didn’t bought their souvenirs on the street, some of which were probably stolen.


That’s a picture of me as a tunnel rat in Afghanistan.


Next slide. For some members in my unit, it was the Iraqi atomic energy facility that was most profiting. It was there that I was told that members of my unit had breached a safe containing gold coins. I was not on that foot patrol, which took place deep within the compound. However, I was shown the coins later from fellow NCOs in my platoon.


When I deployed, it was with two sappy armor-protected plates, yet I was ordered to give one to a fellow Marine from 1st Combat Engineer Battalion who had not deployed with one. Such was the case for a majority of the junior NCOs and below from 1st CEB, deploying with inadequate armor. During the initial invasion, in fact, my Humvee had plastic doors.


We never found evidence of weapons of mass destruction while on patrol with the Nuclear-Biological-Chemical Warfare chief warrant officer and fellow members of my reconnaissance team.


Early May, while trying to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, we were surrounded by a crowd of non-hostile Iraqis. I witnessed my first sergeant for H&S Company as he exited the Humvee without any backup or support. He ran down a male Iraqi child who was maybe seven to eight years old and lifted him in the air, hand choking the boy. With his pistol already drawn, he pointed into the child’s head and neck area, threatening and screaming shouts of profanity. As a result of this, the mood in the truck was dead silence until we returned to our campsite.


Thank you very much.



AMY GOODMAN: Marine Corporal James Gilligan served in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. We’ll have more from the Winter Soldier on the Hill hearings in a minute.


[break]


AMY GOODMAN: We return to Winter Soldier on the Hill and to war veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan testifying before Congress about the horrors of war. This is California Congressmember Barbara Lee questioning former Army Sergeant Kristofer Goldsmith.


REP. BARBARA LEE: Now, I know part of the psychology of war is to dehumanize people so that the atrocities that are required—the atrocities that are committed, that those atrocities would bear minimal emotional impact on the soldier. How does this affect the mental health of those who have to do these things? And how do we need to move forward to make sure that suicide attempts don’t occur and that post-traumatic stress syndrome is minimized and that we could really help with the psychology and the psychological needs of our veterans? Because all of you talked about, and we saw and we witnessed on the slides, this dehumanization process in action, and that’s part of war. And I don’t know how they train our young men and women for this, but that’s what occurs, and so we have to figure this out and what we can do to help when you come home.


KRISTOFER GOLDSMITH: Yes, Congressman. Something that was brought up to me by a very good friend of mine sitting behind me, Mathis Chiroux, just mentioned maybe two weeks ago, and it was something I never thought about, was that every enlistee spends a week of basic training, or at least a few days, doing bayonet training. And we are putting a bayonet, a knife on the end of a rifle, and we repeatedly stab a dummy that looks like a human being and yell "Kill!” with every movement, yell—


REP. BARBARA LEE: This is part of your training?


KRISTOFER GOLDSMITH: Yes, that is the basis of the military on a broad scale. That is the basis and the first step to dehumanization towards the enemy and the acceptance to kill is—there’s a very popular thing that the drill sergeants require us to say. I remember the first time I heard it, I refused to say it, and it wasn’t because I didn’t want to be a soldier, it was because I thought it was weird. And the response to the question, “Soldiers, what makes the green grass grow?" and the response is “Blood, blood, blood, Drill Sergeant!” So I would like to allow Geoffrey to go on how we can move past that

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