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Soldier Asks Himself: "Am I a Torturer?"
By Justine Sharrock
Mother Jones
March/April 2008 Issue
Ben Allbright watches "The Daily Show," worships
Dave Eggers - and still wound up "softening up" prisoners in
Iraq.
The prisons in Iraq stink. Ask any guard or interrogator and they'll tell you
it's a smell they'll never forget: sweat, fear, and rot. On the base where Ben
Allbright served from May to September 2003, a small outfit named Tiger in western
Iraq, water was especially scarce; Ben would rig a hose to a water bottle in
a feeble attempt to shower. He and the other Army reservists tried mopping the
floors, but the cheap solvents only added a chemical note to the stench. During
the day, when the temperature was in the triple digits, the smell fermented.
It got even hotter in the Conex container, the kind you see on top of 18-wheelers,
where Ben kept his prisoners. Not uncommonly the thermometer inside read 135,
even 145 degrees. The Conex box was the first stop for all prisoners brought
to the base, most of them Iraqis swept up during mass raids. Ben kept them blindfolded,
their hands bound behind their backs with plastic zip ties, without food or
sleep, for up to 48 hours at a time. He made them stand in awkward positions,
so that they could not rest their heads against the wall. Sometimes he blared
loud music, such as Ozzy or AC/DC, blew air horns, banged on the container,
or shouted. "Whatever it took to make sure they'd stay awake," he
explains.
Ben was not a "bad apple," and he didn't make up these treatments.
He was following standard operating procedure as ordered by military-intelligence
officers. The MI guys didn't make up the techniques either; they have a long
international history as effective torture methods. Though generally referred
to by circumlocutions such as "harsh techniques," "softening
up," and "enhanced interrogation," they have been medically shown
to have the same effects as other forms of torture. Forced standing, for example,
causes ankles to swell to twice their size within 24 hours, making walking excruciating
and potentially causing kidney failure.
Ben says he never saw anything like that. The detainees didn't faint or go
insane, as people have been known to do under similar conditions, but they also
"weren't exactly lucid." And, he notes, "I was hardly getting
any sleep myself."
When I first set off to interview the rank-and-file guards and interrogators
tasked with implementing the administration's torture guidelines, I thought
they'd never talk openly. They would be embarrassed, wracked by guilt, living
in silent shame in communities that would ostracize them if they knew of their
histories. What I found instead were young men hiding their regrets from neighbors
who wanted to celebrate them as war heroes. They seemed relieved to talk with
me about things no one else wanted to hear-not just about the acts themselves,
but also about the guilt, pain, and anger they felt along with pride and righteousness
about their service. They struggled with these things, wanted to make sense
of them-even as the nation seemed determined to dismiss the whole matter
and move on.
This, perhaps, is the real scandal of Abu Ghraib: In survey after survey, as
many as two-thirds of Americans say torture is justified when it's used to get
information from terrorists. In an abc/Washington Post poll in the wake of the
2004 scandal, 60 percent of respondents classified what happened at Abu Ghraib
as mere abuse, not torture. And as recently as last year, 68 percent of Americans
told Pew Research pollsters that they consider torture an acceptable option
when dealing with terrorists.
Critics of the administration's interrogation policies warn that the ramifications
will be felt across the globe, including by Americans unlucky enough to be imprisoned
abroad. Foreign-policy scholars fear the fallout from Abu Ghraib has already
weakened the U.S. military's anti-terrorism capabilities. Lawyers warn about
war-crime tribunals. But hardly anyone is discussing the repercussions already
being felt here at home. It's the soldiers tying the sandbags around Iraqis'
necks and blaring the foghorns through the night who are experiencing the effects
most acutely. And the communities they're returning to are reeling as a result.
When i went to visit Ben in Little Rock, Ark., I wanted to know why this charming,
intelligent, and overly polite 27-year-old had done what he'd done. For 10 days
we rode around in his beat-up maroon 1970s Mercedes-running errands, picking
up job applications, meeting his girlfriend for lunch. Ben wore pink shirts,
hipster blazers, and color-coordinated Campers; he used hair products, which
to his friends meant being a metrosexual; he listened to indie rock, watched
The Daily Show, and wrote attitude-filled blogs on veterans rights, which meant
being a liberal. He refereed football games, worshipped novelist Dave Eggers,
and placed special orders at McDonald's so his meals would be fresh.
He was unemployed, fired from his latest job as a bank teller the day before
I arrived. Ben had worked there for four months-the longest he'd held
down a full-time job since coming home from Iraq. He'd tried tutoring high schoolers,
bagging groceries, and doing IT support for Best Buy. Part of the problem, he
said, was the lack of good jobs in the area, part of it his own "flailing
and procrastinating." He had toyed with the idea of law school and scored
a near-perfect 178 on the lsat entrance test, but then turned down offers from
schools such as nyu. While I was in town he picked up an application for a job
at his corner liquor store. In high school he was one of two students voted
most likely to become famous. "The other kid became a doctor," Ben
confessed, "and I, well, yeah..."
As a kid, Ben was a sort of Doogie Howser, blowing through school, asking teachers
for more work, until his mom, fearing the classes weren't challenging enough,
pulled him out in the fourth grade in order to home school him. His parents
finally bought a TV set when Ben was in eighth grade. Ben says his dad was an
original member of Pat Robertson's 700 Club. He was an executive for American
Airlines, a job that moved the family around a lot: St. Louis, Kansas City,
Nashville. After they lost their nest egg in the 1987 stock market crash, the
family moved from Chicago's lakeshore suburbs to the South Side. Finally, when
Ben was a teenager, they settled in Lonoke, outside Little Rock.
Ben took me to the town, 4,300 people and 22 churches. Tractors dotted the
fields that hadn't yet been grabbed by developers. He noted a "Free Greens"
sign advertising leftovers from someone's garden and the customary wave from
passing cars. His condescension about the "bumblefuck" town cracked
when he showed me a plot of land, near one that his buddy had just bought, that
he saw as a potential home for a future family.
Ben pointed out the Grace Baptist Church, which he attends because he's friends
with the pastor and his son, "not because I agree with their fundamentalist
views." As an undergraduate at the University of Arkansas, Ben explored
Buddhism and Taoism, but he returned to Christianity as a way to make sense
of the world, even though sometimes it's "awkward reconciling my religion
and military profession."
Ben was still in high school when he enlisted as a reservist; his friend Brandon
had asked Ben to accompany him to the recruiter's office as a "bullshit
detector." In the end, he enrolled along with Brandon, applying twice before
he finally bulked up enough to meet the weight requirement. He saw it as a chance
to get out from under his parents' thumb and learn about computers. But mainly
it was his idealistic sense of duty-right out of Starship Troopers, the
1959 Robert Heinlein novel that is now a cult hit in military circles. "Like
in the book, there's the idea that to be a full citizen you have to contribute."
Ben was called up to go to Iraq in February 2003. His father told him the invasion
seemed like a mistake, but they didn't have time to discuss the subject much;
he died of cancer a month later. Half an hour after the funeral, Ben was on
his way to Kuwait.
In iraq, ben was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division; since there was no
computer work for him to do, he was made a prison guard.
Things on the Tiger base were pretty "ad hoc," Ben recalls. Some
orders, like the mandate that the heavy Kevlar helmets be fastened at the chin
at all times, were clearly posted on the wall. Others were left to word-of-mouth,
including instructions about detainee handling. Military-intelligence officers
issued various orders; then there were the anonymous ogas, a.k.a. other government
agencies, code for either private contractors or cia officers with civilian
clothes, long beards, and fake names like Joe Stallone and Frank Norris. The
chain of command was chaotic.
Ben was soon promoted to warden and made small changes on his shift: Guards
had to limit stress positions, and detainee rations were increased from crackers
and peanut butter to whole Meals Ready to Eat, which were served three times,
not two times, a day. He enforced a ban on cameras to discourage the degrading
treatment that usually came when soldiers posed with prisoners for trophy photos.
"But I could only do so much," he admits.
When he was first ordered to soften up detainees, "it didn't seem so weird,"
Ben says; nothing in the war zone was normal. "You don't think about what
you're doing until later." He was asked to stand in on dozens of interrogations,
to help intimidate the subject: one more body, one more gun. The small room
was usually crowded with guards, military-intelligence officers, and ogas. They
were told to wear T-shirts, not uniforms that would signal their rank. Under
the single bulb, the interrogator would loom above a prisoner seated in a child-size
chair. Sometimes the room suddenly went dark and strobe lights flashed on. Other
times the soldiers would bang pots and pans in the detainee's face, blare loud
music, blast air horns and sirens. The sounds were meant to disorient, but also
to mask the screams. More than half the time, even if they were cooperative
the detainees were beaten, kicked out of their chairs, punched in the windpipe
or gut, pulled by the ears-blows that wouldn't leave lasting marks. Occasionally
things got out of hand, but with their medical training, the military-intelligence
officers could stitch up or bandage injuries, avoiding a call to the medics
and an entry in the logbooks that the Red Cross could read.
The first time Ben saw a detainee get beaten, he took the lead interrogator
aside afterward to ask, "Was this stuff really allowed? Didn't it violate
the Geneva Conventions?"
"These aren't pows; they're detainees," he was told. "Those
rules are antiquated and don't apply. You can't get any information without
breaking that stuff." Ben asked other officers, but "it was basically
like, 'Dude, you're actually worried about how we're treating them? They wouldn't
afford you the same respect.'"
If there is anything Ben hates, it's not having all the information. Like most,
he hadn't listened when the Geneva Conventionswere covered in basic training.
But as it happened, when first arriving in country he'd asked a military lawyer
for a cd-rom of various documents, just to have on hand. Now, scrolling through
the text on his laptop, Ben saw what anyone could: All prisoners-civilians
and combatants-are protected against violence. There is no separate category
for unlawful combatants. "Outrages upon personal dignity" and "humiliating
and degrading treatment" are prohibited. Abuses like those at the Tiger
base were "grave breaches." War crimes.
Ben made a verbal complaint to his platoon leader and later to his platoon
leader's boss, asking for an investigation. The officers seemed surprised. "They
said they'd look into it and tell their superiors," Ben recalls. "But
it didn't seem like a priority." Nothing happened.
"I'm not one of those hardcore 'Duty! Honor! Country!' guys," explains
Ben. "But I had signed a contract with rules and obligations. I figured
that I did the responsible thing by notifying people. I felt helpless not being
able to do more. But at least I'd covered my end." He tried quizzing the
guards under him about the Geneva Conventions, but they "just wanted to
fuck with people." He developed a reputation as a softy.
In the summer of 2003, the interrogators threw a detainee against a concrete
wall, punched him in the neck and gut, kicked him in the knees, threw him outside,
and dragged him back in by his hair. For the entire two-hour ordeal, the prisoner
wouldn't talk; Ben later found out he spoke Farsi and couldn't understand the
interrogators' English and Arabic. Afterward, Ben hid behind a building and
cried for the first time since his dad's death. "It was like a loss of
humanity. Like we were trading one dictator in for another. I had to weigh my
integrity against my duty. Why couldn't I stand up more? Why was I hesitant?"
Ben told me this as we were sitting in his bedroom back home in Little Rock;
by the end of the story he had climbed into bed and pulled blankets up around
him and was hugging a pillow. There were tears in his eyes, and he apologized
for being so "weird about this stuff." Ben writes poetry, and he's
fiercely loyal to his Army buddies. But now, for the briefest moment, I saw
rage in his eyes.
War, ben was discovering, is "not like what you see on TV. It's insanely
boring and depressing." His trip home at Thanksgiving in 2003 lasted just
long enough for him to discover that his girlfriend had a new man. Back at Tiger,
he joined a group of grunts watching a Michael Moore dvd. It struck a chord
with them. "I was never political before I went to Iraq. But I was already
disgruntled and fed up just being in Iraq. The movie made me angrier."
It wasn't Fahrenheit 9/11 that so resonated with the soldiers; it was Roger
& Me, a documentary that follows the decline of Flint, Michigan, after the
General Motors plants closed down. Ben saw "connections between U.S. policies
away and at home, how the administration is willing to sacrifice regular people.
They were throwing people out of their homes in Flint just like we were taking
people out of their homes in Iraq. We got all misty-eyed. It was emotional and
had a lingering effect on us."
Ben began to think about what was behind the abuses he'd seen. Soldiers were
sent off to war with the promise that they'd be heroes. They had been trained
to kill bad guys, not baby-sit detainees. "You need to think that you're
there for a reason, that there is some purpose," Ben says. But now people
at home were saying the war was a mistake; body counts were mere blips in the
news. When Ben first arrived in Iraq, he played soccer with locals; a few months
later Iraqis wouldn't even set foot on the base. More and more, the soldiers
turned their anger on the prisoners. They poked them with rifles, called them
"towel heads" and "sand niggers." Guards would let other
soldiers "snag a guy to fuck with or whatever, as long as it didn't leave
a mark."
About a month after Ben left Tiger for good, an insurgency leader detained
there, Maj. General Abed Hamed Mowhoush, was suffocated in a sleeping bag-a
technique that, like waterboarding, Ben had heard was used but had never seen.
The General, as he was known, was one of the 160-plus detainees who have died
in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since August 2002, according to aclu
attorney Hina Shamsi. Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer, the man accused
of murdering Mowhoush, claimed he'd been following orders. In 2006, he was convicted
of negligent homicide and dereliction of duty and sentenced to 60 days of barracks
confinement, the equivalent of house arrest.
After ben came home in March 2004, he was treated warmly. "I was at Applebee's
one night and a guy overheard that I had just come back from Iraq," he
recalls, "so he bought me a Jack and Coke." He was offered discounts
on cell phones and cars. "I finally felt appreciated after feeling used
for so long."
But the welcomes couldn't silence the questions that kept him up at night.
Ben loves to debate, perhaps because he usually wins, but now he was endlessly,
fruitlessly arguing with himself. "Every human being instinctively knows
right from wrong. There is never a justification for torture." But then
again, "Is softening people up wrong on some levels? I don't know. It wasn't
beneficial to them, but it was presented as necessary." He had seen a side
of himself he didn't know existed, and now he had to live with that. "In
combat you question your mortality," he told me. "In these prisons
you question your morality."
I asked Ben point-blank if he considered himself a torturer. It was a hard
question to ask, a harder one to answer. He said he didn't know. He asked me
how other soldiers in his situation had responded. Most, I told him, didn't
even brook use of the word "torture" instead of "harsh interrogation."
He finally said he guessed he didn't want to have to think of himself that way,
and that it was time to go meet his girlfriend.
When he first got back from Iraq, Ben had nightmares and couldn't remember
things; this was infuriating, since he'd always prided himself on his perfect
memory. A psychiatrist diagnosed him with ptsd, but he refused medication. Instead
he blew $14,000 on bar tabs his first four months home. "I drank every
night. I'd wake up next to a stranger at around 4 p.m. and head off to the strip
club again." He traveled some, because "you can reinvent yourself
when you're out of town." He also reenlisted; he'll be on active duty until
2013, which means that once a month he has to cut his perfectly messy hair and
show up at the local base. He thinks the military needs people like him, "people
who can see both sides of things."
When Ben first started speaking out about torture, posting to blogs and testifying
for a human rights group, he didn't use his real name. Then, gradually, he grew
bolder. Brandon, his high school friend, Army buddy, and now roommate, encouraged
him, so long as he wasn't trying to become famous. He got the occasional blog
flame-"un-American commie bastard"-but there was none
of the reprisal from the Army that he'd feared. Nor, for that matter, any call
from the various military investigators looking into human rights abuses. No
one seemed to care.
People cared when Specialist Joseph Darby spoke out, though not always in the
way he would have wanted them to. Darby is the Army reservist who turned in
the Abu Ghraib photos. He hates the term "whistleblower," which is
understandable, since it's earned him others like "rat" and "traitor."
He's gotten death threats, from phone calls and emails to just whispers around
his hometown of Cumberland, Maryland. His sister-in-law's house was vandalized;
his wife was verbally harassed and the police refused to help.
I met with Darby at a Starbucks in a strip mall along a busy four-lane route.
He is still in a sort of witness-protection program the military put him in
after his role in the scandal was revealed. He didn't want me to detail his
appearance, which has changed somewhat from the recognizable round face that
appeared in magazines and on television. This, he said, was his last interview
before he put Abu Ghraib behind him forever.
He said being in hiding wasn't so tough; he'd always kept to himself. His marriage
was rocky while he was in Iraq, and seclusion had forced the couple back together.
Whenever our conversation got difficult, he fiddled with his wedding ring.
Darby joined the Army Reserves for tuition money when he was 17, but he never
did end up going to college. Instead, after returning from a deployment in Bosnia
in June 2002, he found construction work off the books. Eight months later,
he was called up again to go to Iraq. When his unit was assigned to guard prisoners
at Abu Ghraib, Darby asked for a job where he wouldn't have too much contact
with the detainees; with his temper, he didn't trust himself around the Iraqis.
He became the guy you called to get a mop, garbage bags, or meals brought up
to the tiers.
Unlike Ben, Darby didn't witness any abuse; he came across the torture photos
by accident. The desert heat had warped his own snapshots, so he asked Corporal
Charles Graner for some pictures, hoping for images of camels and tanks. Scrolling
through the CD, he laughed when he saw the pyramid of naked Iraqis. Then he
got to the simulated-fellatio pictures.
He insists he's not a goody-two-shoes tattletale or a saint by any stretch.
"I'm as crooked as the next MP," he explains. "I've bent laws
and I've broke laws." Months earlier, Graner (who is now serving a 10-year
sentence) had shown him a photo of a prisoner tied up in a stress position and
said, "The Christian in me knows this is wrong, but the corrections officer
in me can't help but love to make a grown man piss himself." Darby says
he was too tired to think much about it.
It took him three weeks of soul-searching to decide whether he should turn
in the photos. He finally took them not to his superior officers but to the
Army investigation office, where soldiers can report everything from sexual
harassment to theft-a breach of the chain of command that many would later
hold against him. Four months later, Darby was sitting in the Abu Ghraib mess
hall; cnn was on, showing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's congressional
testimony on prisoner abuse. Darby had no idea his tip-which military
investigators had assured him would remain anonymous-had led to a national
scandal. He heard Rumsfeld name various people who'd provided information-"first
the soldier, Specialist Joseph Darby, who alerted the appropriate authorities...My
thanks and appreciation to him for his courage and his values."
Darby dropped his fork midbite. Oh shit. He felt 400 pairs of eyes on him.
Seymour Hersh had already published his name, but as Darby says, "Who reads
the damn New Yorker?"
His mom was dying of cancer; now, the compassionate-leave request he had filed
a week before was rushed through. When his plane touched down stateside, officers
were there with his wife. They escorted the couple to an undisclosed location,
where they lived with around-the-clock security for the next six months. He
didn't get the formal thank-you he'd expected from the Army, though a personal
letter from Rumsfeld arrived at one point-asking him to stop talking about
how he'd been outed.
When the Abu Ghraib photos splashed on television sets, people in Cumberland
watched, hoping their loved ones weren't involved. Not all were so lucky. Kenneth
England saw the pictures of his daughter, Lynndie, as did the welders and machinists
who work with him at the csx railroad. They supported him as best they knew
how: by not mentioning it. While Pentagon flacks spun the scandal as the work
of a few bad apples from Appalachia, people in the area hung yellow ribbons
and "hometown hero" posters for the accused MPs. Reservists' wives
organized candlelight vigils.
"Everybody needs his time over there to mean or count for something,"
Sergeant Ken Davis, a teetotaler nicknamed Preacher Man by the other MPs at
Abu Ghraib, told me. "It has to be right in the greater scheme of things.
But if the U.S. government was truly at the helm, ordering the abuse, then it
actually means nothing. And now we live with ghosts and demons that will haunt
us for the rest of our lives."
Davis, who has a clean, bleachy smell to him and says "dang" a lot,
was in some of the photos, and he says he reported the abuse to his superior.
For that, people at the police department near Cumberland where he worked call
him a narc. He's become an Abu Ghraib junkie, attending the trials, testifying
at some, collecting photos and evidence, corresponding with the accused. It's
a way, he says, to get closure. "A lot of soldiers, when we come back,
are lost. You don't belong anymore. It's especially true for a unit accused
of abuse, when you hear lies about what happened and people deny what you saw."
At 37, he's particularly worried about the younger soldiers he served with.
"They were put in situations where they had to do things they didn't agree
with just to survive," he says. "All they know about being an adult
is the military. We've got a lost generation on our hands."
Military recruiters always had it easy in Cumberland. Beyond honor, responsibility,
and meaning, they pitched a paycheck and a ticket out. It was on the steps of
Cumberland's City Hall that Lyndon B. Johnson first announced his War on Poverty
back in 1964, but neither the coal mining industry, the railway, nor a series
of short-lived manufacturing booms could win that battle. Of the big factories
in the area, only the paper mill is still open. One in five residents live below
the poverty line, a third more than the national average. A food bank operates
out of a former bread factory. In February 2007, a high school football player
shot himself during a game of Russian roulette.
I often asked people in town what they thought about the war, but conversation
inevitably turned to jobs. Supporting the troops was akin to union solidarity-a
pact among the people doing the country's grunt work. As one ex-Marine told
me, "Sometimes you just have to do what you can to get by. And you have
to be able to believe in the validity of what you're doing."
People told me the threat against Darby was exaggerated. The university's chaplain
had been harassed for hosting an anti-war event, the newspaper's columnist threatened
for advocating gun control, but no harm had come to either of them. Colin Engelbach,
the commander of the local vfw post-who called Darby a "borderline
traitor" on national television-said that by "get him,"
people just meant they would make Darby's life hell.
Engelbach is a small guy whose eyes had trouble meeting mine. He spent ten
years in the National Guard and four on active duty, though he didn't see combat.
Now he works double shifts making depleted-uranium munitions at Alliant Tech.
For several months after our interview, he called me with "dirt" on
Darby; the overall message was that Darby had put himself before his comrades,
that he was not a real American.
"People aren't pissed because I turned someone in for abuse," Darby
told me. "People are pissed because I turned in an American soldier for
abusing an Iraqi. They don't care about right and wrong."
Five miles down from Cumberland, Cresaptown, home to the 372nd Military Police
Company's headquarters, is little more than the junction of U.S. Highway 220
and Route 53. There's no town hall, the civic improvement center is shuttered,
and old toys sit forgotten on the front porches of houses behind low wire fences.
It's only a few steps from Pete's Tavern to the Big Claw bar and the Eagles
Club, which a few years back launched a minor scandal by admitting a black man.
("He may be a nigger, but he's also a cop," one Pete's regular told
me, "so they had to let him in.")
Driving down the hill into Cresaptown, the first thing you notice is the sweeping
expanse of glimmering barbed wire and corrugated metal buildings that house
the roughly 1,700 inmates and 500 employees of the Western Correctional Institution.
The 161-acre property used to be the Celanese factory, where you could swim
in the public pool for a quarter. Next door is the brand new $24.8 million prison,
built by out-of-state contractors and lauded as a state-of-the-art maximum-security
facility. The 372nd's inconspicuous brick building is down the road, past the
Liberty Christian Fellowship, the technical high school (whose sign declares
"teamwork" the word of the month), and the Boy Scout building.
On most afternoons you'll find John Kershner, a sergeant with the 372nd, sitting
at the Big Claw smoking his usa brand menthols with his change lined up on the
bar, ready for his next dollar-fifty Miller Lite. The night I was there "Sarge"
was talking more than he had in a while, he admitted. He was polite in an old-time
kind of way, making a point of taking off his well-worn Eagles Club hat indoors,
revealing a balding shaved head. His light blue eyes were shielded behind his
thick glasses. Sarge knows Darby well; he was the guy who hired him to work
off the books at his self-storage-construction company after the two served
together in Bosnia-though it was Darby who told me about this later, not
Kershner. "People here feel more hurt by this whole thing than anything,"
Sarge whispered into my ear. "I just wish Darby would shut his mouth and
let the rest of us move on."
Sarge had to sell his construction business when he deployed to Iraq. Now employers
tell him he's either overqualified or, at a war-weathered 56, too old. He's
been filing for his veterans benefits for two years now but continues to get
the runaround. He knows what most everyone in the bar does for a living-he's
a roofer, he's a pharmacist, she's a beautician. "I'm not saying that the
photos were correct," one of the other patrons, his work boots still muddy,
told me. "But our people had their heads cut off."
"Other countries can torture our men to death and it's okay, but if we
drop one decimal dip below our standards, you have guys paying the price,"
Sarge said. "Now you need permission to even shoot back when you're under
attack. You let them win there, and we'll be fighting here next."
There is a peace group in Cumberland. It's spearheaded by Larry Neumark, the
Protestant chaplain at local Frostburg State University whose cardigan sweaters
and soft voice conjure up Mr. Rogers. Early on in the war, the group-mostly
composed of faculty from Frostburg and nearby community colleges, who clung
to each other as a "lifeline"-struggled for attention. "You'll
be accused of being unpatriotic and un-American if you speak up," said
Neumark. A local college has rejected courses with "peace" in the
title as unpatriotic. "But in the last six to seven months people have
been more willing to talk."
When I first visited Cumberland in December 2006, Neumark told me that he had
caught hell for inviting Ray McGovern, a retired cia officer, to speak on campus
against the war. By last spring, he was having a hard time filling the pro-war
slot on a panel discussion he was setting up. Torture, though, was another story.
Neumark had proposed a discussion about the topic, but people were "very
on edge" about it, as Daniel Hull, a member of the group, told me. Even
the activists were split on whether they should "go in that direction."
Eventually Neumark did pull together his panel, featuring a man who had been
tortured in the Philippines during the Marcos regime. About 100 students, many
of them earning class credits, listened to him recall mock executions and solitary
confinement. One student argued that the Geneva Conventions were outdated. "Has
fear been used to effectively deaden our critical senses?" Neumark asked.
An audience member stomped out. In the back someone snoozed. "Torture is
a form of terrorism," offered Neumark. "Why do you think people aren't
speaking out about this?" No one had an answer.
In ben's two-bedroom apartment in a suburban complex, the shades are always
down and the lights are dimmed. An Ikea rug covers the cheap wall-to-wall carpeting,
Yellow Tail wine bottles line the mantle, Aristotle and Dostoevsky serve as
toilet reading, and a large-screen TV with a PlayStation 2 dominates the living
room. Ben shares the place with Brandon, who circumvented the postwar job problem
by taking a civilian job at the nearby Army base. He seems more stereotypically
military than Ben, with wide biceps, close-cropped hair, and a closetful of
Army T-shirts. But he writes poetry and acoustic songs about things such as
post-traumatic stress and how he almost reflexively hit his girlfriend one day
and never regained her trust.
One afternoon, with a sitcom on TV and his dog skidding around the sofa, I
grilled Ben about torture. After returning from Iraq, he studied the philosophical
theories surrounding the issue to prepare for just these kinds of conversations-particularly
in case he ever got to talk to Senator John McCain, to whom he'd written during
the drafting of the Detainee Treatment Act. We discussed the ticking-time-bomb
argument-the hypothetical challenge arguing the morality of torturing
someone who knows where a bomb is hidden-which Ben called "total
bullshit" since "we aren't living in some fantasy 24 kind of world
where those sorts of situations occur." Besides, he said, torture will
induce false confessions. And most of the detainees at Tiger didn't even have
anything to confess; like 70 to 90 percent of those jailed across Iraq, according
to a 2004 Red Cross report, they'd been arrested by mistake.
When the Abu Ghraib photos came out, Ben was on a trip around Europe. He pretended
to be Canadian, and the whole thing pained him-because he's a patriot,
and because the images brought back memories. "It was like a bad nostalgia,"
he said. "But it was also embarrassing. I just didn't want to be associated
with it."
When I asked Ben if Brandon judged him for what he did in Iraq, he said they
don't really talk about it. "It's two separate parts of our lives and we
keep it that way," Ben explained. "It's like, 'Iraq sucked. Now get
on with it.'" He said he doesn't talk about it to anyone close to him-he'd
tell his mom, he said, but she has never asked and he doesn't want to bother
her.
His girlfriend, Gretchen, flat out doesn't want to know. Gretchen trained Ben
as a teller at the bank. She's gorgeous, with long dark hair and tall leather
boots. Within a week, they were making out; six months later, she's sure he's
the one. They seemed too young to be talking about marriage, until I saw their
friends with kids, mortgages, and ex-spouses.
I asked Gretchen if we could have coffee. "It's not like I know anything
about what happened over there," she said. "I probably should, but
he doesn't talk about it, and I don't want to think about it." Gretchen
blushed when she asked me what Abu Ghraib was. ("She doesn't know much
about politics," commented Ben, "and that's to put it nicely.")
"I realize I'm naive," she said. "I get upset about stuff that's
sad on TV." She didn't have a "real opinion about the war. I figure
the people in charge know more, so I trust them."
But Gretchen did know how Ben would "tear up" sometimes, like when
he was fired from the bank, even though he said it was no big deal, or how he
only stayed for five minutes when he visited his dad's grave, or how he used
to wake up in the middle of the night shouting. She thought Ben liked her not
being political because she didn't argue with him. I thought he liked the escape.
When i was in Little Rock in January 2007, Ben was chastising himself for not
having spoken out more about the war. He had just bought a new Web domain, WaitingToPanic.net,
to consolidate his blogs and had big plans for building his veterans site, Operation
Comeback, into a full-on grassroots movement. Human Rights Watch had encouraged
him to work for them, and he thought that was a great idea. But he was also
excited about cheap properties in the area, and when he got upset by our conversations
about Iraq, he told me he'd been trying to "block it out a little bit."
A year later, when I checked in with him again, he had bought a brand new three-bedroom
house in Lonoke, the town where he'd grown up. Gretchen had moved in with him.
He was working with the military as a communications expert-the "resident
computer geek," as he put it-at the local base. He was up for a promotion
to Warrant Officer candidate. His new website was blank and he hadn't posted
on his blogs in months. And Senator McCain had never called.
"I'm told that I'm courageous for speaking out," he said. "But
I wonder if I get blamed enough for the bad things I've done. Did I stand up
enough? Using a situation to justify it, like I did, doesn't make it right.
It's the sense of being helpless that still weighs heavily on my soul."
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