I grew up extremely conservative in a military family and felt that it was my duty to join the military and go to war and fight for this nation. And, when I got there and started realizing we were killing innocent people, for the most part. And, you have to understand they say in that video we're shooting civilians. Every person in Iraq is a civilian. There was no army that we were fighting. There was no military we were fighting. It was all civilians. So, you know there's no uniformed people that we were fighting. That was the hardest part because you start to see these people that we are fighting over there are people who are trying to protect their own homes from us who invaded their country.
So, when I left the military and been trying to put this incident behind me--You know, last year I drop my kids off at school and came home and turned on the news with a cup of coffee and the first image I actually saw was me running across the screen and carrying the child.
Immediately, it felt like a slap in the face. I knew exactly what it was. Unfortunately, I had seen that image in my head plenty of times in the past. The first feeling I felt was anger that this was put out but then I started realizing that this needs to be out there. People need to see what soldiers are being put through, what the Iraqi people are being put through on a daily basis. I wanted to provide context for that video because it seemed that all these talking heads on the radio or on the TV were saying one thing when it was completely wrong. They had no idea what was going on that day. That's when I decided to come out and start speaking about it, about my feelings, about what I felt at the time and that was why I started speaking on this and over the past year I've been part of many speaking engagements and have actually spoken to kids in classrooms to let them know the realities of war.
GOSZTOLA: Right and what has it been like and what can you say about how commanding officers give people who are in the military who experience these incidents -- like how they actually don't tend to want to listen to people who have complaints about incidents like this? What can you say about the need for veterans to have an outlet for explaining what they went through?
MCCORD: You know, when I was in the military, I never heard of We Are Not Your Soldiers or Courage to Resist . The military did a very good job of keeping those outlets away from us. If you wanted to talk to somebody, well you can go and talk to other veterans who are around the army post who are very adamant about this war is right, this war is just. So, when say someone like me who witnesses and experiences something like the WikiLeaks "Collateral Murder" and their view changes, you really have no one to speak to. You have to kind of ball it in.
For myself that day, when we had gotten back to the forward operating base I had asked to see mental health because I was having a hard time dealing with what I had just seen with the small children. I was told by a staff sergeant that I needed to suck it up and get the sand out of my vagina. So, there's this stigma for especially in the infantry -- You have to be thick-skinned and you have to be able to deal this. I mean your job basically is to kill people. You're not there to save people, you're not there to provide freedom and democracy because in the infantry you're trained from the first day of basic training to kill, kill, kill. You know, what makes the green grass grow? Blood, blood, blood. That's what's pressed into you. So there's no way to get to higher ups especially in my case the battalion commander for our unit 216 was Pat Tillman's old XO and he had given us orders out in Iraq for 360 degree rotational fire to kill everybody on the street when we were hit by an IED including men, women and children. So, who do you go to? There's no one there. And again you don't have the outlets like We Are Not Your Soldiers or Courage to Resist right there for you to be able to talk to.
GOSZTOLA: Now, back in October--Well, actually I think it's good to mention and you can talk a little bit about this. You actually with Josh Stieber put out an apology letter . What did it mean for you to be able to connect with some of these families in the aftermath?
MCCORD: First off, I think way too many people underestimate the power of forgiveness and, even though myself and Josh Stieber we didn't pull the trigger that day, we were still guilty, I guess you could say, by association. We were a part of the system that was doing this to their families. And, we felt that we needed to heal ourselves as well as to heal others was to express feelings and our sorrow. So, we wrote the letter of reconciliation and responsibility.
From my understanding, a London reporter took the letter to the widow and the mother of the two children and she said that she can forgive me because if it wasn't for me her children would have died and that was a huge weight being lifted off my shoulders. Forgiveness is an extremely powerful thing.
GOSZTOLA: And then in October you posted some video and some photos on MichaelMoore.com and these were actually from Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry, the unit in the video and you said you were showing detainee abuse but the kind of abuse that's not violent but the kind of mental, emotional and degrading type which actually seems to be less and less significant than the violent abuse. We don't give that the kind of attention that many might say it deserves. And so, what I'm wondering is what went into your decision to release especially since you had been exposed through a "leak" yourself?
MCCORD: When I was in Iraq, I was witnessing these things happening. I was watching good men become somewhat of animals. And the dehumanization that was taking place in Iraq, of the people of Iraq, it was sickening. You know, again, it begins in basic training. You learn to despise these people, to hate them. And, you know I released these videos for the simple fact that I believe that every person should see what happens in war. The only way we are going to stop war is if people have to live it, if they have to see it thrown in their face--Just like the Afghanistan "Kill Teams."
I believe everybody should look at those pictures. Everybody. Because, for too many people, the war is so far away and so distant that they go on about their normal lives and they don't care about what's going on over there. It doesn't affect them. But, if you're children are seeing these pictures and you're looking at these pictures and you're not feeling anything, then there's something seriously wrong with you. You have to feel some kind of anger, remorse for what's happening to these people.
We're destroying these nations. We're destroying these people over there. For what? Because I still don't know. I served over there. I still don't know why we're killing these people. We were killing people for coming out of their homes, for trying to live their lives we were killing people. So, yeah, I believe everybody deserves to see what happens in war so that's why I released the videos and sure they're not graphic in nature as far as physical violence but if you sit there and abuse someone mentally for so long, do the scars not last longer than if you were to punch somebody in the face?
GOSZTOLA: And what you can say about, being somebody that has a connection to the military and for people who are in the military, if they get these photos and if they get this video, I guess, what are they dealing with when they decide whether or not to share them? Is there some kind of disciplinary procedure they can face for sharing this material?
MCCORD: Oh, absolutely --
GOSZTOLA: What's the ramification for somebody that goes ahead and decides to post and share this widely?
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