Iraq War: "I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth."

The Deep South troops that refused to let their commander send them on what they claimed (apparently with good reason) was a suicide mission of marginal use even if they had gotten through are getting a lot of press attention.  The Army Times picked up the original Jackson Clarion-Ledger story on the incident.

Steve Gilliard found the platoon's claims plausible: We're not marching anymore 10/15/04.

Please understand something, every convoy movement in Iraq is tracked. The resistance has a 24-7 roadwatch. The second that they move down the highway without escort, the RPG's and snipers will be out in full force. They would have gotten as far as they could before the boys could call their cells to line the highway. Which might have been five miles or so. But the outcome would have been a repeat of the Jessica Lynch debacle. Except they aren't into taking prisoners now. ...

I would bet that these orders came from some staff guy who wanted to move the parts on the board, and had no clue about the danger on the highway. The Army is being ground down, beaten beyond recognition for Bush's dreams of empire.

This might go away, it might not, but this is a harbinger of bad things to come.

In the last week, you have Marines disgusted with their mission, the next thing is refusing orders. The next thing coming is a combat refusal, the nice word for mutiny. And it's one thing to arrest truck drivers. When you have a platoon of fully armed infantrymen doing the same, you have a problem.

Inquiry Opens After Reservists Balk in Baghdad by Neela Banerjee and Ariel Hart New York Times 10/16/04.  The Banerjee/Hart piece had an added element that could prove important (my emphasis):

"Yesterday we refused to go on a convoy to Taji," Specialist Amber McClenny, 21, said in a message she left on the answering machine of her mother, Teresa Hill, in Dothan, Ala."We had broken-down trucks, nonarmored vehicles. We were carrying contaminated fuel."

After the soldiers were released, Specialist McClenny called her mother againandexplained that the jet fuel the convoy had to carry had been contaminated with diesel, and that because it had been rejected by one base, it would likely be rejected by the Taji base.

Taji is in the volatile Sunni-dominated swath of Iraq, and Ms. Hill said her daughter felt "that if you go there, it's a 99 percent chance you will be ambushed or fired upon."

"They had not slept, the trucks had not been maintained, they were going without armed guards, it was just a bad deal," Ms. Hill said. "And that's when the whole unit said no." She said their defense is "cease action on an unsafe order."

Relatives said that prior to the incident, soldiers had complained to them that their equipment was shoddy and put them in greater danger. The relatives said they did not know if such complaints were made to the unit's command.

If the claim about the contaminated fuel is accurate, it makes it even more understandable that the unit would refuse the mission.  Not only did they not have adequate security on a high-risk mission; the mission was likely to be pointless anyway.

Army Reserve Unit Reportedly Balked at Risky Mission in Iraq by Mark Mazzetti and Ellen Barry Los Angeles Times 10/16/04.

Family members said the incident was the product of cumulative frustration over being exposed to danger.

"It's a buildup," McCook said. There's a sense "people don't give a damn about them or their families. At a point in everybody's life you get upset. You get fed up."

2 Miss. soldiers among 5 reassigned (Jackson MS) Clarion-Ledger 10/16/04

Jackie Butler of Jackson said she has not heard from her husband, a 24-year veteran of the Army reserves and a carpenter for the Jackson Public School District during his civilian life.

"I haven't been able to sleep since this happened," Butler said. "I've just been walking back and forth pacing, waiting to hear something." ...

GeniaWhite, Spc. Reeves' mother, also of Denver, N.C., said her son has talked in the past about being ill-equipped for some missions.

"Why do they not have what they need?" she asked. "My taxes are supposed to be paying for those things, but I have to worry about my son being ill-equipped while he is being fired at. That makes no sense."

Harold Casey Sr. of Louisville, Ky., is the grandfather of Spc. Justin Rogers, 22, who was among those detained. Casey, who has not spoken with his grandson, was told the platoon refused the convoy because they had been under heavy attack and were so sleepy that drivers were nodding off and running off the road.

Casey said he was told Sgt. McCook of Jackson played a major role in the platoon refusing the orders.

"I was told he really stuck his neck out for his men," Casey said of McCook. "They were so shorthanded it was pathetic."

Four calls to the Army personnel division Casey has placed to check on his grandson have gone unanswered, he said.

"He really and truly was enthused about being in the Army," Casey said. "He would actually strut around while he was in his uniform. This might change that strut. I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth."

Harold Casey's question is an appropriate one for the Bush administration's handling of this entire miserable war:  "I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth."

One of the ugly features of this story is that the Army is obviously jacking the families and the press around even on basic information on the actions taken against the soldiers.  Given what everyone knows happened at Abu Ghuraib, the families can't help but wonder just how careful the Army will be in following the law in dealing with soldiers accused of mutiny.

But, as this article makes clear, there's good reason to think the soldiers were acting sensibly and very likely in accord with the law: Revolt in the ranks in Iraq by Mary Jacoby, Salon.com  10/16/04.

The e-mail arrived Tuesday evening. But Kathy Harris didn't see the urgent plea from her son, Spc. Aaron Gordon, 20, until she arrived at work Wednesday morning. By then, Gordon and 16 other members of his Army Reserve platoon were corralled in a tent in Tallil, Iraq, under armed guard, for refusing to drive a fuel supply convoy in what another of the detained soldiers would later describe as a "death sentence."

"At that point [when her son e-mailed] they hadn't been arrested yet. He was asking my advice about what could happen if they refused an order," Harris told me on Friday by telephone from Mississippi. "He said they had been ordered to take a contaminated load of fuel into a high-danger area. He said that they had already taken this load to one location, and it had been refused, and that they had, in his exact words, a '75 percent chance of being hit' on this new mission. He asked what the potential reprimands were if he disobeyed his commanding officer and, if it came to that point, what would happen to him if he had to get physical."

Harris quickly phoned a friend who is a judge advocate general (JAG) officer and e-mailed her son back. "I told him if he struck an officer he faced potential three years imprisonment and a dishonorable discharge. I said, 'Do not do that.' I told him to talk to his first sergeant and see if he could help. But I doubt he ever got my reply." ...

At 5:12 a.m. Wednesday, Patricia McCook, also of Jackson, Miss., was awakened by a "very frantic" phone call from her husband, Sgt. Larry McCook. "He was saying, 'Wake up! Please listen to me! I sneaked out of the back [mess] hall to tell you something. Something's going on. The military wants to sweep it under the rug, but it needs to be out. Get a paper and pen and write this down."

The mother of two teenagers jerked out of bed and began scribbling. Her notes read "disobeying a lawful order," "17 of us," "all of us agreed not to go." Her husband, she said, "was just trying to get out as much information as possible. I had to slow him down to get the names of some of the other people." She managed to get three names before he hung up on her. ...

The 343rd Quartermaster Company is based in Rock Hill, S.C., and has been in Iraq since February. From their base in Tallil, about 190 miles southeast of Baghdad, the reservists have run fuel supply convoys from Najaf in the Shiite south to Fallujah in the Sunni triangle,butmore recently they have stayed away from those cities in the heart of the burgeoning insurgency.

"When Amber first told me she was doingconvoys, she said they would have two or three gun trucks with them, and she was either driving the tanker or driving a gun truck. And they always had air support. But this time, they were ordered to go without," her mother, Teresa Hill, said.

When does credibility count in a national administration?  In situations just like this.  God bless those relatives who are defending their family members in a situation like this.  They know that the blowhard armchair warmongers who sit around dreaming up wars for their family members to die in and who snicker about sick, sadistic tortures being performed on the "enemy" will accuse their loved ones of being cowards or worse.

And they are talking to the press and pressuring the Army because they know that Lt. AWOL Bush and his criminal Defense Secretary and the rest of the sorry lot that cooked up this war will gladly hang their family members out to dry.  "I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth."

What do model Republican Party wars look like?  They look just like this.

In other blog comments, echidne at The American Street 10/16/04 comments:  "These are soldiers in a support unit who were not trained for direct combat duties. Their performance during the nine months of their stay in Iraq has been good. But even the best will mutiny at some point…"

EBW at the Wampum blog looks at the legal basis for the soldiers' refusal of this order:

It appears that they disobeyed an illegal order, to conduct routine logistics ops but delivering fuel known to be water contaminated to combat units (sabotage) and doing so without combat support and draw casualties (standing orders on force protection).

The unit was tasked to traverse Main Supply Route Tampa in unarmoured fuel transports with a top speed of 40 mph without gun-truck or rotary-wing escort. Separately, the fuel load is reported to have been water-contaminated and rejected by a combat unit seeking fuel resupply the previous day.

I came across that one via Juan Cole, who summarizes the unit's problem: Is Bush Shortchanging our Troops? 10/16/04.

That is, there are three separate elements to the order that the reservists refused to obey. The first was that they were being sent to deliver contaminated fuel that shouldn't have in fact been delivered up to the hot war front in Anbar province. The second is that they were being sent to do it in old barely operational vehicles that not only were not armored properly against roadside bombs, but might break down, stranding the soldiers and exposing them to a guerrilla attack. The third was that they were being denied the customary escort by humvees and helicopter gunships, key to scaring off potential small-band guerrilla attacks.

In other words, they were ordered to do something illegal in a way that might well have gotten them killed for no good reason.