May 6, 2005

  • OP-ED COLUMNIST


    From 'Gook' to 'Raghead'


    By BOB HERBERT

    Published: May 2, 2005

    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 Sept. 11, 2001, before hearing anything about the
    terror attacks that would change the direction of American history, Mr.
    Delgado enlisted as a private in the Army Reserve. Suddenly, in ways he
    had never anticipated, the military took over his life. He was trained
    as a mechanic and assigned to the 320th Military Police Company in St.
    Petersburg. By the spring of 2003, he was in Iraq. Eventually he would
    be stationed at the prison compound in Abu Ghraib.

    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.' "