Ethan McCord, one of the soldiers seen in the now-famous Wikileaks video in which two American Apache helicopters fire upon a relaxed, unhurried
gaggle of men in Baghdad, has
stated in an interview
with World Socialist Website that he witnessed numerous times the
indiscriminate slaughter of civilians in Iraq after IED attacks.
McCord is on of the soldiers seen helping two wounded children after
the attack. He has stepped forward with open opposition to the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, and written a letter
of apology
for his part in the incident to the mother of the children, who has
accepted his apology. The mother's husband was killed in the attack
and found with his body shielding that of one of his children.

McCord said to reporter Bill Van Auken:

"we had a pretty gung-ho commander, who decided that because we were getting hit by IEDs a lot, there would be a new battalion SOP [standard
operating procedure].He goes, "If someone in your line gets hit with an
IED, 360
rotational fire. You kill every motherf*cker on the street." Myself
and Josh and a lot of other soldiers were just sitting there looking at
each other like, "Are you kidding me? You want us to kill women and
children on the street?" And you couldn't just disobey orders to
shoot, because they could just make your life hell in Iraq. So like
with myself, I would shoot up into the roof of a building instead of
down on the ground toward civilians. But I've seen it many times, where
people are just walking down the street and an IED goes off and the
troops open fire and kill them."

The deliberate killing of civilians is a war crime (Nanking 1937, Hankow 1938, German Invasion of Poland 1939.)
McCord is one of a growing number of soldiers and support groups who
have renounced their actions in Iraq. He said:

"I was the gung-ho soldier. I thought I was going over there to do the greater good. I thought my job over there was to protect the Iraqi
people and that this was a job with honor and courage and duty.

I was hit by an IED within two weeks of my being in Iraq. And I didn't understand why people were throwing rocks at us, why I was being
shot at and why we're being blown up, when I have it in my head that I
was here to help these people."

McCord says the scenes captured in the Wikileaks video are "an every-day occurrence in Iraq."

McCord says that when he found the two children wounded in the van, another soldier began to vomit and ran off. Then he recounts:

"That's when I saw the boy move with what appeared to be a labored breath. So I stated screaming, "The boy's alive." I grabbed him and
cradled him in my arms and kept telling him, "Don't die, don't die." He
opened his eyes, looked up at me. I told him, "It's OK, I have you."
His eyes rolled back into his head, and I kept telling him, "It's OK,
I've got you." I ran up to the Bradley and placed him inside. My
platoon leader was standing there at the time, and he yelled at me for
doing what I did. He told me to "stop worrying about these
motherfucking kids and start worrying about pulling security." So after
that I went up and pulled security on a rooftop.

McCord says about his mental state afterwards:

"I went to see a staff sergeant who was in my chain of command and told him I needed to see mental health about what was going on in my
head. He told me to "quit being a pussy" and to "suck it up and be a
soldier." He told me that if I wanted to go to mental health, there
would be repercussions, one of them being labeled a "malingerer," which
is actually a crime in the US Army."

McCord says the greater story is being overlooked, and that rather than blame individual soldiers, the Army itself should be examined, and
its system of training soldiers.

"Instead of people being upset at a few soldiers in a video who were doing what they were trained to do, I think people need to be more
upset at the system that trained these soldiers. They are doing
exactly what the Army wants them to do."

McCord echoes Major General Smedley D. Butler, the double Medal of Honor winner who resigned his commission and in 1935 became a critic of
the nations wars, traveling the country with his book and famous speech
"War is a Racket."
McCord said in the interview:

McCord talks about the ongoing effects of war:

"I still live with this every day. When I close my eyes I see what happened that day and many other days like a slide show in my head. The
smells come back to me. The cries of the children come back to me. The
people driving this big war machine, they don't have to deal with this.
They live in their $36 million mansions and sleep well at night."

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