New Book Brings the War Home

“My name is Chantelle Bateman. I’m a corporal in the United States Marine Corps Reserve. I need to preface this by saying that I am still under an active contract, so anything I say here is a complete representation of myself, and not at all any way shape or form the Marine Corps, the United States Marine Corps Reserve, or the U.S. government.”

“Thanks for having so much courage, sister,” someone shouted from the audience.

Bateman, 24, was one of five veterans who spoke last week at an event celebrating the release of a new book, “Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations.” The book, produced by Iraq Veterans Against the War and writer Aaron Glantz, is a sweeping compendium of stories from veterans and Iraqi civilians, detailing in striking detail their experiences of the war, its leadership, and its aftermath.

“I didn’t have a classic, you know, what you see on CNN war experience,” Bateman said. “I didn’t kick in doors, I kicked boxes. I worked supply.”

Despite not seeing combat, Bateman said that she knew something had changed in her when, towards the end of her deployment, the fuel farm for her base exploded after being hit by incoming mortar fire.

“All you could see was just this huge cloud of black smoke coming up into the air, and re-igniting again and again and again and again. A year before, had I seen this, I probably would have been freaked the hell out,” she said. “But in my sixth month in Iraq, I stopped to take a picture of it. I thought it was so cool.”

“That just tells you how cavalier you become about things like that,” Bateman said.

Now, Bateman said, she can’t stand the Fourth of July. She said she spends the day indoors, “under covers, under something, pretty much hiding out, and away from the noise and the boom and the flash.”

“They still tell you that you’re fine. As far as my unit is concerned, I’m fine. I’m not killing anybody right now, and I’m not going to kill myself right now, so I must be okay,” she said.

“I think that is something that people don’t necessarily realize. Just because I never killed anybody, just because nobody died in front of me, just because I never blew any shit up, doesn’t mean I’m fine. I’m not fine,” Bateman said.

"Just because I never blew any shit up, doesn’t mean I'm fine. I'm not fine," said Bateman to the audience.: Geoff Millard, Nick Morgan, Ami Baxter, Chantelle Bateman, and Adam Kokesh share their war stories at the "Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations" book release.

The Winter Soldier book gathers the words of soldiers who testified at a four-day event held in March 2008 in Silver Spring, Md. The veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who organized the event drew their inspiration from another Winter Soldier event organized 37 years earlier in Detroit by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, in which veterans of the war in Vietnam spoke about what they had seen, done, and felt while serving overseas.

Geoff Millard is a nine-year veteran of the military, who served 13 months in Iraq. Millard said the veterans behind the Winter Soldier book wanted to “challenge the traditional narratives of war.”

“See, we learn about war from TV, we learn about war from movies, sometimes from books although it seems like people read less and less these days. We don’t seem to learn about war from those who were there,” Millard said.

At the book event, held at the Busboys and Poets bookstore, and in the book itself, the veterans’ testimony reflects both the mundane, even tedious, aspects of the war, as well as what one speaker at the event called “combat atrocities.”

Nick Morgan said he was 19 when he got his deployment order to go to Iraq, where he was stationed at the Baghdad International Airport from February 2004 to February 2005. He arrived in Kuwait, and drove from Kuwait to Baghdad in a day, he said, in a Humvee with no doors and no armor.

Morgan’s unit was tasked with building a large checkpoint outside the airport, and clearing shrubs and trees from the side of the road between the airport and the Green Zone, he said.

“There was always a lot of children playing in the area, messing around, asking us for food, candy, water, whatever,” Morgan said. One day, he said, “some people in my unit decided to give them water, in the form of a large chunk of ice that they threw at them as we were driving by. I just remember seeing the kid take a large chunk of ice in the kidney and drop to the ground.”

Ami Baxter, who also spoke at the event, said she served in Iraq from February 2004 to February 2005, at a base outside of Fallujah. Her unit ran ambitious night missions, 9 hours away, she said, because their commanding officer was trying to make major, and wanted to head up high-profile assignments.

Baxter, a slim, dark-haired 28-year-old, said that another commanding officer insisted that she and another woman ride in his Humvee. “He started calling it the Victoria’s Secret humvee, and the whole mission he would make these lewd comments, completely inappropriate,” Baxter said. She filed a sexual harassment complaint, she said, and was eventually moved off his Humvee.

Baxter’s experience is not an isolated one, according to the book, which has a section dedicated to stories about sexual assault and harassment in the military, and the discrimination faced by gay and lesbian members of the armed forces. The introduction to the section notes that “nearly a third of female veterans say they were sexually assaulted or raped while in the military, and 71 percent to 90 percent say they were sexually harassed by the men with whom they served.”

Baxter said like Morgan, her unit lacked armor and other necessary equipment. “We had to scramble to try and find sheets of metal to weld to our trucks.”

“I hated being in Iraq, and the reasons why were because of the bullshit mission, and the terrible equipment, and some of the most worthless leadership in the world,” Baxter said.

Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: published by Haymarket BooksGlantz, who worked with the members of Iraq Veterans Against the War to produce the book, had also been in Iraq during the war, as an un-embedded independent reporter. He said that when he heard that the veterans were organizing the Winter Soldier event, he knew he wanted to help document and preserve the testimony.

“This is history. I wanted to make sure that it didn’t get lost,” he said. “That ten years from now, 15 years from now, when they go back to write the history of the war, people can read the testimony of American soldiers talking about what they actually did and what they actually saw in the war.”

But the importance of the veterans’ testimony is not just for the history books. Their words are vital today, Glantz said.

“I think that in this country, people do not want to be reminded about the terrible things that our government does. It’s very uncomfortable,” Glantz said. The testimony of the veterans in the book shatters that silence, he said.

Book events similar to the one at Busboys and Poets have been organized in Illinois, California, Oregon, Florida, New York, and Wisconsin, Glantz said. At each event, he said, new veterans have joined the ranks of those stepping forward and speaking out. At the D.C. reading, three of the five people speaking had not participated in the original March hearing.

“Historians are going to go back and say this event in March, it was the beginning of a movement of people telling the truth about this war, of soldiers coming back to tell the truth,” Glantz said.

“The event in March, it wasn’t the end,” he said. “Now it’s rolling. The story is getting out there.”