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Articles : IraqThe War Comes Home
By the standards of Columbus, Georgia, the Platinum is a classy place. Meaning that it’s a strip club where a five dollar cover charge will get you all the ‘Hot Women’ and ‘Cold Beer’ you can afford. Only a handful of customers are around to appreciate a half-naked girl wrapping herself around the ubiquitous pole. It’s a quiet night in Columbus; most of the soldiers from Fort Benning, the sprawling military base outside of town, have gone back to Iraq for a second tour of duty
Things were very different on July 13, 2003. Business was booming for strip clubs in Columbus as thousands of soldiers were returning from the war in Iraq. At Fort Benning, five young soldiers piled into a car and took off for a night on the town. Jacob Burgoyne, Mario Navarrete, Alberto Martinez, Douglas Woodcoff and Richard Davis, all twenty-three years old, had come back from the war zone just 72 hours earlier. After months in Iraq and Kuwait, where women and alcohol were mostly out of reach, they were determined to make up for lost time. They five had been drinking heavily by the time they arrived at the Platinum club. Tony, the Platinum’s bouncer, remembers them as a rowdy bunch. Twice, he’d had to warn them to tone it down. When Richard Davis hit one of the dancers in the eye, Tony’s patience ran out and he kicked the whole group out. In the parking lot, Jacob Burgoyne picked a fight with Davis, whom he blamed for ruining everybody’s evening. When someone called the police, the soldiers got back into Martinez’ car and disappeared into the summer night.
Four months later, the Muscogee County coroner would count no less than thirty-three stab marks on what remained of Richard Davis. According to the statements made to police by Burgoyne and Navarrete after their arrests on November 7, 2003, the five soldiers had stopped at a dark spot by the road where the fight with Davis had resumed. At some point, Alberto Martinez had produced a knife. Both Burgoyne and Navarette later claimed that they had tried in vain to stop Martinez. One thing we know for sure: after Martinez killed Davis, the others all helped to cover up the crime. They drove to a nearby convenience store to buy lighter fuel; they doused Davis’ body with it and set it on fire. They dumped his remains in the woods, where they were discovered in Nov. 2003.
Diagnosis: PTSD
“Jake told me Martinez just went into a rage that night. There was no stopping him,” Billy Urban says. Jacob Burgoyne’s mother lives in a modest redbrick house in the small town of Keystone Heights in Northern Florida. There is a police car parked in front; Urban’s second husband Dennis, Jacob’s stepfather, is the deputy sheriff here. Billy Urban says she is “not the kind of mother who believes her son can do no wrong.” But, being a mother, that’s exactly what she is. She is not surprised, she says, that it was probably her son’s indiscretions that eventually led to him and the others being arrested. “Already as a little boy he was incapable of lying. Whenever he did something wrong, we could tell right away.”
But the boy in the Little League pictures in the bedroom at his mother’s house was clearly not the same person as the twenty-three year old in the mug shots taken by the Columbus police department. Something had changed, as Billy Urban soon found out when she went to collect her son’s personal belongings after his arrest. In them, she discovered Jake’s medical file. “Diagnosis: PTSD,” it read, post-traumatic stress disorder. “Patient seems to have severe anxiety issues exacerbated from stress and multiple traumatic events. Patient must be monitored by unit members at all time, not be able to carry weapons or munitions. Patient has homicidal/suicidal ideations. Patient will be command directed to psych upon return.” Urban was even more shocked to learn that Jake’s being diagnosed with PTSD came as the result of a failed suicide attempt: Jake had swallowed an overdose of anti-depressives in Kuwait on July 6, just a few days before his return to the States. “You would think that the Army would tell his mom about something like that. But when I confronted them about it, all they said was Jake was an adult and they had to respect his privacy.”
Like Jacob Burgoyne, more than one hundred thousand U.S. soldiers are estimated to have returned from the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan with symptoms of PTSD. An official Army study, the results of which were published in the New England Journal of Medicine in Dec. 2004, concluded that 15.8 to 17.7 percent of soldiers who took part in Operation Iraqi Freedom, the initial invasion of Iraq, showed signs of “severe depression, generalized anxiety or ptsd.” That’s roughly one in six soldiers out of more than one million soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past three years. (The percentage of PTSD among Afghanistan veterans is slightly lower.)
Officially, just over one thousand soldiers have been evacuated from Iraq alone for mental reasons. And the Department of Veterans Affairs, in whose care soldiers end up after their discharge from the military, has so far treated 6,400 Iraq or Afghanistan vets for PTSD. But according to Dr. Charles Friedman, director of the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Vermont, these figures are probably a conservative estimate. “The Army study only looked at the invasion of Iraq, not at the insurgency that followed it. One can assume that in an insurgency, where everybody is under threat, from the truck driver to the office clerk, the prevalence of PTSD will be much higher. And it only interviewed career soldiers, not the Reserves and National Guard. There is reason to believe that PTSD will be higher among the latter.” (Army Reservists and National Guard members typically have civilian jobs, and only train for one weekend a month and two weeks a year.) What’s more, Friedman says, there are very little data to go on. The first national PTSD survey among Vietnam veterans was only conducted in the mid-eighties. It found that thirty percent of Vietnam vets showed signs of PTSD at some point, and fifteen percent were still struggling with it at the time of the survey; fifteen to twenty years after their deployment.
PTSD is generally defined as “a psychiatric disorder that can occur following the experience or witnessing of life-threatening events.” People who suffer from PTSD “often relive the experience through nightmares and flashbacks, have difficulty sleeping, and feel detached or estranged. These symptoms can be severe enough and last long enough to significantly impair the person’s daily life.” It is, of course, hardly a new phenomenon. PTSD – the phrase was first coined in 1980 – is only the latest moniker for what was known as ‘Soldier’s Heart’ after the American Civil War, ‘Shell-shock’ after World War I, ‘Battle Fatigue’ after World War II and ‘Combat Stress’ after the Vietnam War. Author Jonathan Shay, in Achilles in Vietnam, goes back even further. Shay, a psychologist who has worked for years with Vietnam veterans in the Boston area, suggests that the mythological figure of Achilles, from Homer’s Iliad, could well have been the first recorded case of battle-related PTSD in history.
The Midtown Massacre
If the library at the Muscogee County Jail had a copy of The Iliad, Jacob Burgoyne might well relate to Homer’s description of the horrors of war. We have agreed not to talk about the events of July 13, 2003, for which he is on trial, but only about what led into them: Burgoyne’s experiences during the war in Iraq, and his involvement in what has come to be known as the ‘Midtown Massacre’.
“It must have been around 11 a.m. on April 11 when we got the call,” Burgoyne says over the jailhouse phone. The U.S. invasion force had pretty much taken Baghdad, but isolated pockets of resistance remained. It was to one such pocket, near the main Baghdad airport, that Burgoyne’s Bravo Company was dispatched. The men had been told that around fifty ‘fedayeen’, Saddam’s paramilitary troops, including some Syrian fighters, were making a last stand there.
Burgoyne remembers the eerie calm at the scene. “When we first arrived, it was business as usual. There were cars going past, people were crossing the road. And then everything went real quiet. The next thing we knew they were shooting at us from all directions. It was obvious they had been waiting for us.”
By the time the shooting stopped, some six hours later, the sun was setting over Baghdad. Depending on the source, one- to two-hundred enemy combatants lay dead in the street, but miraculously not a single American life was lost. It was the soldiers themselves who dubbed the events of that day the ‘Midtown Massacre’, after a famous mob killing in New York City. When Bravo Company returned to Kuwait six weeks later, their reputation preceded them. “Nobody would talk to us. They said we were crazy murderers and rapists,” Specialist Donald Duncan would later recall. “Well, I can see the murder part, seeing as how we did kill a lot of people.”
The Duncan quote is from a May 2004 article in Playboy magazine. It was the first detailed account of the ‘Midtown Massacre’, and it led to an internal inquiry at Fort Benning in July of last year. A major Hollywood movie, ‘Death and Dishonor’, based on the article, is currently under development at Warner Bros. with Paul Haggis of “Million Dollar Baby” fame directing. Clint Eastwood will play the part of Richard Davis’ father Lanny, who for months had to battle the military hierarchy to get them to investigate the disappearance of his son, who had simply been listed as ‘AWOL,” Absent Without Leave.
But in this story, it seems, the victims are often also the perpetrators. The handwritten statements made by the members of Bravo Company during the Fort Benning inquiry, were recently obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). And they paint a less than flattering portrait of Richard Davis. There was an incident, during the Midtown Massacre, when Douglas Woodcoff had taken two enemy prisoners who had been hiding in a basement. One of the men had his arm shot off. As one soldier testified, “the guy with the shot up arm, [Richard Davis] stuck his finger in his wound, and put cigarettes out on him. The other guy, he only had a shirt on, other than that he was buck-naked, he punched him and stepped on his balls. He thought it was funny.”
The inquiry also confirmed that Davis had, at one point, put a skull on a stick outside their temporary base at Baghdad’s Technical College, possibly to evoke a scene from “Apocalypse Now!,” although it turned out that the skull was made of plastic. And several soldiers testified that Davis and others in his platoon had sex with Iraqi women, probably prostitutes, at a shopping mall in Baghdad. This was not a secret. Davis boasted about it to other soldiers all the time. “Everybody knew about it,” a soldier testified, “they were the only ones to get some in months.”
In the end, the Army concluded that there was “insufficient evidence to prove or disprove the allegations” in the Playboy article. The investigation was closed, even though several soldiers had testified that they had also killed women and children during the firefight.
When Jacob Burgoyne talks about the Midtown Massacre, he goes into ‘soldier mode’. “We were really in the enemy’s hands out there. Everybody’s just shooting. AK rounds being shot at you, guys with RPG’s running across the road. You’re trying to stay disciplined, trying not to O-cross nobody. There’s bunkers all over the road, and the bunkers are all booby-trapped. We’re shooting up the bunkers. Then, about two hours into the fight, we hear over the radio that we’ve got suicide bombers as well.”
The Midtown Massacre had already led to an earlier inquiry into war crimes. The investigation centered on Lt. Col. John Charlton, the commander of the 1st Battalion 15th Infantry Regiment, which Bravo Company was part of. Charlton had executed an unarmed enemy combatant as he was lying on the ground. The Army cleared Charlton of any wrongdoing, accepting his argument that he, mistakenly, thought the enemy combatant was a suicide bomber. Minutes earlier, a suicide bomber had indeed blown himself up, wounding a U.S. soldier. “We really didn’t take no prisoners after that,” Burgoyne says. “We were told to just strip them, leave them tied to a post and get the hell out of dodge. You’re not thinking about the Geneva Convention, you’re thinking about staying alive.”
There is one sentence that jumps out from Burgoyne’s medical report: “The patient views his role in killing enemy soldiers in a poor light, inquiring if he should feel like a murderer.”
“What made me say that is because some people that died didn’t deserve to die; they were just in the wrong place. What we did in Iraq is what we were trained to do. But it’s still hard when you’re looking through a scope and you’re about to kill somebody of flesh and bone, someone who has feelings just like you. You’re killing your own kind. I just don’t think it’s something that people should think that it’s OK to do. Killing, I mean. It’s something I’m going to have to live with for the rest of my life. I still don’t know what it is, this PTSD. I just know they diagnosed me with it, and that I’m going to have to find a way to deal with it.”
Historic trial
It didn’t take David West long to realize that there was something not quite right with his client. West, an attorney in the Atlanta suburb of Marietta, had been asked to take on the defense of Alberto Martinez, the twenty-three year old former soldier from Oceanside, California, who stands accused of doing the actual killing of Richard Davis. “When I walked into the room I hadn’t even considered the possibility of a mental defense. But there was some problem with the communication between us, and with his ability to recall information. It was sufficient to make me realize that there was an underlying health issue that I needed to take a look at.”
West contacted a PTSD expert at Emory University, Dr. Millie Astin, and convinced her to meet with Martinez. “I’ll never forget the phone call I got from her afterwards. She said: ‘Your boy has got one of the worst cases of post-traumatic stress disorder that I’ve ever seen’. It’s one of those things where, as a lawyer, you go: Yeah, that’s awesome! But then you go: Oh shit. Now I’m going to have to do something that no lawyer has ever tried to do before, at least not in Georgia.”
The PTSD defense has been successfully argued only three times in U.S. legal history. In 1980, Joseph Oteri convinced a jury that his client, Michael Tindall, a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, became a drugs smuggler because the war had turned him into an ‘action junkie’. Oteri showed the court footage from “Apocalypse Now!” and “The Deer Hunter” as part of his defense. In 1991, Connecticut lawyer Michael Sherman, of Michael Skakel fame, got his client Roger Ligon, a Vietnam vet, off after he shot and killed an unarmed man during an argument on a supermarket parking lot. And in 1983, another Vietnam veteran, on trial for kidnapping a woman, was found not guilty for reasons of insanity. But when that man’s lawyer, Sverre Staurset, recently defended an Iraq war veteran, he wasn’t so lucky. The jury in Tacoma, Washington, was not swayed by the argument that Sgt. 1st Class James Pitts killed his wife because the war in Iraq had turned him into a “killing machine.”
When the Columbus case goes to trial some time this summer, chances are you will hear about it. What with a Hollywood movie in the making, and at least one news network signing up relatives for exclusives, the case is sure to attract a lot of media coverage. David West is no longer Martinez’s lawyer – his newly established private practice is taking up too much of his time – but he has asked to stay on as co-counsel. “Because, by now, there isn’t another lawyer in Georgia who knows more about PTSD than I do. And because I like an historic trial. This is an important case, one that’s going to have repercussions long after I’m gone.”
That is, if the judge allows the PTSD defense. West, for one, doesn’t see how it could be kept out. “It’s going to come in. I don’t have any doubt about that. And then the jury is going to be wondering why someone didn’t catch this sooner. What do they have in place to prevent this from happening? They’re going to want to know.”
West is convinced that “this is not about to be the last case from this conflict. The Army worries a lot about training these people to kill, but they don’t worry a lot about what happens to them once they do kill. You’re going to see more soldiers coming home and more people getting hurt. What it should be about is bringing this to the forefront and coming up with a plan to do something about it. But the Army seems to have a different agenda.”
The Army, West says, “has been horrible throughout. They have blocked me every step of the way. They didn’t want to give up one ounce of information, and they invoked national security to block a lot of what I was asking for. They’re clearly worried that this is going to hurt them, and they’re circling the wagons.”
The irony is that Jacob Burgoyne was all set to become a success story for the Army’s new approach to dealing with PTSD. Unlike Martinez and Davis, Burgoyne had been diagnosed with PTSD well before leaving the combat theater, and for a while, everything was done by the (newly established) book. In 2002, a mild panic had swept through the military hierarchy after four soldiers from Fort Bragg in North Carolina killed their spouses in a six-week period. Three of the soldiers had recently returned from Afghanistan; two committed suicide afterwards. For a while, the anti-malaria drug Lariam was seen as the culprit. (Lariam invariably comes up in cases like these, and the Army has since stopped giving it to soldiers.) An official inquiry concluded that the killings were the result of pre-existing marital problems, combined with the stress of separation. But it also said that military culture prevented troubled soldiers and their families from seeking the help they needed. “We’re not doing what we need to be doing yet,” said Col. Dave Orman, the Army psychiatrist who led the team of investigators. “There was a prevalent attitude that seeking behavioral health care was not career-safe.”
Partly as a result of the Fort Bragg controversy, the Pentagon has adopted a new set of procedures, the Deployment Cycle Support Contingency Plan (DCS). “That is to say: we would have done it anyway but the events at Fort Bragg speeded up the process,” says Pentagon spokesperson Rhonda Paige. DCS is a comprehensive program under which soldiers are psychologically screened and, if necessary, assisted. It begins with the so-called ‘combat stress teams’, who are deployed in the battlefield with the soldiers, and ends with the ‘family support teams’ after their return to the States. DCS came into effect in July 2003, the month in which Jacob Burgoyne came home and Richard Davis was killed.
When Billy and Dennis Urban came to Columbus on July 10, 2003, the first thing they noticed was the nice Army sergeant who wouldn’t let their son out of his sight for a second. That was a direct result of the recommendation by the Army doctor in Kuwait that Burgoyne be “monitored at all times” until further psychological evaluation. “Jake probably didn’t want me to worry. He said he had asked for help, and needed to go to the hospital to be checked out.” The Urbans went with him to the hospital where Jacob Burgoyne was questioned for forty minutes. “Jake said he was feeling much better. Then he left the room for about three or four minutes to speak to this psychiatrist on the phone. And that was it.”
Jacob Burgoyne was given a two-day pass and told to report back to the hospital on Monday. By then Richard Davis would be dead. Shortly afterwards, Burgoyne and Navarette went AWOL (Absent Without Leave), Woodcoff went on leave, and Martinez got out of the army. When Davis didn’t report back for duty, the Army declared him AWOL too, and took his name off the rolls.
High Season at Walter Reed
Not every soldier with PTSD ends up on trial for murder. When all goes well, soldiers diagnosed with severe PTSD find themselves at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, a sprawling military hospital on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. Whenever the United States go to war, it is here that the human toll is at its most visible. Every other taxi that pulls up to Mologne House, a hotel on the hospital grounds, discharges a human tragedy. It is at Walter Reed that the young men – their average age is twenty-three – who return from Iraq with missing arms and legs are fitted with new artificial limbs. Walter Reed has been so overwhelmed with wounded since the start of the insurgency in Iraq that Mologne House is constantly overbooked, and outpatients are being directed to private hotels in the surrounding area.
Perhaps surprisingly, the amputees are a face of the war that the Pentagon is quite keen to present to the world. Dozens of TV crews have been allowed to film the soldiers as they struggle to adapt to their new limbs. President George W. Bush has visited the complex half a dozen times, twice around Christmas. There is considerably less attention for the patients in Wards 53, the psychiatric ward for outpatients, and Ward 54, the closed psychiatric ward. There has been no visit from the president, and the Pentagon has yet to allow a single journalist to – officially – visit with the PTSD patients at Walter Reed.
“The Army doesn’t like to talk about the PTSD patients,” says Stephen Robinson. “I met president Bush both times he was here. He said he was aware of my work, and he promised he wouldn’t abandon his troops. But I frankly didn’t believe him. I don’t think it touches him on a personal level.”
Robinson is the director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, a support group for veterans of the first Gulf war. An imposing former Army Ranger, sporting a crew cut and a crushing handshake, Robinson has become the unlikely go-to guy for soldiers suffering from PTSD. “Make no mistake: I love my country and I love the Army,” he says in his office in Silver Spring, Maryland, a few miles from Walter Reed. “But I have come to realize that this administration cares more for the state of its weapons systems than that of its soldiers.”
The main problem, according to Robinson, is the way soldiers are being screened for PTSD. “The Department of Defense is basically waiting for soldiers to come forward with their problems. There is a form they have to fill out. If they admit to having mental problems, there is a follow-up. If not, they are allowed to go home. But merely asking the question isn’t enough.”
Lt. J. Philip Goodrum (34) has become something of a poster boy for PTSD ever since his statements to the media about the lack of health care for soldiers led to Congressional hearings in early 2004. It is not a role he would have chosen for himself. “I was always a model soldier. I was voted Soldier of the Year in 2001. I had been recommended for a promotion.”
We’re talking on the bed in his room at Mologne House. Goodrum is an Army reservist and a postal worker in Knoxville, Tennessee, in civilian life. He is one of those polite southerners who address women with Ma’am. He’s wearing a tracksuit, but because there will be a photo shoot later on, he is patiently polishing every single button on his dress uniform. On his bedside table is a mess of pills, mostly anti-depressives. Goodrum’s voice trembles and he is sweating profusely as he struggles to explain the effect PTSD has had on his life. “Nightmares, flashbacks, trouble sleeping… Some days it’s all I can do to brush my teeth.”
He knows it isn’t always enough to convince people that he has a genuine problem. “There are times when I feel guilty when I meet the amputees in the corridor. There are times when I wish I had lost a leg myself. But it is not because you can’t see my wound that it isn’t there. If I wasn’t taking my pills, I would go outside and shoot three people right now.”
When the symptoms started to show after his return from Iraq in July 2003, Goodrum kept them to himself at first. “I was keeping it inside because I knew about the stigma. I didn’t want my record to say” psychological problems.” He experienced flashbacks, had trouble sleeping, and at one point almost died when he found himself, inexplicably, driving at 5 mph on a Tennessee freeway, and a truck nearly crashed into him. He started crying uncontrollably. He decided it was time to ask for help.
But Goodrum was in for a shock when he reported to the hospital at Fort Knox on Nov. 7 2003. There is a memo in his medical file stating that Lt.-Col. Ronald Stevens, the hospital chief, “does not want this patient in med’hold.” (Med’hold or Medical Hold is the Company soldiers are assigned to while they await a decision on their discharge and benefits.) Goodrum went instead to a private psychiatrist who immediately had him hospitalized. As a result, the Army declared him ‘AWOL’ (Absent Without Leave), a court-martial offence that carries a maximum sentence of six months in prison and the loss of all benefits. “They’re just messing with me because I spoke out publicly,” he says.
A few days before Goodrum requested help for his PTSD, he was at the Fort Knox hospital for an unrelated physical problem. He expressed his shock at conditions there to a visiting UPI reporter. “People were waiting for months before being allowed to see a doctor,” he says. “We had to buy our own blankets. Imagine that: having fought your country and not being given as much as a blanket for your troubles.”
Goodrum eventually reported voluntarily to Walter Reed Army Medical Center where, at the insistence of Fort Know, he was locked up in Ward 54, the closed psychiatric ward, for two weeks, despite misgivings of the hospital staff. The Army later charged him $6,000 for his stay at Walter Reed.
The charges against Goodrum were ultimately dropped in early 2005. But his case illustrates the kind of difficulties soldiers can encounter when they admit to having mental problems. Another soldier, George Pogany (32), was sent home to his base in Fort Carson, Colorado, after he experienced a panic attack in Iraq. Instead of receiving counseling, he was charged with cowardice and sent to court-martial. Pogany too was cleared after an Army doctor testified that his symptoms might have been the result of Lariam poisoning. But during his trial he wondered out loud to reporters how many soldiers would keep their mental problems to themselves after seeing what happened to him. “It would have been far better to keep my mouth shut,” Pogany said.
Tip of the iceberg
When Robert Acosta, 22, pours ketchup over his burger, the other customers in the chic Manhattan bistro do their best not to stare. Acosta has pinned the ketchup bottle in the hook that replaces his left hand, and given it a quick 180 degrees spin. It is one of the few perks of having returned form Iraq with his arm blown off. “People don’t know how to react when they see my hand,” Acosta says. “Sometimes they will tell me how much they appreciate the sacrifice I made for my country. What am I supposed to say to that? Gee, thanks?”
Acosta, who is from Santa Ana, California, is typical of many very young soldiers who have joined the U.S. Army for lack of something better to do, and when faced with the reality of war, realized they were not the ‘killing machines’ they thought they were. “I was nineteen when the war started. I thought I was invincible.” He points to his missing arm. “Then something like this happens and you realize: shit does happen.”
What happened was actually his own fault. Acosta never did see a lot of action in Iraq. His unit sat out the initial phase of the war in Kuwait. Later, he was stationed at the Baghdad airport for four months, his job there consisting of loading and unloading helicopters. A few mortars lobbed at the base by insurgents were the only enemy action. Until one day, Acosta and a buddy decided to take a Humvee, without permission, to score cigarettes and soft drinks from the Iraqi vendors outside.
“We did it all the time. But that day, we noticed we were the only military vehicle on the road. So we kind of got scared. As soon as we turned around a grenade flew in the window. I saw it and grabbed for it. But I guess I must have hit my elbow or some shit and it fell between my legs. That’s when it blew up.” Acosta lost his arm and was severely wounded in his right leg, which is held together with pins. His friend was kicked out of the Army because of the incident. “They told me they were letting me off easy because they figured I had paid enough already.”
The PTSD didn’t show until much later. Acosta spent four months at Walter Reed learning to use his new artificial arm. He was back in California when funny things started happening to him. “I would be driving on the freeway and suddenly swerve because I thought I had seen a roadside bomb. One night I planted my fist in my girlfriend’s face while we were sleeping. Another night I was staying over at a friend’s house, and I woke up trying to strangle him.”
He doesn’t care much for the help he has been given by the Army. “They have threatened to take away my PTSD benefits because I wouldn’t show up for therapy. But their idea of therapy is to stuff me full of pills. I didn’t want all that chemical shit in my brain, dude. I just needed someone to talk to.”
Eventually, he found a willing ear in Paul Rieckhoff, the founder of Operation Truth, a veteran’s rights organization in New York City. According to Rieckhoff, an Iraq veteran himself, “PTSD is without any doubt the most important problem facing soldiers today. It is the Agent Orange of our generation.”
He fears that the Army has learned little from the Vietnam experience. “We’re seeing exactly the same problems as after Vietnam: drug abuse, joblessness, relational problems, homelessness…” It is estimated that some 500,000 Vietnam veterans are homeless in the streets of America today. According to Rieckhoff, there are already several hundred homeless Iraq veterans in New York City alone. “I just hope it doesn’t take a sniper in a clock tower to get the Army to take the problem seriously.”
(Rieckhoff is referring, not quite accurately to Charles Whitman who on Aug. 1, 1966 shot forty-five people from the clock tower at the University of Texas in Austin. Although Whitman was an ex-Marine, he never actually served in Vietnam. In fact, the Hollywood stereotype of the Vietnam veteran turned sociopath is mostly just that. In real life, there have been relatively few incidents involving the type of Vietnam veteran played by Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver. Which makes it all the more worrying that there are so many cases already involving Iraq veterans. )
(In January 2005, Andres Raya, a Marine who had served in Fallujah, walked into a convenience store in Modesto, California, carrying an assault weapon. He calmly waited for the police to arrive, killed one officer and wounded another. He was shot to death after an hours long firefight with police. The police claim that Raya was a gang member, but his family says that he had been troubled ever since his return from Iraq.)
(That same month, a salesgirl at a Wal-Mart in Tyler, Texas, was kidnapped and murdered by an Iraq veteran, 24-year old Johnny Lee Williams, Jr. William’s mother said he’d been having nightmares and had trouble adjusting after coming back from Iraq.)
(In July 2004, Kenneth Schweitzer, a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan, walked into a bank in Keokuk, Iowa, shot a bullet into the ceiling, demanded the money, then turned himself in at the local police station. He hadn’t done it for the money, he told police, he just wanted to be locked up because he “couldn’t take it anymore.”)
(These are only a few examples, and according to Paul Rieckhoff, “they are merely the tip of the iceberg. Just wait until all these guys come back from their second tour of duty in Iraq.”)
The “traitor”
People who are afflicted with war-related PTSD have different ways of coping, and this is Jimmy Massey’s way. Several times a month, he puts on his old Marines uniform, his desert boots and his dark sunglasses. He throws a big handwritten sign over his shoulder, and proceeds to walk down the Main Street of Waynesville, North Carolina, population: 9,255. The sign says: “I killed innocent civilians for our government.”
It is not the kind of thing you get away with in Waynesville. To get to Waynesville, you take the Billy Graham Freeway, named after the infamous TV evangelist whose vocational training center is nearby. A huge sign along the freeway declares North Carolina “the most military-friendly state in the nation.” When Jimmy Massey walks down the Main Street, there are those who will spit at him and call him a traitor. Twice, people have tried to run him over in their cars.
There was a time when Jimmy Massey might have been one of those people. The old Massey was a gung-ho marine. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he says, “his hands were itching to go kill me a couple of ragheads.” He didn’t know it then but two years later he would have ample opportunity to do just that in Iraq. But there was no satisfaction after Massey killed his first “raghead.” On the contrary, at the end of a forty-eight hour period in which he says his unit killed “at least thirty innocent civilians.” Jimmy Massey would never be the same again.
It was early April 2003. Massey’s unit was manning a checkpoint near the old Al-Rashid barracks in Baghdad. There is one incident that Massey recalls with more detail than any other because it was key to his transformation. “A red Kia was approaching our checkpoint and made no sign of slowing down. We fired warning shots but the care kept coming towards us. That’s when we opened fire.”
When the marines approached the car, they found three civilians dead. The driver, miraculously, had survived unscathed. They found no weapons in the car. “What I will personally never forget is how the driver looked me straight into they eye and shouted: ‘Why have you killed my brother? He has done nothing to you!’ That was the defining moment for me. After that, I was no longer a marine.”
The facts are not disputed, merely their interpretation. In a letter to The Mountaineer, the local newspaper in Waynesville, Maj. Dan Schmitt, Massey’s superior in Iraq, writes: “Staff Sergeant Massey was personally fired from his position by me. I have no regrets. He was ineffective at leading Marines, and was a liability to those very Marines. (…) There is no profit for anyone by discrediting his story in any way. There were civilians injured and killed during our last fight. What everyone needs to know, however, is the measures we took to avoid that. Your Marines are not killers. They are honorable, ethical warriors. Your community should be proud of them.”
“You can call if fog of war if you wish but for me it was murder,” Massey says, “and I want Americans to know this.” The new Massey is a popular speaker at left-wing political events. He has traveled to Japan to meet with the peace movement there. He has testified at a Toronto hearing for Jeremy Hinzman, an American deserter who has asked for asylum in Canada. He has sold his gun collection. His own mother refuses to speak to him anymore, but his wife Kathy has followed him on his new path. Political activism has become his new career, but the PTSD is always present. “It’s the nightmares, the flashback to those forty-eight hours in Iraq that can e brought on by nothing more than a car’s screeching tires.” And there is the fact that whenever Massey plans to walk down Main Street with his sign, he does the same route by car the previous night, taking GPS coordinates of possible sniper positions.
Back in Washington, D.C., Stephen Robinson had said he was worried about Massey. “If I was the Army and I wanted to shut Jimmy up, I would arrest him and charge him with war crimes.” But Massey is unfazed. “What more can they do to me? Put me in prison? I’m already in prison. My PTSD, the knowledge that I have murdered innocent people, is my prison. It is what I have to live with every day of my life.”
Back in the real prison in Columbus, Georgia, Jacob Burgoyne has had a lot of time to reflect on how he got there. But he is no closer to figuring out whether what he experienced in Iraq and the murder of Richard Davis are connected. “All I now is that five guys came back from Iraq, and seventy-two hours later someone lost his life. That is all I can say about that.”
Billy Urban hopes there will come a day when she will be able to face Richard Davis’ parents. It is ironic, she says, how much the two families have in common. She and Davis’ mother lived on a American Army base near Frankfurt, at the same time, but without ever meeting. They both have husbands who served in Iraq and are dealing with their own PTSD issues. Lanny and Remy Davis even met at Walter Reed, where he was a PTSD patient, she a nurse. But the Davis family has let it be known that will not accept PTSD as an excuse for what was done to their son. “This has destroyed so many lives,” Urban sighs. Among her son’s belongings, she has found an old name tag that belonged to Richard Davis. “I’ve put it in a special box. I hope to return it to his family some time.”
GNN special correspondent Gert Van Langendonck is a freelance journalist based in New York City. The former foreign editor at the Brussels daily De Morgen, he covered wars in the former Yugoslavia, Congo, Rwanda, Burundi and Somalia. Most recently, he spent more than a year covering the insurgency in Iraq.
© Gert Van Langendonck 2005
This article may not be republished without the written consent of the author.
Posted by anthony
Anthony Lappé is GNN's Executive Editor. He's written for The New York Times, Details, New York, Paper, The Fader and Vice, among many others. He has worked as a producer for MTV and Fuse. He is the co-author of GNN's True Lies and the producer of their Iraq doc,...
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