CHRISTOPHER MORRIS/VII FOR TIME

WHY DIDN'T HE STOP? A farmer is fired on and killed after he failed to halt at a U.S. checkpoint

Lamenting a Civilian Casualty
	A failure to stop at a checkpoint leads to death on the road, writes Alex Perry
	By Alex Perry | Karbala

Posted Sunday, April 6, 2003; 1:32 p.m. EST
No matter how many times they played it over afterward, the soldiers all agreed that the farmers had it coming. Even with razor wire across the road, four Bradley fighting vehicles, and 12 soldiers leveling M-16s and M-4s, their dump truck kept rolling toward the checkpoint. Even with Sergeant George Lewis waving it down. Even with a first, then a second warning shot.

So when the truck was maybe 100 feet away and still approaching, Red Platoon opened up. Six or seven men shot a continuous M-16 volley of warning shots into the air for three or four seconds, then some fired at the truck, and Lewis launched a .203 grenade at the right front tire. "Now they got the message," said Sergeant Robert Jones. The truck stopped, the driver slammed into reverse and, attempting a wild U-turn, careered into a ditch. The doors on both sides popped open, and three men leaped out and sprinted away.

Charlie Rock Company's First Sergeant William Mitchell and Red Platoon gingerly approached the cab. Out of that hail of fire, a single shot had shattered the bottom of the windshield, and another had passed through the passenger window. The engine was still running. A soldier rounded the open door and jumped back. "We got a KIA," he shouted, meaning killed in action. "How do you know he's KIA?" Mitchell asked. "Well, look at him," said the soldier.

The Iraqi man was lying across the cab with his feet hanging out the passenger-side door, his head snapped back, a diamond-shaped entry wound just below his right eye; the fourth finger on his right hand had been shot off, and there was a large patch of blood under his right arm. Judging from the empty truck and the bundles of onions and garlic in the nearby fields, the soldiers figured he was a farmer collecting vegetables to sell in Karbala, the Shi'ite city on the horizon that the checkpoint was meant to seal off.

Private First Class Damon Young, a good-looking 25-year-old from Idaho, said he was sure it was his round that hit the windshield. "That was me then," he said. "I probably killed him." Lewis asked, to no one in particular, "Why do they make you do that? They don't want to f___ing listen, goddammit." Young paused. "It's just stupid to have to shoot people who are not armed," he said. "This language barrier really sucks."

	The soldiers didn't do anything wrong, but it bothers me to hell that the guy is innocent. — SERGEANT WILLIAM MITCHELL

America promises freedom for the Iraqi people, but the price so far has been a regrettable number of civilian casualties—the best guess is 600 dead and 4,500 injured—and a rapidly expanding gulf of mistrust between civilians and U.S. forces on the ground. Language is just the first problem—there's not a single frontline soldier outside the special forces who speaks Arabic. "You try signing 'I give you freedom and democracy within the paramount parameters of my own security,'" sighed a lieutenant at a checkpoint last week.

At the core of the civilian casualty crisis is the decision by Iraqi forces to decline both of the two options coalition war planners are offering them: surrender or obliteration. Instead, those Iraqis still fighting have, according to an American officer, "turned matador," changing into civilian clothes, sidestepping the full might of advancing forces only to reappear later to inflict cut after cut in the Americans' flanks with guerrilla strikes on convoys or suicide bomb attacks. In this atmosphere every civilian is suspect, and the longer the conflict lasts and the more innocents that are sacrificed, the less welcome the Americans may be. The recent suicide bombing, in which four 3rd Infantrymen were killed, swiftly followed by the 3rd Infantry Division's killing of seven women and children at a checkpoint, was the perfect one-two for Saddam Hussein's desperate endgame.

Before the conflict started, combat trainers stressed the priority of avoiding civilian casualties. But that changed with the first guerrilla-style attacks. On Day 2, the order came to assume all Iraqis were hostile unless proved otherwise—an assumption that many of these young soldiers had made anyway. Since receiving their new instructions, the soldiers have dropped their message of liberation for one of mistrust and irresistible force. Checkpoint squads have arrested hundreds of Iraqis who are unable to communicate their reasons for traveling, while detaining others carrying AK-47s as "terrorists," even though Iraqis carry AKs the way Texans do handguns.

To a man, it seems, the U.S. soldiers are unhappy about their rising civilian kills. And many are smart enough to realize that every death backs up Saddam's claim and the Arab world's suspicion that they are occupiers and conquerors, not liberators. "They didn't do anything wrong," said Mitchell of his men. "But it bothers me to hell that the guy is innocent."

Mitchell argues that according to U.S. rules of engagement, the soldiers carried out their primary mission: "to eliminate the threat." Iraqis, however, are following a different set of compulsions. A few hours after the killing, Major Dean Shultis reported that his battalion had collected 69 prisoners of war over the previous 24 hours. He said he had tried to warn the Iraqis that approaching American checkpoints now was dangerous. They're not listening. "We're hungry," replied a prisoner. "And we're not going to stop coming."

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