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they had taken fire from. They were gonna raid the house and maybe catch the guy who had been shooting at them.
    When they kicked in the door of this house, what they found was an entire extended Iraqi family celebrating a wedding. For those of us who have been in Iraq or at least in Baghdad, you know that any excuse they have is a good excuse to get on the roof and shoot their guns in the air. It’s a celebratory thing. We’ve all heard of celebratory fire being mistaken for hostile fire and this is a textbook case of that. Old Grandpa was on top of the roof cuttin’ loose with his rifle because he was so happy that his daughter was getting married. Meanwhile this 82nd patrol in his front yard gets ambushed from across the road and they returned fire in both directions.
    They hit three people inside the wedding party. One was an adult man, who was slightly wounded, another young girl of maybe ten was slightly wounded. But there was another girl who was six or seven and she was dead. I was in the gunner’s hatch of the Humvee. I didn’t get out and go inside the house, but I looked through the doorway and that was the first time that I had ever seen a six-year-old girl dead.
    This happens every day. People always say, “Yeah, well, that’s war,” and that is war, and that’s especially this war. Little girls get killed by soldiers in Iraq every day, not because we want to, but just because it happens. What happened next was that the 82nd patrol just mounted up and left it with us. It was our responsibility. Once again, we got stuck calling this up. We called it up to our Tactical Operations Center, and we told them what happened. They told us to continue mission. They said, “Charlie Mike” and that’s military jargon for continue mission.
    So we hopped up in our Humvees and rode out. We didn’t even have a translator and we didn’t speak Arabic. We couldn’t say “sorry.” We just hopped in our vehicle and rode off.
    For obvious reasons, it’s difficult to get up here and talk about these things. But what’s also difficult is that right after this happened, we never talked about it again. We drove away. We didn’t even tell the other guys back at the post about this. This was something that we just stuffed it the back in our minds and we thought, “Well, these things happen.” It was just forgotten and then the occupation dragged on.

Steven Casey
Specialist, United States Army, Cavalry Scout
Deployment: April 2003–July 2004, Baghdad and the surrounding areas
Hometown: Farmington, Missouri
Age at Winter Soldier: 24 years old
    I was in the same unit as Clif. During the November 2003 free-fire zone Clif was talking about, our Lieutenant Colonel Chuck Williams’s personal Humvee had been purportedly shot at. He did an interview with CBS the afternoon before the incident.
    He said, “If you are trying to send a message by firing and harboring yourself inside of an area like this, we want to send the message right back that you can be reached. We will find you and surgically remove you.”
    Spectre Gunships are not a precision weapon. There’s no precision to it as there is with surgery, so to have him use that comparison is a little odd. I have video footage of the air strike itself, and the most disturbing part was the parties on the rooftops. Our roofs were set up in a semicircle around this post, and in building after building everyone was told to grab their chairs and popcorn and jerky and go on top and watch this thing go down. I was there. I probably hooped and hollered as well. There are higher-up NCOs on the video saying, “Can you hear haji die?” “We don’t have zone five anymore because they just blew the shit out of it.” And lots of cheering. You know there are civilians there, but that’s what we’re supposed to do.
    I never got a true body count out of it. We never went to inspect the rubble afterwards, but I can tell you that it happened. Clif can tell you that it happened. He