08/16/10 – Josh Stieber – The Scott Horton Show

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] All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Thanks for listening.
I'm Scott Horton, and my next guest on the show today is Josh Steber.
He's a former U.S. Army specialist deployed to Iraq in 2007 and 2008.
He was in Bravo Company 216, although not on patrol at the time that that company was involved in the Apache helicopter attack depicted on the video released by WikiLeaks.
Welcome back to the show, Josh.
How are you?
I'm good.
Thanks for having me back on.
I'm sorry.
I'm not sure why I added the oo-ah on the end there.
It's just Josh, right?
Right.
My mistake.
Anyway, so I've been reading this book, The Good Soldiers, by David Finkel from the Washington Post.
And this is really a hell of a thing.
It's all about the 216.
Your brigade, is that what it is?
I'm not sure the difference between companies and brigades and all these things.
I'm not a veteran.
It's actually a battalion.
A battalion, right, right.
Yeah, roughly about 800 people.
And so this book is the story of Lieutenant Colonel Koslarich, is that how you say it?
Koslarich.
Koslarich, okay.
And you guys, his guys, and a year and a half or so that you guys spent surging into eastern Baghdad there.
And again, it was you guys' company that was involved in the so-called collateral murder video put out by WikiLeaks, the Apache assault.
And so anyway, I think I kind of want to talk to you about generally what it was like there and maybe what it's like to be back and some of that kind of thing.
But there's a couple of specific points that I wanted to try to nail down before I talk with David Finkel so I can ask him about them.
And so the first thing is, is do you know or have you heard from inside your battalion there whether Finkel actually got his hands on the video of that Apache assault or whether it was just shown to him?
It's pretty clear reading the book that it was at least shown to him.
But apparently there's some question as to whether he has the video or not.
Do you have any insight into that?
Yeah, I mean, as far as the book, it's pretty clear that he's quoting from the actual tape.
But as to whether or not he has possession of the video, I have no idea.
Okay.
And yeah, I mean, I had no reason to believe that you would necessarily, but I figured I'd go ahead and ask you about it because, you know, it is part of this.
And then the second thing is that a fellow veteran of yours from the same battalion has said that you guys had a standard operating procedure, SOP, that said, and I guess this was a reaction to some EFP attacks on Yale's Humvees and stuff that had killed some guys, that from now on if a roadside bomb goes off, IED goes off, everyone who survives the attack get out and fire in all directions at anybody who happens to be nearby, that this wasn't just the kind of thing that soldiers might resort to under the worst frustration, fighting against ghosts, setting off remote control landmines, but that this was actually an order from above.
Is that correct?
Can you verify that?
Yeah, it was an order that came from Kazlerich himself, and it had the philosophy that, as Finkel does describe in his book, that we were under pretty constant threat.
And what he leaves out is the response to that threat.
His whole philosophy was that if each time one of these roadside bombs went off where you don't know who set it, you don't know how it got there, and you're just left with injured soldiers or dead soldiers, then people didn't know how to respond.
So the way we were told to respond was to open fire on anyone in the area with the philosophy that that would intimidate them to be proactive in stopping people from planting these bombs, because some of our leaders thought that was the only way to counteract the attacks that were going on.
Wow.
So, I mean, how many times did that act?
I mean, was that order stood from what point to what point?
From my experiences after it was issued, probably not too long before that video came out, which would have been July of 2007, was a fairly indefinite thing, and a lot of it depended on the lower-ranking leaders.
Some of them were more encouraging of the policy than others, but straight from Cosler to his mouth, it was definitely permitted, and he sent it to my platoon of about 30 people, and beyond that, I'm not sure who else he would have repeated it to and how broadly the policy was in use.
So to be specific here now, Josh, you're not saying that you heard from your sergeant that that's what he said.
You're saying he told you this to your face.
Right, yeah, myself and a couple other former platoon members have all verified this.
Yeah, one of the first times that this bomb went off, we came back to base, and he said that, and then two of my friends, I wasn't in the actual meeting, but two of my friends have publicly stated or talked about a meeting that I wasn't part of where he brought together our platoon and, again, repeated that order.
Did you survive EFP attacks?
I was in convoys where we got hit, but I was never directly in a truck that got hit by one.
It's just amazing.
I don't know the right words for it, but it's just something else to read the stories of you guys going out there and playing the IED lottery, as I've heard it termed before.
It almost seems like you're sent out there just to get landmined sometimes.
It seems strange.
It never seemed like any of the missions had any real purpose or something.
Maybe at some point, okay, set up a fire base here or a COP there, but most of the time it seems like it was just going out to pick a fight or to get one picked with you all.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of times that is what seemed to be the motivation.
We had the joke that the people assigning the missions were shaking up a magic 8-ball to determine what we would do that day because so much of it just seemed random and arbitrary.
In a lot of our opinions, the stuff we were doing was creating more hatred against us and, yeah, picking fights and finding more enemies.
Actually, the only thing that seemed to change that and the only thing that seemed to prove worthwhile was actually sitting down and negotiating with and talking with people we knew had at one time or another attacked us.
Well, now, back to the 360-degree rotational fire order here.
Were there any other – well, first of all – well, two questions, I guess.
First of all, how many times did this actually happen?
I guess I read your buddy Ethan saying that, well, he would just fire up toward the rooftops rather than down at street level where he could hit innocent people or whatever in order to obey the order and yet not really carry it out.
I just wonder how many times did this really happen where guys would get bombed and then just dismount and wax everybody on the street?
Does this happen over and over again?
I would say from what I witnessed maybe five to ten times.
Yeah, there were some guys who fired to intentionally miss.
There were some guys who refused to do it.
I at one point refused to take part in that and said that not only was it morally wrong, but it's strategically stupid.
It seems to be creating more enemies.
And then if there are actual more threats in the area, then that policy of just opening fire, you can't even hear where a threat is coming from.
So on multiple levels it seemed like a mistake.
I lost my position as a gunner for arguing with that position and that's why I wasn't on the mission in the collateral murder video.
But yeah, there were a mix of responses to how guys dealt with it.
Well, that's very interesting.
On the most very basic on the street tactical level, I can't hear who's shooting at me if I'm ordered to fire in all directions for no reason.
All right, hold it right there everybody.
It's Josh Steber from the U.S. Army.
Thankfully no longer.
Bradshaw, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Ward.
I'm talking with Josh Steber about his time in Iraq as part of the 216 as featured in David Finkel's book, The Good Soldiers.
That interview is coming up later in the show.
And we're talking about war crimes.
Josh, help me understand here, man.
Believe me, I can imagine only barely, but I can imagine the frustration of having IEDs and landmines going off and nobody there to shoot at.
And I think it's just a mathematical formula.
If you put enough troops in somebody's country to get blown up by landmines, there are going to be times when the soldiers dismount and fire their rifles at anybody who happens to be nearby because they're that mad at seeing their best friend blown up.
It's understandable.
That's war.
That's what happens.
You're telling me this was a standard operating procedure passed down to you by the lieutenant colonel.
And so anything more that you can tell me about that I want to know and I want on the record here.
But secondly, I'm also curious as to whether there were any other direct orders from Lieutenant Colonel Kozlarec about basically permitting the killing of civilians or mandating the killing of civilians like this, 360-degree rotational fire in this case.
I would say that was the primary one.
We actually don't have a whole lot of interaction with Kozlarec.
My company was out at a small factory apart from the main base where Kozlarec spent most of his time.
So only occasionally would we see him, but he definitely made it a point to pass along that order and kind of got into the reasoning behind it.
And a lot of people accepted that reasoning, but there seemed to be a lot of flaws in it and a number of us to varying degrees resisted that command also.
Were you at the COP that was in the factory across the street from the other factory that they started to make the COP but then it got bombed?
Correct.
You know, there's a thing that happens to, well, those of us who don't go to the war and sit back here and read about it all the time, where even when we're reading about this many soldiers were killed today by a landmine, whether in Iraq or Afghanistan, it's still, I hate to say, but to a degree there are still words on a page, you know what I mean?
And this book is that too, but then again, this book is something that the guy was embedded with you guys for more than a year and really wrote the stories of all these different guys who died.
Not everybody, I don't guess, but quite a few of the guys who died and all about who you guys are, what the attacks are like and all these things in a way.
It's so vivid and really brings home the idea about how you guys are just our next door neighbors over there.
And especially when all throughout the book as well, Josh, is I'm fighting for my country.
I'm fighting for freedom.
I always want to be a soldier, not to kill people, but to defend my country because I love America.
And that's what all the soldiers say, stuff like that.
These abstractions that are so abstract, they've got really nothing to do with the actual fight y'all are in, but they're all based on the theory that you trust the rest of us to make sure that you don't go to war unless it's the right thing, that we don't send you on a mission unless it's worth dying for.
Is that basically the understanding that you guys are operating under over there?
Yeah, I think it is.
It works both ways, and that's the common way that war seems to get spread, is that the people who live it out are expecting that they're not going to get deployed unless it's a just cause, and they're not going to really question that cause.
But then so many of the people who are cheering for it, too, aren't really taking into consideration the human aspect of what's going on.
And so I think that is the positive aspect of what David Finkel wrote about, is putting that human face on it.
And I think that if you look back through the last decade and the support that this war had, that as much as people want to criticize, and I think there's definitely a lot of room for criticism, but as much as people want to criticize specific things that soldiers did, which should be examined, that we need to look at broader society, too, and see that after 9-11 and everything, so many people were clamoring for vengeance, and you start campaigns with titles like shock and awe, and it should be pretty evident that that kind of thing is going to happen.
And so hopefully through looking at this on a personal level from soldiers, from civilians, both here and in Iraq and Afghanistan, then this can be a huge learning experience if we look at the full picture.
Well said.
Yeah, you know, I started the show out earlier, actually, with all the coverage of actually the TV ads for veteran support groups, TV ads for the VA now hiring.
Boy, we sure need doctors and nurses over at the VA all the time.
And, you know, this is really part of our society from now on is returning veterans, and thousands of guys who have been fighting through the war there.
And, you know, I was just reading last night the transcript of your buddy, Ethan McCord's interview with Cindy Sheehan where he talked about, and maybe I want to go back and look in the book and see if he was the guy because he used the exact phrase.
There's one guy in the book, in the Finkel book, who talks always about the slideshow in his head, and your buddy Ethan used that same phrase, talking about the pictures of this, you know, madness that he lived through over there, you know, in his mind all day, all night, this kind of thing he can't get rid of.
And I guess some people are more affected by that than others.
I wonder how you're doing.
I've been pretty fortunate to have a lot of people really step up and be supportive of me.
And when I got back from Iraq or even before that point, I knew that I was being a hypocrite by what I was doing on a regular basis and what I set my beliefs for and knew that I had to change how I was living.
So I became a conscientious objector and I've really been trying to learn about and promote other ways of solving problems.
But, yeah, unfortunately so many guys get back and really don't know how to sort out that contradiction between what we say we believe and what we're expected to do.
And I think that the times where people aren't able to vent those frustrations or give themselves room to, you know, say that maybe we made a mistake, that's when people bottle things up.
And there's a lot of times that leads to a lot of traumatic results.
Well, you know what?
Let's go ahead and leave this interview on the subject of veterans' care and that kind of thing.
If you'd like to talk about any organizations that you're a part of, how any soldiers listening can go about trying to follow your path and gaining conscientious objector status and opting out of this war.
Geez.
Real quick, just name a couple of websites.
I'm sorry.
My clock's wrong here.
All right.
The Center on Conscience for the War helped me with my CO application.
And then there's also Sections for Peace in Iraq, Sections Against the War with other veterans who feel a lot of things that I'm feeling.
All right.
Thanks, Josh.
Thanks a lot.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
That's Josh Steber.