Redeployment(54)

Over the following months and years, there were other deaths. One car accident. One Marine who got into a fight on leave and was stabbed to death.

There were crimes and drug use, too. James Carter and Stanley Phillips, of Alpha Company, murdered Carter’s wife and then mutilated her body trying to get it into the too-small hole they dug. Another Marine, high on cocaine, shot at a nightclub with an AR-15 and seriously injured one woman. Cocaine makes you feel invulnerable, which I suppose hypervigilant war vets must like. They don’t like what comes after, though, when they get kicked out of the Corps and denied VA health services for their PTSD. That sort of thing happened to five or six Marines from the battalion, so the men started switching to substances that couldn’t be easily picked up in a piss test.

Aiden Russo was the first of the suicides. He did it on leave, with his personal handgun. After Russo’s death, the incoming chaplain, Reverend Brooks, gave a suicide prevention speech to the battalion. In his speech, he claimed America’s suicide rates were a result of Roe v. Wade. Apparently, abortion was degrading our society’s respect for the sanctity of life. Brooks was one of the hordes of born-again chaplains coming not from established churches, but from the loosely organized Independent Baptist Churches. My RP told me that after his talk, the Marines joked about how they thought I was going to punch him out midspeech.

Five months later, Albert Beilin killed himself with pills. Both Beilin and Russo were from Charlie Company.

A year later, José Ray, back in Iraq for the third time, shot himself in the head.





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Two years later, Alexander Newberry, formerly of Charlie Company, appeared in an event called Winter Soldier, organized by the protest group Iraq Veterans Against the War. The event was supposed to prove the illegality of the war, and since a Marine from my old battalion was taking part, I watched most of it on YouTube. The panel of veterans was of varied quality. Many were vague and unconvincing, and what they complained about seemed more like the standard horror of war than any particular pattern of misconduct. Newberry, however, had brought a camera to Iraq and used photos and video to accompany his testimony. He claimed to have abused Iraqis and shot some just to take out aggression. He claimed Captain Boden congratulated every Marine on their first kill and told everyone that if a Marine got their first kill by stabbing someone to death, they’d get a ninety-six-hour pass when they got back. It sounded right.

Newberry had a series of slides he flipped through that were projected behind him, and he brought up pictures of two people he had killed, both of whom he claimed were innocent. He showed a video of Marines firing on mosques and talked about conducting “recon by fire,” where he said they would shoot up a neighborhood in order to start a firefight.

The comments section beneath the video was a mess of antiwar and human rights folks either congratulating Newberry or calling him scum. A few posts seemed to be from Marines, and even Marines from the battalion. “I was there. Alex no telling the whole story.” “This guy was the biggest shit bag ever.” “boohoo they had to kill some people. what did he think was gonna happen when he became a MACHINE GUNNER IN THE MARINE INFANTRY.” “It’s the commanders fault don’t feel bad Alex.” “No one told him to kill innocent people he did it himself and blames the Corps he committed war crimes what a nut and its not true this happens often i know im a Marine.”

At this time, I was still serving as a chaplain at Camp Lejeune. I’d done a stint at Base and then ended up transferred to a new battalion. While there, I’d occasionally run into Staff Sergeant Haupert, who’d been transferred to the same unit and whose Ramadi days were clearly still with him. He’d tattooed the name of every Marine from his company who’d died on his right arm. Combat deaths and suicides. He was widely respected in the unit.

The one time we discussed Winter Soldier, Haupert spoke of Newberry with intense hatred. “It’s not whether it happened or not. You don’t talk about some of the shit that happened. We lived in a place that was totally different from anything those hippies in that audience could possibly understand. All those jerks who think they’re so good ’cause they’ve never had to go out on a street in Ramadi and weigh your life against the lives of the people in the building you’re taking fire from. You can’t describe it to someone who wasn’t there, you can hardly remember how it was yourself because it makes so little sense. And to act like somebody could live and fight for months in that shit and not go insane, well, that’s what’s really crazy. And then Alex is gonna go and act like a big hero, telling everybody how bad we were. We weren’t bad. I wanted to shoot every Iraqi I saw, every day. And I never did. Fuck him.”