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From
'Gook' to 'Raghead' By
BOB HERBERT The
New York Times: 5/2/05 I
spent some time recently with Aidan Delgado, a 23-year-old religion
major at
New College of Florida, a small, highly selective school in Sarasota. On
the morning of Mr.
Delgado's background is unusual. He is an American citizen, but because
his
father was in the diplomatic corps, he grew up overseas. He spent eight
years
in Egypt, speaks Arabic and knows a great deal about the various
cultures of
the Middle East. He wasn't happy when, even before his unit left the
states, a
top officer made wisecracks about the soldiers heading off to Iraq to
kill some
ragheads and burn some turbans. "He
laughed," Mr. Delgado said, "and everybody in the unit laughed with
him." The
officer's comment was a harbinger of the gratuitous violence that,
according to
Mr. Delgado, is routinely inflicted by American soldiers on ordinary
Iraqis. He
said: "Guys in my unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by
in
their Humvee and shatter bottles over the heads of Iraqi civilians
passing by.
They'd keep a bunch of empty Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over
people's
heads." He
said he had confronted guys who were his friends about this practice.
"I
said to them: 'What the hell are you doing? Like, what does this
accomplish?'
And they responded just completely openly. They said: 'Look, I hate
being in
Iraq. I hate being stuck here. And I hate being surrounded by hajis.' " "Haji"
is the troops' term of choice for an Iraqi. It's used the way "gook"
or "Charlie" was used in Vietnam. Mr.
Delgado said he had witnessed incidents in which an Army sergeant
lashed a
group of children with a steel Humvee antenna, and a Marine corporal
planted a
vicious kick in the chest of a kid about 6 years old. There were many
occasions,
he said, when soldiers or marines would yell and curse and point their
guns at
Iraqis who had done nothing wrong. He
said he believes that the absence of any real understanding of Arab or
Muslim
culture by most G.I.'s, combined with a lack of proper training and the
unrelieved tension of life in a war zone, contributes to levels of fear
and
rage that lead to frequent instances of unnecessary violence. Mr.
Delgado, an extremely thoughtful and serious young man, balked at the
entire
scene. "It drove me into a moral quagmire," he said. "I walked
up to my commander and gave him my weapon. I said: 'I'm not going to
fight. I'm
not going to kill anyone. This war is wrong. I'll stay. I'll finish my
job as a
mechanic. But I'm not going to hurt anyone. And I want to be processed
as a
conscientious objector.' " He
stayed with his unit and endured a fair amount of ostracism. "People
would
say I was a traitor or a coward," he said. "The stuff you would
expect." In
November 2003, after several months in Nasiriya in southern Iraq, the
320th was
redeployed to Abu Ghraib. The violence there was sickening, Mr. Delgado
said.
Some inmates were beaten nearly to death. The G.I.'s at Abu Ghraib
lived in
cells while most of the detainees were housed in large overcrowded
tents set up
in outdoor compounds that were vulnerable to mortars fired by
insurgents. The
Army acknowledges that at least 32 Abu Ghraib detainees were killed by
mortar
fire. Mr.
Delgado, who eventually got conscientious objector status and was
honorably
discharged last January, recalled a disturbance that occurred while he
was
working in the Abu Ghraib motor pool. Detainees who had been
demonstrating over
a variety of grievances began throwing rocks at the guards. As the
disturbance
grew, the Army authorized lethal force. Four detainees were shot to
death. Mr.
Delgado confronted a sergeant who, he said, had fired on the detainees.
"I
asked him," said Mr. Delgado, "if he was proud that he had shot
unarmed men behind barbed wire for throwing stones. He didn't get mad
at all.
He was, like, 'Well, I saw them bloody my buddy's nose, so I knelt
down. I said
a prayer. I stood up, and I shot them down.' " |