War Porn (part three - for the children)

"The girl was wounded in the stomach and the boy in the lower chest. Both were said to be in stable condition." That's a quote from David Finkel's first report (in July, 2007) on the incident that resulted in the deaths of two Reuters reporters and several other non-media members no one gives a damn about. Lets face it, had there not been two reporters (more importantly to the media two reporters apparently employed to some degree by a Western news organization) splattered with them that day this particular bit of snuff porn would have been just one of many you can find on Youtube. For snuff porn fans the appearance of children near the end of the video of the event released this week is a bonus, but for the human beings among us concern for those kids was the first thing that came to mind.

Thanks to the wikileaks folks, al Jazeera was able to track them down for a highly-charged news segment this week:

They failed to mention a few key points - but we'll get to those...

Finkel was there that day, and "I remain in touch with many of the soldiers from that battalion," he wrote this week, "including one who picked up and held one of the wounded children, and he has been having a difficult time ever since he made the discovery. I won't go into details without his permission, but I can assure you that in his case he is haunted."

Iraq can be a haunting place - that comment reminded me of reporter Pamela Hess' account of a 2005 visit there: "I was never in immediate danger," she wrote by way of introducing a list of the few times she came close - a list that included seeing "a car bomb burn at a police check point in Tall 'Afar, the explosion killing no one but the people inside the car -- a man, a woman and two young children." Hard to forget a thing like that.

Speaking of vehicles, here's an interesting photo from the web page hosting the video

The minivan that was attacked while two men tried to rescue the critically wounded Saeed Chmagh and place him inside the van. Inside the minivan were two children and their father.

That's the caption from the site. But curiously, if you've seen the video you know that's not what the van looked like after the attack. This, however, is:

You can even see the soldiers rushing one of the wounded children to the hospital in this screen capture. There are many such inconsistencies, errors, and frauds to be found throughout the sloppily researched and poorly documented content of the site, including within their doctored version of the video (another example: the false assertion that the wounded children were denied care at an American hospital, more on that shortly) but snuff porn fans aren't exactly seekers of accuracy or insight.

Or things like plot or context in their videos.

From his book The Good Soldiers, David Finkel's account of the dawn of the morning of July 12, as soldiers prepared to roll out...

The neighborhood was Al-Amin, where a group of insurgents had been setting off IEDs, most recently targeting Alpha Company soldiers as they tried to get from their COP to Rustamiyah for Crow's memorial service a few days before. Two IEDs exploded on the soldiers that day, leaving several of them on their hands and knees, alive but stunned with concussions, and now Kauzlarich was about to swarm into that area with 240 soldiers, 65 Humvees, several Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and, on loan to them for a few hours from another battalion, two Apache helicopter gunships.

All together, it made for a massive and intimidating convoy that at 5:00 a.m. was lining up to leave Rustamiyah when the radar system picked up something flying through the still-dark sky. "Incoming! Incoming!" came the recorded warning as the alert horn sounded.

"But most did nothing," Finkel writes. "Because the bullet had been fired, it was only a matter of time, and if they knew anything by now, it was that whatever happened in the next few seconds was the province of God, or luck, or whatever they believed in, rather than of them."

"What's helpful to understand," Finkel says now of the video, "is that, contrary to some interpretations that this was an attack on some people walking down the street on a nice day, the day was anything but that. It happened in the midst of a large operation to clear an area where US soldiers had been getting shot at, injured, and killed with increasing frequency. What the Reuters guys walked into was the very worst part, where the morning had been a series of RPG attacks and running gun battles."

I was there because I was writing a book about the experiences of an Army infantry battalion in the surge. That battalion happened to be the one involved in the 2-16 incident. They were in Baghdad for 14 months; I was with them for eight months. They had a tough area and a tough time -- June, for instance, was four KIAs, one who lost a hand, one who lost an arm, one who lost an eye, one who was shot in the head, one who was shot in the throat, eight who were injured by shrapnel. Many, if not most, of those injuries occurred in the area that on July 12 they were attempting to bring under control.

By 2007 many American soldiers in Iraq were multiple tour veterans - so they knew they weren't going out to distribute candy. Such practices were largely abandoned, or at least approached with caution following events a few years prior:

BAGHDAD -- A suicide bomber in an explosives-laden SUV killed at least 27, including an American soldier, late this morning in the deadliest insurgent attack in more than two months.
<...>
Many, if not most of the dead were children loitering and playing near U.S. soldiers at an impromptu checkpoint in Baghdad al-Jadida, a lower-middle class residential district populated by Shiites, Sunnis and Christians.

At the nearby Kindi hospital, hundreds of distraught parents mingled in blood-soaked hallways shouting and screaming as they looked for their children, many of whom were badly mutilated.

"Most of them are children. The Americans were handing out sweets at the time of the attack," a duty policeman at the Kindi Hospital said.

"We have received the bodies of 24 children aged between 10 and 13," said an official in charge of the morgue.

A suicide attacker steered a car packed with explosives toward U.S. soldiers giving away toys to children outside a hospital in central Iraq on Thursday, killing at least 31 people. Almost all of the victims were women and children, police said.
<...>
"It was an explosion at the gate of the hospital," a woman who had wounds on her face and legs told the AP. "My children are gone. My brother is gone."

With no room left at the hospital, emergency workers rushed victims to hospitals in Baghdad, about 15 miles to the north. And when the hospital morgue was full, the workers were forced to place the dead in the hospital garden so family members could find them.

Given the pace of tour rotations, most likely the veterans preparing to roll out of Rustamiyah had last been in Iraq when those events occurred.

Anthony Martinez is a multi-tour Iraq veteran, too. "For those unaware of my background," he writes, "I have spent quite a lot of time (a conservative estimate would be around 4500 hours) viewing aerial footage of Iraq (note: this time was not in viewing TADS video, but footage from Raven, Shadow, and Predator feeds). I am certain my voice can be heard on several transmissions with several different Crazyhorse aircraft, as I have called them to assist troops on the ground more times in my 24-months in Iraq than I could even attempt to guess."

I need no reassurances to determine the presence of an RPG7 or an AK-variant rifle, especially not from a craft flying as low as Apache (even after the video has been reduced in dimensions to a point at which it is nearly useless).

And (like anyone else paying attention to what they're seeing in the video) see them he does. As Finkel recalls, "If you were to see the full video, you would see a person carrying an RPG launcher as he walked down the street as part of the group..."

Another was armed as well, as I recall. Also, if you had the unfortunate luck to be on site afterwards, you would have seen that one of the dead in the group was lying on top of a launcher. Because of that and some other things, EOD -- the Hurt Locker guys, I guess -- had to come in and secure the site. And again, I'm not trying to excuse what happened. But there was more to it for you to consider than what was in the released video.

But while the presence of multiple weapons in the group initially targeted by the Apaches that day is well documented (everywhere other than the Wikileaks "collateral murder" site and video) the real unresolved questions of the day surround the attack on the van that arrives immediately thereafter, and the horrific discovery of children inside.

Firing on the van is a morally repugnant act that has legal (and some moral) justification - in that regards it offers an informal definition of war. It's an action that many of us would like to believe we ourselves wouldn't take were we in similar circumstances. There are any number of such things we like to imagine ourselves capable or incapable of - from rescuing victims from a burning building or a horrific car crash to exhibiting calm courage under fire (sure - I could do all that!); to enraged battlefield bloodlust (never - I don't even curse when I bump my head!) to fleeing the scene of a car crash we witnessed (not even when late for work!). But reality and our imaginations are two different places, and in reality there is no zoomed-in slow-motion instant replay - and here I will leave it at that. For what it's worth, it's a considered conclusion with which I suspect most of my fellow Iraq vets would agree.

But it is worth noting that while the official investigation validated the actions, the conclusion (redacted) included suggestions for avoiding a future repeat. (Click image for larger version.)

But what shouldn't stand without comment is a demonstrably false accusation (made in the "collateral murder" version of the video) that the children - unseen until that moment - were denied treatment in an American medical facility.

(Video screen cap)

While some might consider Finkel's first report too vague:

An officer who saw a medical report about the children said they were injured by shrapnel from the Apache strafing. The girl was wounded in the stomach and the boy in the lower chest. Both were said to be in stable condition.

...or deem the actual report of the investigation into the incident unpersuasive (click images for larger):

...two final pieces of evidence can be found on the "collateral murder" web page - the actual records of treatment for both children from the 28th Combat Support Hospital (CSH). (Click images for larger versions.)

Those few (certainly relative to the number of people who've seen the obvious falsehood contained in their video - a statement they know to be misleading as evidenced by these documents hosted on the same site) who actually discovered these documents (identified there only as "medical records") and viewed the full versions would know that both children were diagnosed (to include CT scans) and treated at the 28th CSH - where (tragically) the doctors, nurses, and staff are well practiced at treating children. "Each month the CSH treats half a dozen boys aged 10 to 15 who have been maimed while planting IEDs for the terrorists," the Times (London) reported in September of that year.

And ironically, the (decidedly non-combatant) head nurse of the hospital's intermediate care wards had been murdered in an "insurgent" mortar attack on the mostly-civilian populated (including many Iraqi civilians) International Zone just two days before.

On July 10 a mortar exploded near by. Many were injured. Major White was called to a trolley and found himself staring down at one of his nurses, Captain Maria Ortiz.

"We'd been talking an hour before," he recalled. "She told me, 'I've just got my wedding dress. I've got to lose two sizes. I'm going to the gym to work out'. She was coming back from the gym when the mortar hit."

The parade of dead and wounded soldiers and the unexpected extension of their tour of duty wasn't all the 28th's staff had to endure this year. One of their own, Army nurse Capt. Maria Ortiz, was killed in July by indirect fire from a mortar attack in the International Zone as she was walking back to the hospital from one of the area's gyms with fellow Army nurse Maj. Stephen Williams. She was the first military nurse to die in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan. Williams was seriously injured and returned to the U.S. to recover.

The staff, especially the intermediate care wards where Ortiz was head nurse, struggled with her death.

A death that went mostly unremarked, and generated no international outrage.

2007 was a rough year for many of us in Baghdad. But (per the link above) "September, October, and November brought some relief to the 28th CSH as the surge began to work and the number of dead and wounded noticeably declined."

Indeed it did - though not without some effort and sacrifice. This graph depicts "insurgent" attacks on coalition forces with time...

...and this one could be called "insurgent" attacks on Iraqis.

I've placed a vertical red line on July, 2007 in each. There and to the left you can see the world we lived in.

To the right the world we made.

(Previously: Part one here, Part two here.)