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having a handful of people with rifles who didn’t really know how to shoot them and a handful of people who spotted for mortars, it was packed full of innocent families and it was in no way a legitimate military target.
    But one day the squadron commander, who was a lieutenant colonel, rode by in his personal Humvee and they shot at him. So the command went around and told everybody that at ten o’clock that night they were gonna put on a show for us. So this AC-130 showed up and didn’t just strafe or shoot a few rounds here and there; it approached and launched sustained attack on those buildings.
    I don’t recall exactly how long it circled. These planes circle until they expend their ammunition. The main weapon they used in this raid was the 40mm cannon, which loads automatically and can fire a round every half second or so. The 40mm round is like a hand grenade, and it fired maybe a hundred rounds.
    On January 21, 2004—I have the exact dates because I wrote about all this in my journal—a civilian was run over by one of our Humvees and left for dead. We had been on a long night mission. We had been out all night and were tired, wanted to go home and hit the rack. There had been a lot of shooting that night. It had been a real bad night and we just wanted it to be over. We wanted to go home.
    The guys ahead of us arrived at the gate when they apparently ran somebody over. I knew the guys in that Humvee. The driver’s one of my best friends, and the staff sergeant in command was also a very close friend. Later he was killed over there. The staff sergeant ordered the driver to continue driving and then ordered everyone on patrol not to say anything about it. He did this not because he was afraid of getting in trouble for killing somebody, but because he didn’t want to have to wait around and fill out a report. He didn’t want to be inconvenienced. They just wanted to go home and go to sleep.
    As I said in my opening statement, these troopers are not bad people. These are people like any of us, but when put in terrible situations they respond horribly. When you are around that much death, running over some guy who was standing in the road is not a big deal. What’s a big deal is being separated from your cot another two or three hours, having to talk about it.
    So they didn’t say anything, and we rolled up on them. We were the idiots who stopped and called it up and we got stuck out there for three hours, and after that, we made sure that if we saw anybody dead or anything like that we just kept going because it wasn’t worth the trouble.
    February 21, 2004—civilians killed and wounded by American small arms fire.
    It was during another nighttime patrol. This was an unusually friendly neighborhood, where people came out and waved. People didn’t seem to hate us. We were riding around and we heard an IED blast up ahead and AK-47 fire. Then we heard M-16s firing back, which are our rifles. We could tell that some of our people were in a fight. We raced ahead, eager to get some of the action, but by the time we showed up, the fight was over.
    So there was the patrol of 82nd Airborne guys, infantry guys, and Humvees and they were packed in these unarmored fiberglass Humvees with machine guns pointing out on either side. They were attacked by two or three insurgents. They were in an open field, laying in a ditch across on their left. On their right was a civilian neighborhood, with housing for disabled military families from the Iraqi army.
    The Airborne guys had taken fire from the left. Some of the guys also had heard gunfire coming in from the right, so the whole platoon returned fire in both directions. When the firing stopped, they sent some guys who ran out into the field. They didn’t find any insurgents. They looked for blood trails, didn’t find any blood trails. They didn’t find anything but some empty shell casings. The rest of them immediately dismounted and kicked in the door of this house that