New friendly fire coverup: Army shreds files on dead soldiers
Mark Graffis
New friendly fire coverup: Army shreds files on dead soldiers
Hours after Salon revealed evidence that two Americans were killed by a U.S.
tank, not enemy fire, military officials destroyed papers on the men.
By Mark Benjamin
Editor's note: On Oct. 14, 2008, Salon published an article about the deaths
of Army Pfc. Albert Nelson and Pfc. Roger Suarez. The Army attributed their
deaths in Iraq in 2006 to enemy action; Salon's investigation, which included
graphic battle video and eyewitness testimony, indicated that their deaths
were likely due to friendly fire.
After Salon published Benjamin's Oct. 14 report, the Army ordered soldiers to
shred documents about the men. As proof that they were ordered to destroy the
paperwork, a soldier saved some examples and provided them to Salon.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
---
Nov. 20, 2008 |
Last month, Salon published a story reporting that U.S. Army Pfc. Albert
Nelson and Pfc. Roger Suarez were killed by U.S. tank fire in Ramadi, Iraq, in
late 2006, in an incident partially captured on video, but that an Army
investigation instead blamed their deaths on enemy action. Now Salon has
learned that documents relating to the two men were shredded hours after the
story was published. Three soldiers at Fort Carson, Colo. including two who
were present in Ramadi during the friendly fire incident, one of them just
feet from where Nelson and Suarez died were ordered to shred two boxes full
of documents about Nelson and Suarez. One of the soldiers preserved some of
the documents as proof that the shredding occurred and provided them to Salon.
All three soldiers, with the assistance of a U.S. senator's office, have since
been relocated for their safety.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Oct. 14 was a long and eventful day at Fort Carson. The post had been in an
uproar. The night before, Salon had published my article airing claims that
two of the base's soldiers, Pfc. Albert Nelson and Pfc. Roger Suarez-Gonzalez,
had been killed by friendly fire in Iraq on Dec. 4, 2006, but that the Army
covered up the cause of death, attributing it to enemy action.
Based on the testimony of eyewitnesses, and on video and audio recorded by a
helmet-mounted camera that captured much of the action that day, my report
stated that Nelson and Suarez seemed to have been killed by an American tank
shell. The shell apparently struck their position on the roof of a two-story
ferro-concrete building in Ramadi, Anbar province, Iraq, killing Suarez
instantly, mortally wounding Nelson, and injuring several other soldiers. I
included both an edited and a full-length version of the video in the article.
The video shows soldiers just after the blast claiming to have watched the
tank fire on them. Then a sergeant attempts to report over a radio that a U.S.
tank killed his men. He seems to be promptly overruled by a superior officer
who is not at the scene. An official Army investigation then found that the
simultaneous impact of two enemy mortars killed the men.
The article about the alleged friendly fire incident was long overdue for some
of the men who fought in Ramadi that day for the Army's Fort Carson-based D
Company, 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry
Division. Many continue to insist privately that a U.S. tank killed their
friends.
But for their superior officers, the publication of the article was a problem
to be solved. On the morning of Oct. 14, battalion leaders held an emergency
meeting in response to the Salon article. The sergeant in charge of 2nd
Platoon, Nelson and Suarez's platoon, had a pointed confrontation with at
least one of his men in a vain search for the source that leaked the Ramadi
video to Salon. Soldiers were told to keep quiet from then on.
"Everybody was trying to figure out who released this video and who talked to
a reporter," said Pvt. Charles Kremling, a stout, tough-looking infantryman
from the 2nd Platoon, as he recalled the accusatory atmosphere on the base
that day. "Pretty much we were made to understand that we are not supposed to
be talking about this."
Kremling was in Ramadi the day that Nelson and Suarez died. He had been
huddled among the 2nd Platoon soldiers on the second floor of the
ferro-concrete structure when the explosion shook the roof above him and threw
him to the floor. Above him, on the roof, soldiers say a tank shell screeched
in from the west, killing Suarez instantly and blasting his head and torso
clear off the building to the east. The shell severed Nelson's left leg, and
he suffered nearly a half hour waiting for a botched medical evacuation as his
buddies struggled to save him. He died at the gates of a military hospital.
By the evening of Oct. 14, after the battalion leaders' meeting and after both
cable and network news had aired segments on the Salon exposi, the harried
atmosphere died down at Fort Carson. When Kremling and Pvt. Albert "Doc"
Mitchum, a compact, battle-hardened medic, reported for extra duty at
battalion headquarters sometime after 6 p.m., they were tired and facing hours
of mind-numbingly boring tasks. Being a private working the late shift in
battalion headquarters usually meant a night of filing paperwork or
straightening up offices.
Staff Sgt. Swinton was in charge that night. He told Kremling, Mitchum and a
third soldier who had reported for duty that the evening's labor would include
the inglorious task of cleaning out a closet. The first priority, Swinton
said, was to shred the thousands of pages of documents in two large
copy-paper-size boxes. It would be tedious work, but Swinton was adamant. "He
says, 'I need that paper shredded. That has to be done tonight,'" remembered
Kremling, who volunteered to get started on the job.
At first, the men tried to avoid the monotony of shredding. "We are talking
about two Xerox boxes filled," Kremling told me later. But eventually
Kremling told the other two, "I'll go do it."
Kremling stepped into a quiet office with the boxes of documents and the
shredder. Kremling lifted handfuls of paper out of the first box and stuffed
the material into the machine. It hummed to life, chopping away.
This went on for about a half hour. "I was shredding for a while. I was
halfway through the first box," he recalled. He picked up a stack with an
official-looking memorandum on top. "I started feeding it into the shredder
and then, Bam! I noticed the names Albert Markee Nelson and Roger Suarez," he
remembered. "And I look into my lap and there is paperwork galore with their
names on it," he exclaimed. "I was like, 'What the fuck?'"
He froze. He shuffled through the boxes at his feet. Nelson, Suarez and more,
page after page. "The first thing I was thinking was Enron," said Kremling.
"People go to jail for this kind of shit."
Kremling grabbed an inch-thick stack of documents and went to find his buddy,
Mitchum, in another room. "I said, 'Look at this! There are boxes full of
documents about Nelson and Suarez!"
Mitchum understood immediately what his friend was thinking. He tried to stay
calm. "I wanted to make sure we were not overreacting," Mitchum recalled.
Mitchum walked into the room with the shredder humming away. "I looked through
the boxes," he said. He was stunned.
"It was not just those two individuals," Mitchum recalled. On closer
inspection of the contents in the boxes, Mitchum noticed a file on a Julio
Gonzales. Then he found another Nelson, but not his Nelson. "It was anybody
with the name Suarez and anybody who was named Nelson," he stammered.
It was as if somebody had rifled through the unit files and, in a desperate
effort to get rid of everything associated with the two dead soldiers, simply
marked anything with the name Nelson or Suarez for destruction. Of the two
boxes, one contained documents mostly on Suarez, the other, mostly Nelson
one box for each man.
They brought the third soldier into the room and showed him the files. The
three men stood there watching the shredder hum away, unsure of what to do
next. They paced. They argued. Nobody knew what to do. Should they stop
shredding? Spirit away the documents in the trunk of a car? If this was some
kind of coverup, where they unwitting accomplices?
Like Kremling, Mitchum had been in Ramadi on the day in question. He had been
holed up with members of the 3rd Platoon in a building a few hundred yards to
the southwest of where Nelson and Suarez died, and vividly remembered the
hours-long battle against Iraqi insurgents that ended with a barrage of U.S.
tank fire. Unlike a number of Salon sources who say they saw the tank fire at
the building where Nelson and Suarez died on Dec. 4, 2006, Kremling and
Mitchum were not eyewitnesses to the tank shot, though Kremling was on the
second floor of the building that got hit. But both men believed their buddies
who claimed to have seen it, as opposed to the official Army explanation.
After much discussion, the men called the Army Criminal Investigation Command,
the army's premier investigative organization, based at Fort Belvoir, Va. But
by this time, it was late at night. No answer. They dialed the Army inspector
general. "They keep bankers' hours," Kremling complained.
Finally, they called a trusted fellow soldier. His counsel was that although
it was difficult to say, they should proceed as if they had received a lawful
order, since as far as they knew, they had. He thought they should probably go
ahead and shred the stuff.
But after they resumed shredding and were almost finished with the second box,
one of the three soldiers snapped. "This is bullshit!" he announced. "I'm
pretty sure this is illegal." He reached into the second box, pulled out seven
pages, folded the documents twice and shoved them in his pocket. "I finally
said, 'Fuck it,'" he told me about his decision to grab some of the documents.
"I'm tired of getting bullied around."
The papers he grabbed at the last moment are routine deployment checklists,
immunization records and other forms. But the documents definitely refer to
the Albert Nelson from Ramadi, and they are unquestionably official Army
documents. The documents have two holes punched on the top of each page, like
many Army files. The various documents contain Nelson's full name, his home
address in west Philadelphia, the names of some of his family and his correct
Social Security number. (Some of the paperwork is reproduced here, but with
personal information redacted.)
The seven pages that survived the shredding incident are not dramatic and do
not pertain to the friendly fire incident. But they provide proof that on Oct.
14, the day Salon published the article about Nelson and Suarez's deaths, the
Army was shredding documents about the two men.
I learned about the destruction of the documents through my sources at Fort
Carson. I contacted the soldiers involved and interviewed them in Colorado
Springs in mid-October. They wanted the story out but feared repercussions
from the Army. They also complained of serious but largely untreated medical
problems from combat in Iraq.
I called the office of Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., who has a long track record of
advocacy on behalf of returning veterans. Bond's staff contacted officials at
Fort Carson and raised the issue of the shredding incident and the health
problems of some soldiers from the friendly fire unit. The Army agreed to move
the soldiers out of their unit and work to address their medical needs. Bond's
staff also contacted a representative of the National Veterans Legal Services
Program, who agreed to assist them in getting medical care.
The Army has completed an investigation into the shredding incident, called a
15-6 investigation, a relatively informal, internal affair typically conducted
by one officer who reports to his commander. In a 15-6, the military unit that
may have screwed up is responsible for investigating itself.
Kremling and Mitchum's brigade commander, Col. Randy George, told me in a
phone interview that he ordered a captain on his staff to handle this 15-6
investigation. (George was not the commander of the brigade in Ramadi in 2006,
and he had not heard of the friendly fire incident until Salon published the
initial story.)
George's investigation found that the battalion routinely shreds old, inactive
personnel files. The destruction of documents on Oct. 14 was routine. "They
shredded some documents," George told me. "Coincidentally it happened on the
14th ... We shred documents all the time."
George acknowledged that files on Nelson and Suarez went into the shredder on
Oct. 14 but none were related to the alleged friendly fire. "I would
guarantee you that there was nothing in there that was destroyed that had
anything to do with that incident."
George sent me a copy of his investigation, which includes a sworn statement
from an Army staff sergeant (name redacted) who works on personnel issues in
the battalion headquarters. The sergeant wrote that the shredding on Oct. 14
resulted from an effort that began in early September to clean out old files.
That sergeant also wrote that "at no time did anyone give any order to destroy
personal records specific to those two soldiers, nor did anyone I work with
indicate that the battalion leadership or any company commander direct [sic]
any soldiers ... to destroy the records of those two soldiers."
George's investigation also contains sworn statements from the soldiers
interviewed by Salon, reflecting essentially what they told me. They describe
boxes filled predominantly with files on the two men, including some documents
with both men's names on them. They also reiterated what they said in our
interviews they simply don't know for sure exactly what all they put into
the shredder on Nelson and Suarez.
"The documents that were shredded were not related to the deaths or the
investigation into the deaths" of Nelson and Suarez, according to the copy of
George's investigation. "The command was aware of the media interest in the
case but had no motivation to destroy the documents; and the command did not
order nor did it know about the shredding of the documents."
On Oct. 14, George did discuss the Salon article with his superiors in the 4th
Infantry Division, he confirmed. And he did order an effort to comb through
files that day, but only to identify who from the unit on the day of Nelson
and Suarez's deaths might still be around. "I asked who was in the unit
because I was not here when that happened," he told me. "But that had nothing
to do with shredding any documents."
This self-exoneration echoes the Army's original investigation into Nelson and
Suarez's deaths. Col. Sean MacFarland was the commander of the tank unit in
Ramadi that was supporting Nelson and Suarez's infantry company that day in
2006. MacFarland also oversaw the subsequent Army investigation into the
deaths, another 15-6, which found that two enemy mortars landing
simultaneously killed Nelson and Suarez, not MacFarland's tanks.
MacFarland said in a brief telephone interview on Oct. 14 that the full
investigation included 170 photographs, dozens of interviews and hundreds of
pages of ballistic analysis.
"I think it was the gold standard of investigations," MacFarland said,
"particularly in an active combat zone."
He argued that his investigation shows that the eyewitnesses are mistaken. "I
think there was a strong consensus among the soldiers at the platoon that yes,
a tank fired at their building. But the evidence just did not support that,"
he said. "One could see how young soldiers in the fog of war could get
confused," he continued. "So a soldier could very easily be forgiven for
thinking that tank was shooting at his building, but they weren't."
I've known for months about the existence of MacFarland's investigation and I
requested all of it, including the photographs, statements and exhibits, back
on July 30. So far, the Army has produced only a heavily redacted, 10-page
summary of the investigation and a two-page memo from MacFarland concurring
with the findings. A letter from Fort Carson officials, dated Oct. 10, says
they are still looking for the rest of the material requested by Salon in
July.
The men in battalion headquarters on Oct. 14 acknowledge that they don't know
what they destroyed under orders, or even whether they shredded investigative
documents. Said Mitchum, "Who knows what was in there?"
What Mitchum is sure of is how Nelson and Suarez died. "They were killed by a
tank," he said. He complained about officers and senior enlisted leaders going
along with the official story that the cause of death was enemy fire. "They
fall in line," he told me. "And they don't give a shit what it makes us feels
like."