kerkko.fi

Iraq war veteran Ethan McCord, who is seen running with an Iraqi child in his arms in a video posted by WikiLeaks of a July 2007 massacre of civilians in Baghdad, talked to the World Socialist Web Site about the impact of this and similar experiences in Iraq.

McCord and another former member of the company addressed an open letter to the Iraqi people, in which they insisted that "the acts depicted in the video were everyday occurrences of this war: this is the nature of how US-led wars are carried out in this region."

My platoon leader yelled at me for [evacuating a wounded child from the scene]. 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.

Our rules of engagement were changing on an almost daily basis. But 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 motherfucker on the street." We were just sitting there looking at each other like, "Are you kidding me? You want us to kill women and children on the street?"

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/apr2010/emcc-a28.shtml