Iraq: The Hidden Human Costs - The New York Review of Books

...a civilian candy truck tried to merge with a column of our armored vehicles, only to get run over and squashed. The occupants were smashed beyond recognition. Our first sight of death was a man and his wife both ripped open and dismembered, their intestines strewn across shattered boxes of candy bars. The entire platoon hadn't eaten for twenty-four hours. We stopped, and as we stood guard around the wreckage, we grew increasingly hungry. Finally, I stole a few nibbles from one of the cleaner candy bars. Others wiped away the gore and fuel from the wrappers and joined me...

Kayla Williams, an Arabic-speaking military intelligence officer, tells of attending an interrogation session in Mosul in the fall of 2003 in which US soldiers remove the clothes of a prisoner in a cage and then mock him: "Mock his manhood. Mock his sexual prowess. Ridicule the size of his genitals." The soldiers flicked lit cigarette butts at the prisoner and smacked him across the face. Williams later learned that a prisoner died in the same cage she had visited...

In a cluster of mud-hut homes across from the platoon's position, old ladies in black robes stand outside, "staring at the pale, white ass of a Marine" who, naked from the waist down, is "taking a dump in their front yard." A Marine says to Wright, "Can you imagine if this was reversed, and some army came into suburbia and was crapping in everyone's front lawns? It's fucking wild."

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