." "HUZE:" "We got into a lot of firefights." "We didn't lose a single Marine." "It was because, in certain areas everything was considered hostile." "Taking fire from that general direction there are 50 fucking people there, it's one guy is shooting at us." "You know, we can't find the one guy, fucking kill everything." "You know, lay fire down over there." "Suppression fire, area target." "You know, you don't think..." ""Oh, okay, there's a lady in a pink dress, let's take her out." ""There's a kid, well, you know, let's take him out."" "No." "We're taking fire from over there, blanket the fucking area." "It works." "It's effective, you know." "You don't take fire from that area anymore." "You know, threat's eliminated." "And you keep going." "ANDERSON:" "When we finally got to Baghdad and I spent some time with the infantry company that was attached to us those guys actually would tease each other if they didn't get a kill in during the day." "And until you got a kill, you'd be made fun of." "You want to be the coward?" "You want to be the guy who doesn't do it?" "You want everyone to look back at you?" "And it's shame." "I mean, in some..." "I mean, you'll do it." "You're just gonna do it." "Everyone, I mean..." "You know, peer-pressure group killing." "I mean, you know." "And you go ahead and you do it." "I don't think that it's necessarily courage." "The killing and the abusing and the dehumanizing of people it doesn't really come in it because that's the world." "That's it." "Like it's taken and you're just trapped in the bubble and that's what it is." "JONES:" "I've seen one of the soldiers slow his truck down like he was gonna stop." "And he slowed down like he was gonna stop for the child and then he speeded the truck up and ran over him." "But the Army told us if we was..." "If somebody got in front of the truck, to run over them." "The person that was riding with me was angry about it but then again they said, "Well, that's what the Army told us to do." ""Just gotta mark it up."" "MASSEY:" "We were on the outskirts of Baghdad and we had set up a checkpoint." "Well, this particular day the car didn't stop and we discharged our weapons into the vehicle." "And they were rolling on the side of the road in pain and agony." "And the driver of the vehicle, the one that, the survivor he went over to his brother, and I was watching him." "And he picked his brother's head up and he's crying and he's weeping back and forth." "And I'm assuming that his brother expired... 'cause he gets up and he walks directly towards me." "And he gets about an arm's length distance away from me and he goes, "You did this."" "He goes, "Why did you kill my brother?" "We're not terrorists." ""We're not, you know, we're not insurgents." ""We didn't do anything, we didn't do anything wrong."" "And it was that moment that hit me." "I said, " Whoa, what are we doing here?"" ""You know, what's our purpose?" "What's our mission?"" "We just shot three innocent Iraqis." "You know, they didn't have any..." "They weren't doing anything wrong." "KEVIN LUCEY:" "He was told to, "Pull the fucking trigger, Lucey."" "And then he shot that man, and then he shot the other man." "He looked at the man and he could see the fear, the terror in the man's eyes." "And Jeff said, you know, all of a sudden he just wondered was he there because he had to be there like Jeff was?" "And then he just thought about him being..." "JOYCE LUCEY:" "His family." "He said he could see this boy's family." "That he must've had a mother or a father or maybe a wife, children, whatever." "I mean, just quick things that go through." "I mean, I'm sure it was a very small space of time but just..." "He said, just the quick things that went through his head." "And he told his sister that his gun was shaking as he was aiming it." "He told me he was a murderer." "He said, " Don't you understand your brother's a murderer?"" "JOYCE: "I'm the mother of Corporal Jeffrey Michael Lucey." ""Yesterday would've been his 24th birthday." ""I say 'would've been' because Jeff died on June 22nd at the age of 23." ""His dad and I have struggled every day..." ""since my husband found Jeff hanging by our garden hose in the basement." ""He chose to end his life after struggling..." ""with the demons of post-traumatic stress for several months..." ""after his return from Iraq." ""Some may say Jeff returned unharmed..." ""but the young man that came home without obvious physical wounds..." ""was destroyed by the dark hidden pain..." ""of the emotional cost of this war."" "Guns go snap..." "Money goes snap..." "Life goes snap..." "Lights go snap..." "Cannons go snap..." "Mind goes snap..." "Nerves go snap..." "Necks go snap..." "Live wire snap..." "Life goes snap..." "Tell me how does God choose?" "Whose prayers does he refuse?" "Who turns the wheel?" "Who throws the dice on the day after tomorrow?" "STAN GOFF:" "Killing is just one aspect of it." "I think what's important for people to understand about an occupation is the whole situation is one of domination." "It's when you are obliged by the nature of your job to dominate people so killing is just sort of, you know, the icing on the cake, so to speak." "There's the day-to-day reality of behaving abusively toward people of threatening people with guns, of..." "In the case of Iraq, a lot of times rounding up people against whom you have no evidence of any crime." "SOLDIER:" "Turn your head." "Turn your head." "Yes, yes, yes." "All right." "All right." "Turn your fucking head." "You fucking there." "Okay." "Get your fucking head down!" "Turn your head!" "Turn your head!" "Yes, yes, yes." "Hold this." "You stay." "Yes." "All right." "All right." "DELGADO:" "It's the way the military operates." "And the way the government and the military together have indoctrinated soldiers to think it's okay to do this to Arabs, to do this to Muslims, to do this to the enemy." "Here." "Here's your cane." "Hey, sit down, you." "Hey, come on." "SOLDIER 1:" "Hey, cut the sob scene." "Put them all in this room." "Put them all in here." "Put all the women in here." "Christ." "SOLDIER 1:" "No, no, no, no." "You two women." "Okay, you two." "You two." "SOLDIER 2:" "You, come here." "SOLDIER 1:" "You can stay in there." "It'll probably take you an hour for you to get back up." "DELGADO:" "There were similar type abuses going on in Nasiriyah you know, breaking bottles over people's heads or whipping children with an antenna." "And these types of abuses happened everywhere." "If you put anyone in harsh enough circumstances they become the person who's capable of doing that." "And so in a way, we're all subject to that." "We could all do that, given the proper circumstances." "And some people have lower breaking points than others." "We had one guy that was brought in who had been identified as like a senior-ranking Al-Qaeda member, you know." "Or Taliban, you know." "He was brought in as a bad guy." "And he had been hung by his hands for three days from a tree, you know." "And his hands were completely gangrenous and we had to amputate both of them." "And they told us, "Watch out for this guy, you know." "He's really bad."" "And then after a couple of weeks of him being in our clinic, they let him go." "And they said, "Our mistake."" "SOLDIER 1:" "You better stop!" "My ass." "You run my goddamn checkpoint, I'll fucking shoot you." "SOLDIER 2:" "Get out!" "Get out of the goddamn car!" "REIBER:" "We didn't call them insurgents when we were over there." "We called them just hajis, you know." "They weren't the Republican Guard." "They weren't civilians." "They're just the enemy." "And I engaged a vehicle with a.50-caliber machine gun and blew it up, you know." "It was a pretty big explosion." "Found out that they had gasoline and they were gonna take out the checkpoint." "But I remember laughing after I blew it up." "And then driving by and seeing burning, you know, the flesh dripping off, on fire." "And none of us even talked about it." "After it happened it was gone." "It was done." "My Captain, he came walking up to me and he said..." ""What's the matter, Staff Sergeant?" "You look a little under the weather."" "And I said, " Well, sir, today's been a bad day." ""We've killed a lot of innocent civilians."" "And he looked at me and he said, "No, today has been a good day."" "And he walked off." "And I thought to myself, "This isn't the Marine Corps that I signed up for." ""This isn't the Marine Corps that I want to belong to."" "PILOT:" "I got numerous individuals on the road." "You want me to take those out?" "MAN:" "Take them out." "This is not a good day for them." "Okay." "Ten seconds." "Roger." "Impact." "CO-PILOT:" "Oh, dude." "It's very hard to take somebody and turn them into someone that can do that." "And then what they want you to believe is that they can do that and then revert you back to a civilian." "And that's absolutely as ridiculous as it sounds." "SHOOTER:" "Roger." "MAN:" "Hit him." "Got him." "Good." "Second one." "Hit the other one." "Movement right there." "Roger." "He's wounded." "Hit him." "I'll hit the truck." "Get the truck and him." "Go forward of it and hit him." "Roger." "I am not fighting for justice..." "I am not fighting for freedom..." "I am fighting for my life..." "And another day in the world here..." "I just do what I've been told..." "We're just the gravel on the road..." "And only the lucky ones come home..." "On the day after tomorrow..." "There he is." "Oh, my God." "Welcome home." "Daddy!" "Oh, God, I missed you so much." "Look at this guy." "Glad to be home." "DELGADO:" "We got in the big room and we got these little PDA Palm Pilots and we had to fill out a survey saying were we thinking of committing suicide." "Were we thinking of killing anyone, were we thinking of abusing our spouse." "They offered us the chance for psychological services." "They offered the choice of going home or staying at that Army base to receive treatment." "And after serving for one year in Iraq, nobody would willingly choose to stay on an Army base for months after to be treated." "SARRA:" "As these vets come back, you're not gonna know who they are." "They kind of ghost into society." "They might be the quiet kid in the back of a college class." "They might be, you know, a kid that's cleaning up at McDonald's." "It might be..." "You know, you don't know." "You have no idea." "It's not like we come back with a sign, you know, that says, "Hey, vet."" "There are some guys who just don't wanna talk about it." "We all become casualties of war." "Who we are when we leave is not who we are when and if we're lucky, to physically return." "Because psychologically you're completely changed by it." "I was blessed that he was home in one piece and he wasn't home in a body bag or a coffin." "But a part of him died over there and I don't think..." "I take that back." "I know that he'll never be that same person again." "HUZE:" "I'm now back with my wife." "I get to be with them and I get to be a daddy again and I get to be a husband again." "But I've got all this stuff." "And you don't..." "For me, I didn't feel like I could share that to start with." "I mean, how could I?" "My wife's so proud of me, so how can I tell her about seeing a bunch of civilians that are dead?" "How could I tell her about the dead kid I saw laying on the side of the road?" "How..." "Then I go from being a hero to a monster." "And I felt like a monster." "My friends and my family were scared to even be with me." "They..." "I'd find myself outside and..." "The girlfriend that I did have, I was really aggressive and grabbed her by the arm and scared her almost to death." "And she didn't wanna have anything to do with me from then on." "It was a mess." "I was a mess when I came back." "I was really impatient when I first..." "'Cause I wanted my eyesight back and they were like, "Well, you know, we're gonna do an operation." ""Then we have to wait two to three months, you know, and see how it looks."" "The doctors left it up to her." "You know, if she could handle it, well, then I could go home." "I had to play nurse with him." "He got to come home with me." "He was blind." "I took care of the kids had to take care of the house, had to take care of my husband." "Had to bathe him, had to do everything, you know, and it's stressful." "It's..." "It..." "I didn't know when it was gonna end." "I wanted it to just end." "I wanted it over." "I wanted to be where we are now, back then, because it was just..." "It was so hard." "He wouldn't talk." "He looked so bad." "I couldn't cry because he could hear me." "You know, he might not have been able to see me but he could hear." "I have my days." "You know, like I..." "There's times where I'm glad I'm alive, I'm glad I made it." "And then there's times where I wish it would have killed me 'cause it's hard." "I mean, not only just the fact that I lost my hand and I have to deal with that every single morning when I wake up but I can't run." "I can't, you know, there's things I can't do." "Like, my way of living just kind of, like, didn't exist for a while." "It was just kind of like just going." "Like, kind of lost, in a way." "It's, like, Sandy, she told me last night, she was, like..." ""You know, I'd like to go dancing or something."" "But I..." "We can't, you know." "It's just something that we can't do." "I'd like to feel comfortable when I go out." "Just the other day this guy asked me how'd I lose my hand?" "And I told him, "I lost it in the war." And he said, "What war?"" "And I told him, "The war in Iraq." And he said, "That's still going on?"" "And I was just like, "Yeah, dude, it's still going on."" "When I went on convalescent leave for 30 days..." "I spent thousands of dollars on alcohol." "I tried to drink myself, you know, back to reality." "And it didn't work, and then one day I just woke up and I was like, "You know what?" "Maybe I'm here for a reason." ""I'm here to make sure their names never die..." ""their memories never die, and to make sure..." ""that no other soldier has to go through what I had to go through on their own."" "I took all that anger that I had in Iraq and that feeling of not caring about myself and then wanting to die and I brought it home with me." "I didn't leave it in Iraq." "I didn't turn it in with my duffle bags, you know..." "I kept it with me." "REIBER:" "The worst thing is that you don't fit." "You don't fit anywhere." "And there's no place for you to fit in except by yourself." "And then, you know, you don't like yourself anymore." "I'm not a person that wants to kill myself but if there was ever a time that I didn't..." "You know, that I felt that way, it was then." "And that's horrible, you know, being out of the military for the first day and you can't go to sleep at night because you hate yourself." "And you hate what you just did." "It's a horrible feeling." "It was difficult for me to say, you know..." ""Hey, we did something horrible over there." ""And, you know, I'm having nightmares about it..." ""and I'm having flashbacks about it."" "You know, especially being a Marine, because you're you know, you're supposed to be this superman." "Marines are the golden boys of America, the supermen." "You know, we're not supposed to come home and have those feelings." "After the high of coming back a war hero has gone down then they begin to think, "Well, maybe what I did wasn't so great..." ""or wasn't so brave." "I'm not such a hero."" "Even guys who hated the war in my unit say sometimes they wish they could go back so they could go back to that feeling of having a purpose." "'Cause it's that silence, that emptiness, being by yourself that really forces that introspection that's painful, and nobody wants to do that." "When you cross that line, when you kill someone how the hell..." "Like, I could barely..." "I had so much trouble transitioning when I came home." "And I'm still, I still have my depressed moments, you know but it's not as dark as it was." "And I can't imagine where I would be if I did have that memory of shooting someone, you know." "Split-second decision that's made, you pull a trigger it triggers something else." "You can't take it back." "No matter what I do if I go back to Iraq, if I, you know, become a Muslim you know, if I read the Koran every day, I cannot bring back that woman." "And there's nothing I can do about it." "ACOSTA:" "Just think about it, though, like, you're ending somebody's life." "I mean, it doesn't bother you then." "I mean, my main concern..." "I didn't care at the time that people were dead." "Like, I looked the guy in the eyes, you know." "Probably has a kid or a family or a wife or something." "Somebody to go home to." "He's not gonna go home tonight." "It's just death, you know." "It's just death." "And it's survival and it's just not giving a shit, you know." "And I think, for me, that that's..." "For me, that's the thing that's so tough to deal with and reconcile is the loss of humanity..." "I think, and that it's not always easy to tap back into it." "I think one thing one has to do is to make the soldier realize that he's not suffering from a psychological disability." "He's suffering from a change in his brain function and structure that's produced by a terrible, life-threatening experience and that everybody would have done the same thing." "Post-traumatic stress disorder the number one thing is they're reliving it some way or other." "It's like someone says, "What are you doing with that?" "The war is over."" "And there's one poet who said..." ""Yes, the war is over and over and over and over again in my mind."" "And they can be in dreams, it could be in flashbacks which get a lot of press but I think don't exist very frequently." "It could be in intrusive thoughts, that's the most common one." "And there are people who have intrusive thoughts every day, almost all day." "HUZE:" "The things that are most difficult for me are the images of the kids dead children." "Images of women." "Images of men that..." "I mean, I would venture, were non-combatants." "When I see car wrecks and when I hear not even explosions but cars backfiring..." "I don't see what everyone else sees, you know." "I see mental images in my mind that have to do with the war." "And that's hard to deal with." "I mean, that still bothers me when I see even a, you know, car wreck, people laying in..." "It has nothing to do..." "They don't have military clothes." "And all of a sudden I'll see my friend that's laying on the ground with half of his head gone." "I don't know." "It's just..." "This whole thing sucks." "All this sucks." "I mean, like..." "It's just messing up a lot of things." "I mean, like, even..." "Like, God, I'm so glad I have Sandy because, I mean anybody else that wasn't as strong as she is would have probably left me a long time ago." "And, you know, she said last night, and it really made me feel good she's like, " Well, we're in this together."" "You know, 'cause I told her, "Look, I think I need therapy."" "'Cause I'm, like, not doing too good and..." "I don't know, I have a lot of just..." "I don't know if..." "I don't know what it is, I just have a lot of it." "Nobody calls these people up and says..." ""Hey, I wanna ask you a couple questions and make sure you're doing okay." ""I wanna ask how you're doing." "How's your family doing?"" "So usually, when they finally get to the point of diagnosing PTSD ...or something else, it's after there's been an episode a marital problem or a crime or a meltdown at work or a serious fight with a friend or a sibling." "And then they go, "Wow!" "I'm messed up." "I've got something to deal with."" "And then, hopefully, they come forward and seek help at the VA." "MASSEY:" "So I reported in and I seen a psychologist, and I explained to her..." "I said, " You know, this is everything that had happened while we were in Iraq." ""We killed a lot of innocent civilians and that's my problem." ""That's what I'm having a problem dealing with."" "And she looked at me and she said, "Staff Sergeant, I can't help you."" "I said, " What do you mean, you can't help me?" ""You know, you're a psychologist." "That's what I'm here for."" "She goes, " I don't deal with conscientious objectors."" "I lost it." "I said..." ""What?" "You're gonna label me as a conscientious objector..." ""for not wanting to kill innocent civilians?"" "I said, " You're nuts so there's no way, you know..." ""you can label me as a conscientious objector."" "I killed people." "I killed innocent people for this country in the defense of whatever the reason why we were in Iraq." "JACKIE MASSEY:" "It really hit home one day when I went to the gym to go work out, you know, and he was fine." "He was taking a nap on the couch." "And when I came home, he had smashed a desk that was sitting in our living room." "And he had kicked it with his feet he had hit it with his fist." "And I guess that was the part that really kind of struck home to me that you know, " Wow, I'm married to..." ""someone who has been to war..." ""who has seen a lot of death and a lot of destruction..." ""and this is what it's doing to him."" "We still have that ball in our gut, of adrenaline and still the mentality of operating in a combat zone." "We can't..." "You can't just turn that off, you know... 'cause we were taught how to do that for three years or however long that you're in for and you can't just turn it off." "And so when you get out, I expected that I should act the same way." "I was driving on the freeway in the Bronx, on the Major Deegan and someone cut me off one day." "And I got so pissed off, I followed him off his exit..." "I got out of the car, wrapped my T-shirt around my hand and I went to punch his window in." "And then I realized that there was nothing restraining me when I came home." "I just held that frustration inside." "I brought that home with me." "I didn't associate it with Iraq." "I didn't associate it with frustration my past frustration, my past experiences." "I just felt, at that moment, I was angry and this is gonna be my appropriate reaction to his actions." "Whatever the normal response is they were taught in basic training to respond even faster." "And their life depended on it, their buddy's life depended on it." "And so they come back and then it's not appropriate here." "There's an old saying that if you're a good soldier, you'll be a bad civilian." "And this is part of it." "You've been taught to be angry, you've been taught to kill and it was necessary, maybe, for your salvation and survival." "It's not adaptive now." "It has a lot more to do with having one's worldview shattered and feeling like there's no safe place anymore." "And it's one thing to sort of trade your worldview in for another one than to have it just shattered with nothing to replace it." "It leaves people at odds and it leads to situations where you're trying to deal with this." "And a lot of times people tend to become very fragmented." "ACOSTA:" "Well, there's times where I think it's going away, like and I'll, like, go weeks at a time without anything and..." "Just last night, like, I couldn't sleep at all... 'cause I don't know, like, I thought somebody was in the house or something." "And I swore up and down there was somebody on the roof." "And then you know that feeling you get when you don't wanna move at all." "And then..." "I don't know, I was really paranoid." "I sleep with a gun under my bed." "And, like, you know, like..." "Just really bothers me sometimes." "Like, any little thing, I'll go investigate." "I started carrying around a gun with me wherever I went because I felt a lot safer doing that." "And, you know, it was just a part of me that I didn't let go from the Army." "And one night I was, I drank, like, 175 of whisky and went to a party, and a guy pissed me off." "And so I pulled it out and I loaded it, put it to his head, pulled the trigger and it didn't go off, and so I pistol-whipped him." "And from there I..." "They called the cops, you know." "I pointed..." "I was really drunk so I, you know pointed it at everybody, told them to get away." "The cops came in." "I got rid of the weapon, actually." "They didn't even catch me with it but I fought the cops off for a while." "Fought two of them off me and tried to get away and then got beat up pretty good by the police." "And was thrown in jail, charged with felony, assault with a deadly weapon." "I had, like, seven felonies." "You know, of course, they were trying to slam me with everything." "But sitting in jail in a jail cell, you know, full of dirtbags, pretty much it was just a huge reality check of, "What am I doing?"" "One minute, you know, everyone was..." "Everyone in my family was proud of me, you know." "Got quite a few medals in Iraq and Afghanistan did really well as a soldier." "Everyone was proud of me because I did that and now I'm sitting in a jail cell facing 5 to 10 years in prison." "Luckily, I just got break after break." "Instead of going to five years in prison, I went to a PTSD program." "That's been the most, probably, positive thing that's happened to me because it made me think, you know." ""What am I doing?" "What am I so angry about?"" "JOYCE:" "The emotional scars that these troops are bringing back with them we don't understand it, we don't see it." "It's not a physical thing that you can look at and say, "Well, this boy was wounded."" "And our son hid this for a long time from a lot of people." "Even his unit didn't see it." "Nobody saw it coming." "All of a sudden it exploded, and it exploded months later." "And it caught us off guard." "And, you know, regretfully, we had conditioned ourselves in a way that..." ""Okay, Jeff is having a bad day."" "We never knew the depth of the torture, the depth of the hell he was going through." "I was seeing a psychologist at the VA, when I was depressed but I stopped." "And I wasn't doing anything." "And I know that that was the end of the road for me, you know." "I knew where I was going from there." "And I made a conscious decision to go there, you know." "I knew that I would..." "That ultimately I would probably just kill myself." "I wanted to die but I didn't wanna kill myself." "Like, I would think that I was gonna die anyway." "Like, I'd just walk outside and get hit by a bus, you know." "Just 'cause I've been through so much shit, it can't be..." "Death can't be that far away." "NICKIE:" "A good friend of ours had been in Iraq ...for about eight months, nine months." "Came home." "Had been trying to get custody of his little girl." "Finally got custody of her." "Three weeks after he's had her, he's at his friend's house." "And he's got a babysitter for her." "And he called up the babysitter and nobody, I mean, nobody talked about it." "Called up the babysitter and said, "Hey, can I talk to my little girl?"" "She said, " No, she's asleep already." And he just said..." ""Okay, well, just tell her that her daddy loves her very much."" "Hung up the phone and killed himself, you know." "And when everybody was talking about it, and when they found him and they were..." ""Oh, well, was he drinking?" "Was he doing drugs?"" "I mean, they thought of everything that they could think of as an excuse why he did this except the biggest one." "Nobody stopped to realize that this man had just been in a war zone for nine months, a year, and nobody talked about that." "I read the other day, there were suicides that are occurring in Iraq and one of the public relations people said..." ""Those people probably would have killed themselves anyway."" "And I found that hard to believe, that that would be their position." "But they take the position that wartime experiences have no bearing on suicides." "I'll just start unloading them right here." "ACOSTA:" "I'm 22 years old and I'm all..." "I'm all messed up and my legs..." "Shit." "Messed up." "And it's hard to wake up in the morning." "My hand's gone." "My hips are all messed up now 'cause..." "Just walking all weird, my knees hurt." "Like, I had goals in the military, you know." "Like, never before had I had goals and that was all taken away." "SANDY RESTREPO:" "Every day he wakes up, it's kind of like a different person, you know." "And it's just like what, you know, today is it gonna be happy Robert or distant Robert or, you know, and it varies throughout the day as well but it's just hard because sometimes, you know, it hits him harder." "He'll have a rough night and then that'll continue on throughout the day." "You don't really take the world of violence that you experienced in Iraq ...and then replace it with the world of being home you know, the less violent world." "You don't really replace it because what happens is that you come home and you're not the same person." "So your world is gone and you have to start from scratch, really... 'cause you're a totally different person." "So the world is shattered." "And it's kind of..." "A lot of soldiers don't realize the position that they're in." "We've got our demons to wrestle with now, and..." "It's easy." "I try to stay so busy, I think, sometimes where..." "And worrying about others and the politics of it and the justifications for the war not being there and this, that and the other so that I don't ever have to stop and, like, and feel." "So I don't have to deal with my own demons." "I think he doesn't understand or realize that he probably most definitely has PTSD and, you know, some of these things." "And he's trying to help all these other guys and talk to them." "And I think he needs to look at..." ""Hey, these are possibly my traits..." ""and, you know, what I have from this war."" "The common feeling is, you know, you come home from the battlefield and, you know, this loved one that's waited for you you know, you're just totally disconnected with them." "And I found myself totally disconnected with Jackie when I first came home." "But fortunately Jackie was able to read up and was able to understand about the effects of PTSD ...and, you know, what it does to a human, you know, what it does to a human being." "I kept a journal for a long time trying to find a pattern of what would set him off." "You know, was it something that I said?" "Was it something that I did?" "Was it something that he saw on TV?" "Was it something, you know, just didn't go his way?" "And it's not one thing in particular." "It's all those things and more." "RESTREPO:" "While you're in the military, you're taught to know that they're gonna take care of you as long as you take care of them." "As soon as they get out and they start questioning..." ""Well, why is this institution doing these things to me?" ""Why aren't they returning my phone calls?" "Why aren't they filing my claims?"" "A lot of them have had their wives divorce them." "Their kids have been born while they're gone." "They've got a multitude of issues to deal with." "And then there's the paperwork nightmare." "You've got guys at Walter Reed who've lost limbs and have to, you know, literally wheel themselves around the campus to get their pay straightened out or to get their compensation benefits." "It's just, the amount of aggravation that these guys have to deal with to get their life in order, is ridiculous." "JONES:" "They took a statement from the unit I was attached to." "And that statement alone, I suppose, was enough for them to say that my PTSD is as far as the Army goes, is not related and they're not gonna put it on my medical, on my physical evaluation board." "Yeah, 120 days seemed to be the only thing they knew about." "I gave them the records in their hand." "They called me five times and said..." ""Can we just do this over the phone?" And everything like that." "I said, " No, no, I have my medical information." ""I'll bring it and give it to you."" "I took the information down there, put it in their hands and filled out the paperwork and everything." "And they said, "Okay, well good." "We'll call you in 120 days."" "I thought, "What's up with these people?"" "You're gonna get better in 120 days or maybe you'll go back to Iraq and we won't have to deal with you in 120 days." "120 days is absolutely ridiculous." "It's a good thing that we didn't tell this country..." "Every soldier in this country, when we got the call to deploy, didn't say..." ""Well, do you know what?" "Give me 120 days and I'll get back at you..." ""before we go make sure that freedom's not paid for."" "What we are seeing is a Department of Defense that, when the soldier comes back if they have a psychological injury or combat stress injury from war they are not diagnosing that illness." "What they are doing is calling it a personality disorder or a bipolar disorder or some other kind of disorder that has nothing to do with combat." "They tried to label me with a personality disorder." "I was like, " Okay, you know..." ""I did three years of infantry instructor at Parris Island..." ""three years of recruiting, I'm a combat veteran..." ""and you're fucking telling me now that I got a personality disorder?" ""Bullshit."" "But that's what's happening." "They use the personality disorder as a tool." "It's just a tool that they can label you with and then they're not held responsible." "ELLIS:" "You know, these guys that just got back they came through and we're talking to them today and they were a great source of information." "They said they were asked when they were leaving Iraq..." ""Are you suffering from PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder?"" "If you answered yes, yes, you stayed in-country." "You didn't go home." "And, you know, I talked to this friend who's a veteran counselor that they really tightened up on the medical benefits." "You've got two years to declare all your problems after you get out of the service." "If anything comes back, you know, they don't want it." "And we put everything that we are and everything we ever will be on the line when our country asked us to do so." "And you don't expect to be betrayed for that." "You expect them to fulfill their commitment to you just like you don't hesitate to fulfill it to them." "The military is trying a new policy, right now in this war where rather than evacuating psychologically injured people if they can treat them there in Iraq and keep them with their unit, they don't send them back." "So we don't even know how many psychologically injured there are." "But the nature of war and all the confounding factors..." "I believe, much as Vietnam was Agent Orange this war will be the psychological injury of war." "ACOSTA:" "This is my home." "I grew up here and when somebody welcomes me back it's just like, "Welcome home," and you're just, like..." ""I am home." You know, it's cool." "Like, it feels good when somebody says that." "I'd rather have somebody say, "Welcome home," than, "Thank you."" "If Americans actually listened to the veterans that they claim to respect so much their attitude would change." "But the thing is, Americans wanna honor the veterans in, like, a very cursory way." "You know, putting a yellow sticker on their car having a little parade or welcome back." "But they don't wanna honor the veterans by really, like listening to what they have to say." "I imagine that you have been kind of inundated with all the talk about the body armor story that was in the New York Times this week." "We found out yesterday that there's more information that's been revealed and now that the Department of Defense took 167 days just to get the bulletproof vests ordered." "MADDOW:" "Right." "Just to get them started, it took 167 days, and our allies, they took 12 days." "Because they just called the factory and ordered." "Exactly, exactly." "And that 167 days was during the insurgency." "It was a time when people were getting wounded and people were getting killed." "And body armor could have saved lives." "If you sat with me and five guys in my squad..." "I could have told you about this problem a year-and-a-half ago." "It didn't need congressional testimony it didn't need a New York Times investigation." "But all too often they listen to the bureaucrats and they listen to the four-star generals and the general comes and gives them the thumbs-up and says..." ""Well, sir, everything's great."" "I think that the only conduct unbecoming for a non-commissioned officer in the United States Marine Corps is if I identified failed leadership..." "I identified misguided policy that resulted in the loss of my Marines' lives and I didn't speak out about it." "That would be unbecoming." "WOMAN:" "Hello?" "Hi, could I speak with William, please?" "He's not in." "Can I take a message?" "Yes." "Could you tell him Chad called from the National Veterans Foundation?" "All right, I sure will." "Thank you very much." "The Army discharged him while he was in jail." "Brought his discharge papers for him to sign in jail." "Did absolutely nothing to help him." "Nothing." "And now he's still getting no help whatsoever." "He has a bad conduct discharge even though it had nothing to do with his military." "And so he can't receive benefits from the VA." "Guys like me are gonna have to be the ones that come out and start talking about it or nothing's gonna happen." "You know, there's gonna be..." "Everybody is gonna be sitting in their rooms afraid to come out and get help." "Part of healing is to take action." "So we encourage people to talk about the problems that they see that they're experiencing, that they see their friends experience and then to get involved." "You know, people don't expect veterans to be out there speaking out against war even though it turns out, you know, that we're sometimes the most effective people out there to talk about what really happens with war." "I came home on leave halfway through my tour in Iraq ...and I decided that I couldn't participate in the war." "This was the first case of any combat veteran to come back and go public with his criticism about the war and the government and the policies." "So it became a political case and the military responded politically and gave me a sentence of one year in prison and a demotion to the lowest rank and a bad conduct discharge." "I ended up doing nine months in jail." "I got out three months early because of good conduct and ever since then I have been an activist." "'Cause it's strange go from soldier to activist." "Well, I mean, it's not typical." "I'll put it that way." "And what I hope to do is become a teacher." "I think that might be some redemption for me to be able to change to try to change the next generation." "O'BRIEN:" "Whenever I talk about war, even in a theoretical way you know, I think, you know, children with missing limbs you know, and there's a powerful emotional connection that I have." "I guess nothing's purely academic for me anymore after being overseas." "DOUGHERTY:" "Our men and women are coming back and being abandoned by the same government that says it's supporting the troops." "And people are waiting months, people are waiting over a year for necessary mental and physical care that because of the things they did the things they saw in Iraq." "GOFF:" "For the Vietnam veterans who are in this movement, the Iraq veterans are our children." "Those are our kids." "And that's exactly how we feel about them." "I mean, you know, we're just in love with them." "And the commitment they show to one another is very moving." "I think we feel this responsibility that, like, we're speaking not only for ourselves, but for the people who are still in the military who don't necessarily have that freedom of speech." "And I think that the opinion is turning." "I mean, the opinion polls are showing that three-quarters of the troops want to return within the year." "Those are troops in Iraq." "So they can no longer use this rhetoric of "Support the troops."" "Because what the troops are telling you, both in Iraq and those who've returned is that they don't want any part of this." "They want to come home." "MEJIA:" "It's amazing to come to New Orleans and see the similarity between the level of devastation here and in Iraq." "The way that the government and the corporations are behaving with total disregard for human life and human interest." "A lot of the things that are happening in Iraq are happening here." "ALL:" "You're right!" "When I came home and I realized that I had to speak out..." "I also realized that having been to Iraq and having been a part of that war gave me a platform that I didn't have before." "MULLINS:" "I'll never make myself feel better about conforming when I was in Iraq conforming when I was in the military." "But what I can do, is do my part now." "I wanted to go to college so bad that I chose to put my life on the line to join the military just to get that money, those benefits." "When I think about the deaths of my comrades while I was in-country, in Iraq..." "I tried to think..." "I tried to tell myself well, I did at one point try to tell myself that they died for a reason." "But I couldn't find that reason." "I couldn't justify it in my mind." "And that's why I'm here, speaking out." "I'm speaking out because they can't speak out." "I'm speaking out because their voices are silenced." "A lot of military service is about duty." "And I think, you know, there's a sense of responsibility to fight that they instill in you in the military." "And we've kept that with us, you know, and I think many of us are realizing that the military, that wasn't our duty at all." "That fight wasn't our fight." "This is now." "There was no, nothing honorable about what we did." "And that's what I always thought going to war and being a soldier, you're some kind of a hero." "And there was some stuff that I did that was not even close to being a hero." "You know, there's stuff that I did, that was..." "Or that I saw you know, whatever it was, that had nothing to do with honor you know, being honorable." "Nothing to do with it." "And that broke my heart, yeah." "When I was living in Camp Lejeune my minister was a really phenomenal man and he gave a sermon on hope once." "And he said that science has proven that you can live approximately 72 hours without water around two weeks without food and spiritually we've proven you can only live a few minutes without hope." "If I didn't have hope that this was going to end somehow that we were going to be successful then I probably would have let myself out of this life a long time ago." "I don't know that I can let go of it or if I can let myself off the hook." "I know that to an extent that that guilt fuels my fire right now." "That it..." "When they come at me, when they try to quiet me it makes me rage that much louder, it reinforces my resolve." "And maybe I shouldn't be let off the hook, you know." "And maybe that's not the point of this is for me to ever let myself off the hook." "The point is to be wiser and to learn from it." "To the people, I just want to say that I'm really sorry." "I'm really sorry for all the damage and I am really sorry for my cowardice for not opposing the war for not speaking out sooner, for not disobeying more orders in Iraq." "I'm sorry." "And to the troops I want to say that there is a way out." "You know, we sign a contract and, you know we swore to protect the Constitution and to fight for freedom and democracy, but that's not what we're doing in Iraq." "And if it means jail, or if it means disgrace or shame then that's what it's going to take, you know, but there is a way out, you know." "And I also wanna tell people that after being in jail that there is no higher freedom that can be achieved than the freedom we achieve when we follow our conscience." "And that's something that you can live by and never regret."