Fog of War or War Crimes?

By Michael Slenske, SMITH Magazine. Posted March 17, 2006.

In the wake of the James Frey debacle -- and its tractor-powered disinterment of similar thinly veiled literary hoaxes surrounding the louche and love-starved -- it's rather conspicuous (or perhaps not) that Jimmy Massey's name has failed to resurface in the broadsheets.

If you haven't heard of him, Massey, a former Marine staff sergeant who spent 12 years in the Corps before being medically discharged with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and becoming a key figure in the peace movement with Veterans For Peace, rose to infamy last November after St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Ron Harris (followed lockstep by hawkish blogger Michelle Malkin) discredited claims made by Massey in his book Kill, Kill, Kill that he'd been party to (and a participant in) war crimes during his tour in Iraq with a Combined Anti-Armor Team (CAT) platoon.

Although Harris and Co. vehemently disputed Massey's claims of killing innocent civilians on the road to Baghdad, Harris has admitted that he doesn't read French (the language in which Massey's book was published) nor was he ever directly embedded with Massey's unit. Malkin, for her part, failed to return various emails, which is telling, considering the fact that the claims made in "Kill, Kill, Kill," which is also being published in Spain, were corroborated by three other Marines in Massey's platoon in interviews with the same French-American investigative journalist who ghost-wrote the book with Massey.

MICHAEL SLENSKE: What made you want to write "Kill, Kill, Kill"?

JIMMY MASSEY: When I was first diagnosed with PTSD, the psychologist suggested I write a memoir as part of the therapy. I started writing, basically just jotting down notes, and then when I got discharged from the Marine Corps, Natasha Saulnier, my ghostwriter, contacted me through Veterans For Peace. She did a couple interviews with me and asked if I wanted to write a book with her about my experiences, and it all kind of fell into place.

MS: How do you feel when people in the press like Ron Harris want to attack you for what you've said or what you've written?

JM: Ron Harris is just covering his own behind. He knows he is just as liable for war crimes as any military member serving in Iraq.

MS: How so?

JM: Because of his failure to do any investigative journalism into the actual incidents of the killing of civilians.

MS: Was he with you when this was happening?

JM: No, he was never with my company. He was with Lima Company. The only time that I saw Ron Harris was after a particular incident happened at a checkpoint when he came in to do his little interview and leave back to Lima Company. It took an international incident for him to report any of the civilian casualties. It took the killing of reporters for him to finally talk about that.

MS: But what's the actual dispute?

JM: Well, that's the thing. Ron Harris even stated that he didn't set out to dispute, he just didn't see the harshness I portray in the book. And I don't think Ron Harris has read the book either.

MS: So the contention is essentially whether the events you describe in the book should be labeled as normal combat procedures or war crimes.

JM: I leave it up to the readers in the book. Are these war crimes or are these just fog of war? My definition of fog of war is that you're on the battlefield and out of the corner of your eye you see somebody run and you fire off a shot and you go find out it's a civilian. That's fog of war. Where I have a heartburn with it is that we actually escalated the violence by heightening the intelligence reports. We demonized the Iraqi people and we were given carte blanche to shoot first and ask questions later. I think that the truth hurts. I think when a lot of Marines read this book it's going to bring to their point of view the violations of the Geneva Conventions. Can you win a war with continued violations of the Geneva Conventions and International Law?

MS: So did you feel you were violating the law at the time?

JM: Oh definitely, and I raised the BS flag very early on.

MS: And what did your fellow Marines say?

JM: I was kind of treated like an outcast or rogue because they didn't like my opinions about certain situations. I became very agitated because I went up to Captain Smith [of Lima Company]. This was shortly after the red Kia incident. I told him we need to get combat engineers in here to fortify when we have these kinds of checkpoints. And his response was, "No -- there's not going to be any combat engineers to come in."

Michael Slenske writes the "Back Home" column for SMITH.

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