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Thursday, Nov 20, 2008
The Army says no, but a graphic video and eyewitness testimony indicate that a U.S. tank killed two American soldiers. The mother of one soldier demands answers.
Editor's note: Mark Benjamin's friendly fire investigation contains 1) the main article, 2) video documentation and 3) the Army's own report on the killing of Nelson and Suarez.
By Mark Benjamin
Read more: Politics, News, Iraq, Army, Iraq War, Friendly Fire, Mark Benjamin
Helmet-cam footage from Ramadi, Iraq (12-min. edited version). Warning: Contains graphic violence and profanity.
An interview with Jean Feggins, mother of Pfc. Albert Markee Nelson, who died of wounds received in the alleged friendly fire incident.
Oct. 14, 2008 | PHILADELPHIA -- Once a cop, always a cop. Asked if she wanted to see a graphic battle video showing her son Albert bleeding to death, Jean Feggins, retired from the Philadelphia Police Department, said yes.
"Listen, I've moved dead bodies of people I don't even know," she told me, as she sat on a brown couch in the den of her West Philadelphia row house. "I need to know everything. Because he is not a stranger. That's my baby. That's my child."
When Pfc. Albert Nelson died in Iraq in 2006, the Army first told Feggins that he might have been killed by friendly fire, and then that it was enemy mortars. She says she never believed the Army's explanation. "I always felt like they were lying to me," she said. "I could never prove it."
"I would ask the casualty officer what was going on. I'd be told they are still working on the report," she said. "They were still doing their investigation. What could I do? It's the U.S. military. I had no control."
She did not know that there was a video of his death until I contacted her recently. Salon has obtained evidence -- including a graphic, 52-and-a-half minute video -- suggesting that friendly fire from an American tank killed two U.S. soldiers in Ramadi, Iraq, in late 2006, and that the Army ignored the video and other persuasive data in order to rule that the deaths were due to enemy action. Feggins watched the video with me in her den.
Shot from the perspective of the soldiers taking fire from what they clearly believe is an American tank, the footage shows how Pfc. Albert Nelson and Pfc. Roger Suarez-Gonzalez died. It also records soldiers trying to save Nelson's life, and the sound of a platoon sergeant attempting to report over a radio that the casualties were due to friendly fire. He then seems to be overruled by a superior officer who insists it was an enemy mortar attack. Troops from Nelson's unit interviewed by Salon, including three soldiers there that day, blamed friendly fire from a U.S. tank for the deaths. "A tank shot us," said a soldier. "That is what happened."
An Army investigation, however, found the deaths were caused by enemy fire. Soldiers from Nelson and Suarez's platoon, based at Fort Carson, Colo., described what they felt was pressure from above to accept this official story despite evidence to the contrary -- including the video, which has circulated widely. Jean Feggins, after watching the video, said it was more evidence that the Army had misled her about the circumstances of her son's death. The Army told Feggins that her son had died instantly, while the video shows a painfully protracted attempt to get Nelson to a field hospital before he bled to death.
In a statement to Salon, Army spokesman Paul Boyce reiterated the Army's conclusion that Nelson and Suarez were killed by enemy action. But the incident at Ramadi in December 2006 raises questions about how the U.S. military investigates alleged friendly fire incidents -- for which there are no reliable statistics -- and how it communicates its findings to the loved ones of the deceased. "I think [friendly fire] happens a lot," said Mary Tillman, mother of football player-turned-Army Ranger Pat Tillman. His death in Afghanistan in 2004 was first reported to be due to enemy action; it was later revealed he had been killed by members of his own unit. "[But t]he military is not addressing why these friendly fire situations take place," she said, "because they lie about it and get away with it so frequently."
Jean Feggins wants nothing less than the whole truth about what killed her son. "I'm not going to have any closure until I know exactly what happened to him," she said. "I don't care how gruesome it is.
"Tell me the truth. I can handle it."
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The only reason there is a video of what happened in Ramadi is because Sgt. 1st Class Jack Robison, who was there that day, wanted to record a firefight. The video, which is all from the point of view of Robison's helmet camera, begins immediately before the shell's impact. It records the explosion, the effort to help the wounded -- in bloody detail -- and long patches of conversation in which the soldiers present describe how they were shot by an American tank.
As of Dec. 4, 2006, many of the U.S. Army soldiers fighting alongside Albert Nelson and Roger Suarez were well into 15-month tours of duty in Iraq. The troops were moving house to house through Ramadi, a city of half a million that hugs the shore of the Euphrates River 70 miles west of Baghdad, battling Sunni insurgents, taking casualties, delivering many score more. The men of 2nd Platoon, D Company, 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division were fighting in one of the bloodiest areas of Iraq during one of the bloodiest stints of the war. December 2006 was a month before Bush announced the surge, and before 30,000 additional U.S. troops were sent to Iraq to quell the violence.
On the 4th, the fighting was so fierce that some of the Americans had dropped grenades off roofs right onto the heads of insurgents, and fired their machine guns till the barrels almost melted. As one of the men said recently, "I probably killed eight guys at least."
Second Platoon was encamped in a battered white two-story ferro-concrete building, with a gray-dirt courtyard and an attached cinder-block latrine building, not far from the south bank of the Euphrates. On the night of Dec. 3, they had slept at their weapons posts on the speckled marble floors. They'd stolen blankets from evacuated Iraqi houses to keep warm in the cold desert night, throwing money onto the empty beds in payment.
On the roof of "building #2," as it was known in U.S. Army battle plans for the day, stood Nelson, Suarez, seven other U.S. soldiers and an unknown number of Iraqi army troops. Nelson, Suarez and a soldier named Hobson had taken up a position on the northwest corner of the roof, while the other Iraqi and American soldiers had taken up positions a little further south along the western wall of the roof. Below and just in front of them, at ground level on the west side of the building, was the courtyard. Another group of soldiers, including the platoon sergeant, Sgt. 1st Class Jack Robison, was holed up next to the little cinder-block latrine building that hugged building #2 in the courtyard's southeast corner.
Five hundred yards to the west was another cluster of Americans, 1st Platoon, broken into three squads, along with several tanks. Sandwiched between 2nd Platoon's position in building #2 and 1st Platoon's position to the west was a pocket of Iraqi insurgents. Due north of building #2, across the Euphrates on the north bank, was another clutch of Iraqis, firing mortars at the Americans.
From the northwest corner of the roof, Nelson and Suarez were shooting at the insurgents to the west, Nelson with his SAW (squad automatic weapon, a light machine gun), Suarez with an M240 machine gun. Hobson was standing slightly behind them and facing north, firing at the Iraqi mortar team across the river.
Albert Nelson, from West Philadelphia, was the class clown, a popular big brother figure to the other soldiers. At 31, he was years older than the other privates. Though his mother, Jean, was a Philly cop, he'd been unable to make the force himself because of too many unpaid parking tickets. He'd worked as a security guard before enlisting in the Army, thinking he'd have an easier time becoming a cop with a military background.
If Nelson was the guy telling the jokes, 22-year-old Roger Suarez was the guy who didn't always get them, because his English wasn't that good. A native of Nicaragua who had lived in Florida before enlisting, he struggled to pick up on the frat boy humor the other soldiers shared.
