We Remember These Crimes

"Even in Vietnam I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic."
- Major Bob Nugent
  Army intelligence officer

GULF WAR I

Photo © 1991 Kenneth Jarecke / Contact Press Images

"Photo of a dead human burned completely black; he is frozen in place in an upright position as he leans on the edge of some metallic surface of a vehicle, perhaps the door or hood. His face is melted and his lips are burned away so that his teeth are revealed in a hideous grimace; the skin is peeling off his charred skull, his hands and arms are burned and melted to the bone."

HIGHWAY OF DEATH

THE UNSEEN GULF WAR


A few days after the end of the Gulf ground war, an Iraqi soldier lies in the desert near where his convoy of vehicles was bombed and strafed by Allied aircraft as the convoy attempted to retreat from Kuwait back to Iraq. This was a different and much less exposed convoy that was bombed, from the Mile of Death. This convoy was on an obscure road to the north and east of Kuwait City. This attack left most of the Iraqi soldiers in the convoy carbonized and their bodies were buried by Allied Forces at the end of the war.

THE MAI LAI MASSACRE

Photograph by Ronald L. Haeberle © Time Inc

With bodies and burning huts all around them troops had accosted the young 13-year-old girl seen here trying to button her top. Another woman tries to hold back the girl's distraught mother. When the troops noticed Haeberle, the photographer, they stopped and turned away as if everything was normal.

"Then a soldier asked, 'Well, what'll we do with 'em?'"

"Kill 'em," another answered."

"I heard an M60 go off," says Roberts, "a light machine gun, and when we turned back around, all of them and the kids with them were dead."