U.S. soldier kills five troops in Iraq

U.S. Army Sgt. John Russell shot to death five U.S. troops on May 11 at Camp Liberty, one of the largest U.S. installations in Iraq. This act put into focus the relationship of the personal to the political in a war zone.

Russell, a 44-year-old electronics technician with the 54th Engineer Battalion, had been at the so-called Combat Stress Control Center. According to news reports, he argued with staff there and was then taken outside by an armed escort.

According to these reports, Russell commandeered the escort’s weapon and ordered him out of the jeep they were in, then drove back to the Center, where he fatally shot two officers working there—an Army psychiatrist and a Navy social worker—as well as three enlisted persons.

Russell had earlier been stripped of his weapon and ordered to the Combat Stress Control Center by his commanding officer. He was on his third tour in Iraq and due to leave in six weeks.

He had been on active duty since 1994 after having enlisted in the Army National Guard in 1988. Before Russell’s three tours in Iraq, he took part in the U.S. occupations of Kosovo—at that time a province of Serbia—and Bosnia.

According to Russell’s father, Wilburn Russell, John was threatened and reprimanded by his superior and believed that he was going to be discharged from the military. He risked losing not only his steady income, but his pension as well. John Russell owed heavily for a home he had just had built. (New York Times, May 13)

Wilburn Russell says John told his wife, “My life is over. To hell with it. I’m going to get even with ‘em.”

‘They broke him’

In an interview Wilburn Russell said, “If a guy actually goes to the clinic and asks for help, they think of him as a wimp and he’s got something wrong with him and try to get rid of him. Well, he didn’t go and ask voluntarily for help. They scheduled him in, and they set him up. They drove him out. They wanted to put as much pressure on him as they could to drum him out. They broke him.” (Times)

The initial accounts of the shootings described the incident as a case of “fragging.” “Fragging” technically means killing with a fragmentation grenade. Starting in 1969, angry U.S. enlisted soldiers in Vietnam committed “fraggings” when they killed officers or noncommissioned officers who had given them a hard time, ordered them into combat against their will, given unreasonable orders in the field or were responsible for mistakes of leadership that led to soldiers being killed. The term grew to include all similar killings, whatever the weapon.

Historian Terry Anderson of Texas A&M University says of fragging during the Vietnam War that the U.S. Army knew that at least 600 officers and noncoms were killed this way, “and then they have another 1,400 that died mysteriously. Consequently by early 1970, the Army [was] at war not with the enemy but with itself.”

Few eras in the history of worldwide class struggle have been as rife with revolutionary ardor as the period from the late 1950s to the mid 1970s. During the U.S. occupation of Vietnam, national liberation movements in the Third World raged on just as national liberation movements were being fought inside the imperialist U.S. This had a political impact on the GIs.

The current period is quite different. But it is also an era of profound crisis in the system, one that has already bled almost six million jobs in the U.S. alone. Though Russell’s act may not have been overtly political, it developed in a specific context of his legitimate fear of being thrown out of the military and labeled with emotional or mental disability at a time when finding employment is extremely difficult. His act may be best described as “fragging redux.”

Hasan Akbar, a Black man and a Muslim, carried out a more consciously political fragging when he rolled grenades into command tents in March 2003 before the invasion of Iraq began. Akbar said he opposed the war and feared for his life because of bias against his religious beliefs and because he was a Black man who had faced the racist conditions of everyday U.S. life.

Akbar refused to kill fellow Muslims and heroically turned his weapons against his superiors. He has since been sentenced to death.

A new era of crisis

While the stress on U.S. occupation troops pales in comparison with the stress on the occupied peoples, still, anyone organizing against the wars must take into consideration the impact on the U.S. troops. The military has long been one of the few ways out of unemployment for workers, especially those from oppressed nationalities who face much higher unemployment rates. The twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan mean that soldiers are on constant rotation.

Already 1.7 million people in the military have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, with many having served two to three tours of a year or longer in a war zone.

According to the RAND Corporation, a military think tank, at least one in five troops who have been in Iraq or Afghanistan suffer from post traumatic stress disorder or depression. In 2008, 169 active-duty troops committed suicide.

At the same time, a worldwide movement is burgeoning again in response to imperialist globalization. The movement for socialism is once again a rising specter alongside movements for national liberation.

While the U.S. wages two imperialist wars and threatens another in Pakistan, more soldiers may be driven over the edge. Russell’s act, as personal as it seems, is connected to the U.S. tenuous grip on the people of Iraq and Afghanistan and the toll the resistance in both countries is taking on U.S. soldiers, along with the unending uncertainty of the capitalist crisis.