WEAK FALLUJAH MURDER CASE:
MARINE BADGERED INTO
ADMITTING
GUILT
DURING
INTERROGATION
by Nathaniel R. Helms |
July 12, 2008 | Updated with correction July 14, 2008
Editor's
Note: In the second
paragraph of the original story, DOM incorrectly reported Weemer’s
interview with NCIS agents occurred on November 16, 2006. It in fact
took place on November 9, 2006, exactly two years after the alleged
incident happened. DOM regrets the error.
A Marine sergeant charged with murdering an
enemy combatant captured in Fallujah during the heat of battle
repeatedly told Naval Criminal Investigative Service special agents he
didn’t do anything wrong.
Sergeant Ryan Weemer’s words were captured during a
lengthy 2006 interview with NCIS Special Agents Mark Fox and Tess Berg
obtained by Defend Our Marines. The interview took place on
November 9 in Chesterfield, Missouri, a suburb of Saint Louis.
A carefully cherry-picked version of his statement
was revealed by the prosecution during Weemer’s Article 32 preliminary
hearing last week.
Much less was said about Weemer’s apparent
confusion, his overwhelming remorse, and his compelling need to seek
absolution from the very people intent on putting him in jail.
Several hours of prodding and probing primarily by
Fox revealed that Weemer, now 26, was an obviously disturbed young
man who had lost his youth and much of his soul in the fiery cauldron
of Fallujah.
During a battering, soul-searching interrogation, Weemer often sounded like a confused and sometimes incoherent young
man tortured by his memories of the war. Despite a barrage of
questions Weemer was unable to provide Fox with where the alleged
killings occurred, when, or at what time.
Fox, a ruthlessly effective interrogator, used
similar tactics to extract a pair of convoluted confessions from
co-defendant Sgt. Jermaine Nelson during the international dragnet
NCIS put on to bring the Marines up on charges. Like Weemer, Nelson
waived his right to an attorney and was charged with murder after
cooperating.
“I know there were five days or four days that went
by I don’t remember much of because I was just, like I said, I just
feel like I was there,” Weemer explained at the Residence Inn where
the NCIS duo batted his fractured psyche back and forth like a
badminton shuttlecock.
“Would that be between the 9th and the
13th?” Fox pressed on.
"Yes. Probably, somewhere close – well I remember
like the 13th seems like a day I can remember what we were
doing. We were cleaning house and, but before that it seems that
everyone was the same other than the incidents that happened," Weemer
replied.
Weemer should remember November 13, 2004. On that
day he was shot three times in the leg by a foreign fighter – a
suspected Chechen who Weemer lit on fire with 14 shots from his pistol
during an arm’s length gunfight in a darkened room of the infamous
Hell House. Weemer was able to kill the man when he saw him in the
fire of his burning equipment.
“His chest rig was still on fire so I could see his
face,” Weemer recounted in April 2006. “I shot him in the legs and
when he went down in the doorway – I shot him in the face.”
With him at the Hell House were Sgt John Winnick,
LCpl Stephen Tatum, L Cpl Justin Sharratt, Sgt Jose Nazario, and Sgt
Jermaine Nelson, despised by some of their own now for being criminals
when they fought for their country.
Weemer and Nelson are currently under open arrest
at Camp Pendleton on a federal contempt of court citation for refusing
to testify before a federal Grand Jury in California. The civilian
jurors are weighing the prosecutor’s desire to enhance charges of
voluntary manslaughter against their former squad leader Jose Nazario
to murder and unlawfully using a weapon.
Nazario and Weemer were both civilians when charged
by the NCIS with committing crimes in Iraq. Nazario was arrested off
his job as a police officer and frog marched in handcuffs past his
peers on the way to a federal indictment in US District Court.
Weemer was recalled to active duty from college and
a new wife in Louisville, Kentucky so he could be charged with murder
and dereliction of duty.
Both Weemer and Nelson have since clammed up,
leading an exasperated federal judge to jail them in June for contempt
of court for refusing to testify against Nazario and each other after
being granted unwelcome immunity. It was the second time Nelson had
been sent to the slammer for refusing to talk.
The frustrated judge released them from a San
Bernardino County civilian jail on July 3rd, in Weemer’s
case after almost three weeks in a 12-man bullpen filled with common
criminals.
Nazario is charged in US District Court for Central
California for killing two of for insurgent prisoners his squad
captured on November 9, 2004. He is scheduled to go on trial August
19, his attorney Kevin B. McDermott recently said.
Weemer told the agents that the incident at
Fallujah was an exigency of war that resulted in the deaths of four
insurgent prisoners his squad captured in the opening hours of the
ground assault against the heavily fortified city. Only later, after
much cajoling and correcting did Weemer admit he shot one of the
prisoners. He couldn’t even explain why.
“And you’re talking
two years later and now you want to bring all these things back up.
You caught me on a good day, for one. Ummm, for two years I tried
forgetting everything,” Weemer says in response to one of Fox’s
questions.
“Well, it isn’t by
design,” Fox assures Weemer.
“No,” Berg agrees
seconds before her partner asks Weemer why he told a Secret Service
agent interviewing him for a job that he killed a prisoner. His
revelation during a job interview triggered the investigation
currently shaming the Corps.
When Weemer declines
with a grunt to answer his accusatory question, Fox asks, “Okay, what
does it mean to you?”
Weemer: “It means we
had to go. Uh, we couldn’t take them: you know, we knew if we let them
go they’re just going to run around our back side and pull out weapons
elsewhere. The city was just covered with weapons everywhere.”
Fox: “Right.”
Weemer: “We found
[weapons] caches in all places, and we blew them all.”
Fox: “Okay, so when
you say take care of it you have to kill these guys or they are going
to kill you later?”
Weemer: “Umm hum.”
The
Thundering Third in Fallujah and controversy over accounts of their
actions
For the next six weeks
Defend Our Marines
is going to retrace the journey of 3rd Platoon, Kilo, 3/1
from An Nasiriyah in March 2003 to June 17, 2007, during combat
operations near Lake Tharthar in Anbar, Iraq to try and discover why
the Marine Corps insists on eating its young.
North County Times
reporter Mark Walker
broke the Fallujah murder story on a Friday,
June 29, 2007.
In
subsequent reports, he spotlighted a writer who hadn't come clean in a book
about Marines at Fallujah in 2004.
Both the accused at
Fallujah and the Marines charged with massacre at Haditha a year later
belonged to the vaunted “Thundering Third,” a battalion of ordinary
men thrust unwilling into extraordinary times. The author was writing
a story about their heroics thirty months before.
Their story didn’t
begin in Fallujah; an ancient city in a Sunni dominated area of Iraq.
It began when President George W. Bush ordered Army General Tommy
Franks to conquer Iraq and return it to the Iraqi people sans
Saddam Hussein. The Thundering Third crossed the line of departure
with everyone else, an unknown, relatively untested battalion of
Marine infantrymen. It was destined for greater things.
Fallujah just happened
to be a Sunni stronghold when the Ba’athists were running things.
After President Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” in 2003, the
disaffected Sunni minority that once had a death grip on the country
said not so fast and dug in to resist at Fallujah. That is why the
Marines were sent there in April 2004 to calm things down.
It didn’t quite work
out that way.
Fallujah is also the
name most closely associated with the fiercest battle of the Iraq War.
When the Marines concluded their operation to cleanse the city of al
Qaeda inspired and led insurgents during November and December 2004,
most of it was gone. The Marines’ notion of mission accomplished is
somewhat different than that of their Commander-in-Chief.
Of an estimated
160,000 structures that stood in the ancient city on November 1, 2004,
less than 20 percent still existed two months later. What remained was
enshrined in Marine Corps lore.
The platoon at the
center of the incident is 3rd Platoon; in 2004 it was ably
led by 1st Lieutenant Jesse Grapes. His platoon was salty.
A lot of the Marines in it fought the year before at the bridge fights
of An Nasiriyah at the start of the war.
A rifleman who would
lose his leg at Fallujah called An Nasiriyah the best time, when there
weren’t rigidly enforced rules of engagement and Marines were stacking
up the bad guys like cordwood. He told stories about a SAW gunner at
An Nasiriyah who piled up bodies so high he had to elevate his piece
just to have a shot.
It could have been
hyperbole. The story teller is Alex Nicoll, a red-headed wild man and
designated battalion jester who ended up on television while living in
the desert with a bunch of monks until they ran him off.
Tattooed on his brawny
arms is “Bring the Violence.”
The story of Third
Platoon spans several years and several deployments. Some of the 3rd
Platoon Marines who crossed the line of departure in Kuwait in 2003
were still on the firing line in 2008.
Some of them were
destined to become household names. Some of them would receive high
awards and honors and others would be disgraced. Some of them are
still waiting to discover if they will someday go to jail. And far too
many of them were destined to die.
In a
July 6, 2007 report, Mark Walker wrote, “The
author of a book about the battle of Fallujah in 2004 said Thursday
that he has known for more than a year about allegations that members
of a Camp Pendleton platoon shot and killed eight Iraqi prisoners of
war during the fighting.”
It was as inaccurate as
it was unfair. It turned out only four insurgents allegedly died that
day, no doubt an inaccuracy attributable to the fog of war that still
enveloped Weemer and his squad. The men of Third Platoon are heroes in
the same stripe as the mystic Band of Brothers of the 101st
Airborne’s Easy Company and they were being painted as murderers.
"I didn't think it
benefited the Marines," Walker quoted the author in his
shaded rebuke.
Walker left off the
part about them being the finest young men America grows. They don’t
deserve the shame the story would produce, the author said, and they
don’t deserve the pain.
A year later nothing
has changed except the circumstances.
On November 1, 2004 the
Thundering Third was a reinforced infantry battalion on its second
combat deployment to Iraq. Third Platoon was a rifle platoon in Kilo
Company consisting of several squads of riflemen and a command
element. Each squad has three fire teams, a corpsman, and a leader.
Lt. Grapes was the
undisputed leader of the platoon. He said he joined up after 9/11
looking for payback. One guy said the Marines Corps needed two
helicopters to move the platoon when Grapes was in charge, one to
carry the men and one to carry his stones.
The platoon sergeant
was Staff Sergeant Jon Chandler, a relative new guy and untested in
the tightly knit team. He would get his leg turned around backwards at
Fallujah by a burst of AK-47 fire and be medically retired as a
gunnery sergeant.
The real steam among
the non-commissioned officers in the platoon was Sergeant Christopher
Pruitt, the platoon guide. Navy Cross recipient Sgt Maj Brad Kasal –
the Marine his men call “Robo-Grunt” - calls Pruitt one of the finest
small unit tacticians in the Marine Corps.
Pruitt would collapse
on a street in Fallujah November 13 after being shot too many times to
move any farther. Before he went down he gave a concise report to
Kasal about his unit’s situation. His clear reporting led to the
famous “Hell House” fight.
Two squad leaders that
lived after Fallujah was Corporal R.J. Mitchell, a handsome lad from
Omaha, and Sergeant Jose Nazario, a taciturn New Yorker who joined the
platoon after its first deployment.
Mitchell would earn a
Navy Cross and four Purple Hearts on what he called his “personal
crusade.” Nazario would be spared desperate wounds to face two counts
of voluntary manslaughter in civilian court. He said all he was trying
to do was keep himself alive.
A year later a squad
leader who replaced him and three of his Marines would be charged with
war crimes and massacre at Haditha. A year after that another 3rd
Platoon Marine would be charged with manslaughter and aggravated
assault while on his fourth combat tour.
In between there were
other scurrilous charges and other weird outcomes. Defend Our
Marines will report them all.
__________________________________________
Nathaniel R. Helms
Defend Our Marines
12 July 2008
Note: Nat Helms is a Contributing Editor to Defend Our
Marines. He is a Vietnam veteran, former police officer, war
correspondent, and, most recently, author of
My Men Are My Heroes: The Brad Kasal Story (Meredith Books, 2007).
