This is what happens when you decide to make a hero out of somebody who's only "accomplishment" was committing a war crime. Promoting people who did nothing but commit a war crime, above dedicated soldiers who actually followed orders and the law and did not bring dishonor on their country. For some reason rightists seem to think it's good to shame those soldiers who performed well for reporting on officer who violated their oath, their orders, and the laws of the military, while treating as heroes undisciplined losers who accomplished nothing but wanton murder. Rightists want to do to the military what they did to the police, create a poisonous culture which values impunity above all else, considers itself above the law, won't follow orders or the will of the citizenry, and is generally insubordinate and prone to insurrection. That's what happens to a force when you just indulge them endlessly and refuse to ever hold them to account, it turns into a bunch of lawless brigands who respect no one but themselves. That's what Trump wants, he wants the military to be lawless brigands like the police are lawless brigands. The first step is to lionize losers who did nothing but acts of brutality, and shaming people for not following a code of silence. That's what the rightists want.

Well this awful commander absolutely ruined his unit, numerous members of the unit have committed suicide. But that's just fine to lionize and call heroic a bad commander specifically for a lawless act of brutality, lionize him above good and decent soldiers and thus diminish honorable people who followed orders and the law. Like we have a bunch of garbage police departments throughout the United States due to Republicans endless uncritical indulgence of the police, rightists endless uncritical indulgence of idiot brainless grunts for acting like idiot brainless grunts, instead of soldiers, will turn the entire force into idiot brainless grunts. There is nothing in the world more useless than a soldier who cannot follow orders, do not indulge them just because you're a fucking sadist who enjoys the spectacle of murder. Which is literally the sole motivation behind this. You'll wind up with an entire military lead by awful, brutal commanders with garbage moral falling into depression and PTSD just like this unit, you are undermining the discipline of the military by not only failing to discipline people for violations of their orders, their oath, and the law, but honoring them for violations of orders, their oath, and the law, and dishonoring those who upheld their orders, oath, and the law.

You will be left with nothing but a brigand military that will eventually turn its brutality back on the nation that decided to birth such a monster in its stupidity, ignorance, and cruelty, once you are left with a force of lawless brigands they aren't going to do anything you tell them too, it is inevitable that they seize control and institute an order of might makes right in place of law.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graph...ge%2Fstory-ans

The Cursed Platoon

By Greg Jaffe
July 2, 2020
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Only a few hours had passed since President Trump pardoned 1st Lt. Clint Lorance and the men of 1st Platoon were still trying to make sense of how it was even possible.

How could a man they blamed for ruining their lives, an officer the Army convicted of second-degree murder and other charges, be forgiven so easily? How could their president allow him to just walk free?

“I feel like I’m in a nightmare,” Lucas Gray, a former specialist from the unit, texted his old squad leader, who was out of the Army and living in Fayetteville, N.C.

“I haven’t been handling it well either,” replied Mike McGuinness on Nov. 15, the day Lorance was pardoned.

“There’s literally no point in anything we did or said,” Gray continued. “Now he gets to be the hero . . .”

“And we’re left to deal with it,” McGuinness concluded.

Lorance had been in command of 1st Platoon for only three days in Afghanistan but in that short span of time had averaged a war crime a day, a military jury found. On his last day before he was dismissed, he ordered his troops to open fire on three Afghan men standing by a motorcycle on the side of the road who he said posed a threat. His actions led to a 19-year prison sentence.

He had served six years when Trump, spurred to action by relentless Fox News coverage and Lorance's insistence that he had made a split-second decision to protect his men, set him free.

The president’s opponents described the pardon as another instance of Trump subverting the rule of law to reward allies and reap political benefits. Military officials worried that the decision to overturn a case that had already been adjudicated in the military courts sent a signal that war crimes were not worthy of severe punishment.

For the men of 1st platoon, part of the 82nd Airborne Division, the costs of the war and the fallout from the case have been profound and sometimes deadly.

Traumatized by battle, they have also been brutalized by the politicization of their service and made to feel as if the truth of what they lived in Afghanistan — already a violent and harrowing tour before Lorance assumed command — had been so demeaned that it no longer existed.

Since returning home in 2013, five of the platoon’s three dozen soldiers have died. At least four others have been hospitalized following suicide attempts or struggles with drugs or alcohol.

The last fatality came a few weeks before Lorance was pardoned when James O. Twist, 27, a Michigan state trooper and father of three, died of suicide. As the White House was preparing the official order for Trump’s signature, the men of 1st Platoon gathered in Grand Rapids, Mich., for the funeral, where they remembered Twist as a good soldier who had bravely rushed through smoke and fire to pull a friend from a bomb crater and place a tourniquet on his right leg where it had been sheared off by the blast.

Image: James O. Twist poses with local children during his deployment in Afghanistan in 2012.
James O. Twist poses with local children during his deployment in Afghanistan in 2012. (Courtesy of the Twist family)
They thought of the calls and texts from him that they didn’t answer because they were too busy with their own lives — and Twist, who had a caring wife, a good job and a nice house — seemed like he was doing far better than most. They didn’t know that behind closed doors he was at times verbally abusive, ashamed of his inner torment and, like so many of them, unable to articulate his pain.

By November 2019, Twist, a man the soldiers of 1st Platoon loved, was gone and Lorance was free from prison and headed for New York City, a new life and a star turn on Fox News.

This story is based on a transcript of Lorance’s 2013 court-martial at Fort Bragg, N.C., and on-the-record interviews with 15 members of 1st Platoon, as well as family members of the soldiers, including Twist’s father and wife. The soldiers also shared texts and emails they exchanged over the past several years. Twist’s family provided his journal entries from his time in the Army. Lorance declined to be interviewed.

In New York, Sean Hannity, Lorance’s biggest champion and the man most responsible for persuading Trump to pardon him, asked Lorance about the shooting and soldiers under his command.

Lorance had traded in his Army uniform for a blazer and red tie. He leaned in to the microphone. “I don’t know any of these guys. None of them know me,” Lorance said of his former troops. “To be honest with you, I can’t even remember most of their names.”

The soldiers of 1st Platoon tell their story
13:44
An ‘entire month of despair’
Image: Soldiers from the 1st Platoon fire a mortar during a firefight with Taliban in April 2012 in Kandahar province, southern Afghanistan.
Soldiers from the 1st Platoon fire a mortar during a firefight with Taliban in April 2012 in Kandahar province, southern Afghanistan. (Baz Ratner/Reuters)
The 1st Platoon soldiers came to the Army and the war from all over the country: Maryland, California, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Indiana and Texas to name just a few. They joined for all the usual reasons: “To keep my parents off my a--,” said one soldier.

“I just needed a change,” said another.

A few had tried college but quit because they were bored or failing their classes. “I didn’t know how to handle it,” Gray said of college. “I was really immature.”

Others joined right out of high school propelled by romantic notions, inherited from veteran fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers, of service and duty. Twist’s father served in Vietnam as a clerk in an air-conditioned office before coming back to Michigan and opening a garage. In his spare time Twist Sr. was a military history buff, a passion that rubbed off on his son, who visited World War II battle sites in Europe with his dad. Twist was just 16 when he started badgering his parents to sign his enlistment papers and barely 18 when he left for basic training. His mother had died of cancer only a few months earlier.

“I got pictures of him the day we dropped him off, and he didn’t even wave goodbye,” his father recalled. “He was in pig heaven.”

Image: Members of the 1st Platoon James O. Twist, Reyler Leon, Joe Morrissey, Andy Lehrer, Mike McGuinness, Dallas Haggard (kneeling) and Brandon Krebs pose with a flag in Afghanistan in 2012.
Members of the 1st Platoon James O. Twist, Reyler Leon, Joe Morrissey, Andy Lehrer, Mike McGuinness, Dallas Haggard (kneeling) and Brandon Krebs pose with a flag in Afghanistan in 2012. (Courtesy of the Twist family)
Several of the 1st Platoon soldiers enlisted in search of a steady paycheck and the promise of health insurance and a middle-class life. “I needed to get out of northeast Ohio,” McGuinness said. “There wasn’t anything there.”

In 1999, he was set to pay his first union dues and go to work alongside his steelworker grandfather when the plant closed. So he became a paratrooper instead, eventually deploying three times to Afghanistan.

McGuinness didn’t look much like a paratrooper with his thick, squat body. But he liked being a soldier, jumping out of planes, firing weapons and drinking with his Army buddies. After a while the war didn’t make much sense, but he took pride in knowing that his soldiers trusted him and that he was good at his job.

Nine months before 1st Platoon landed in rural southern Afghanistan, a team of Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden.

Image: Jarred Ruhl, Dallas Haggard and Mike McGuinness in Afghanistan in June 2012.
Jarred Ruhl, Dallas Haggard and Mike McGuinness in Afghanistan in June 2012. (Courtesy of the Carson family)
Samuel Walley, the badly wounded soldier Twist pulled from the blast crater, wondered if they might be spared combat. “Wasn’t that the goal to kill bin Laden?” he recalled thinking. “Isn’t that checkmate?”

Around the same time, Twist was trying to make sense of what was to come. “I feel like the Army was a good decision, but also in my mind is a lot of dark thoughts,” he wrote in a spiral notebook. “I could die. I could come back with PTSD. I could be massively injured.”

“Maybe,” he hoped, “it will start winding down soon.”

But the decade-long war continued, driven by new, largely unattainable goals. When McGuinness saw where the platoon was headed — just 15 or so miles from the spot in southern Afghanistan where he had spent his second tour — he warned the new soldiers they were going to be “fighting against dudes who just really f---ing hate you.”

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They were told by commanders they were waging a counterinsurgency war in which their top priority was winning the support of the people and protecting them from the Taliban. But no one seemed entirely sure how to accomplish that goal. They helped build a school that never opened because of a lack of teachers and willing students. They met with village elders who insisted they knew nothing about the Taliban’s operations or plans.

Image: An Afghan girl watches as soldiers from the 1st Platoon walk by during a mission in April 2012, in the Zhary district of Kandahar province, southern Afghanistan.
An Afghan girl watches as soldiers from the 1st Platoon walk by during a mission in April 2012, in the Zhary district of Kandahar province, southern Afghanistan. (Baz Ratner/Reuters)
In May 2012, they moved to a new compound near Payenzai, a remote Afghan village west of Kandahar, which consisted of little more than mud-walled houses, hardscrabble farmers and the Taliban.

So began what Twist described, in a blog post written years later, as an “entire month of despair.”

Four soldiers were severely wounded in quick succession. On June 6, Walley lost his leg and arm to a Taliban bomb. Eight days later, yet another enemy mine wounded Mark Kerner and 1st Lt. Dominic Latino, the platoon leader. Then, on June 23, a sniper’s bullet tore through Matthew Hanes’s neck, leaving him paralyzed.

The platoon was briefly sent back to a larger base a few miles away to shower, meet with mental-health counselors and pick up their new platoon leader. Lorance had served a tour as an enlisted prison guard in Iraq before attending college and becoming an infantry officer. He had spent the first five months of his Afghanistan tour as a staff officer on a fortified base.

This was his first time in combat.

Image: 1st Lt. Clint Lorance during training at Fort Bragg before the deployment to Afghanistan in 2012.
1st Lt. Clint Lorance during training at Fort Bragg before the deployment to Afghanistan in 2012. (Photo by Alan Gladney)
“We’re not going to lose any more men to injuries in this platoon,” he told then-Sgt. 1st Class Keith Ayres, his platoon sergeant, shortly after taking over on June 29, according to Ayres’s testimony.

His strategy, he said, was a “shock and awe” campaign designed to cow the enemy and intimidate villagers into coughing up valuable intelligence. When an Afghan farmer and his young son approached the outpost’s front gate and asked permission to move a section of razor wire a few feet so that the farmer could get into his field, Lorance threatened to have Twist and the other soldiers on guard duty kill him and his boy.

“He pointed at the child . . . at the little, tiny kid,” Twist testified. He estimated the child was 3 or 4 years old.

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“The Cursed Platoon,” Part 1Subscribe0:00151531:49
On Lorance’s second day, he ordered two of his sharpshooters to fire within 10 to 12 inches of unarmed villagers. His goal was to make the Afghans wonder why the Americans were shooting at them and motivate them to attend a village meeting that Lorance had scheduled for later in the week, his soldiers testified.

His real motive, though, seems to have been cruelty. “It’s funny watching those f---ers dance,” Lorance said, according to the testimony of one of his soldiers. Lorance didn’t pull the trigger. Instead, he stood by his men in the guard towers, picked the targets and issued orders. His troops finally balked when he told them to shoot near children. They refused again a few hours later when he ordered them to file a false report saying that they had taken fire from the village.

“If I don’t have the support of my NCOs then I’ll f---ing do it myself,” Lorance exclaimed, according to testimony, referring to noncommissioned officers.

Image: Sgt. 1st Class Keith Ayres looks over maps with other soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division in April 2012, before a joint mission with the Afghan army in Kandahar province.
Sgt. 1st Class Keith Ayres looks over maps with other soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division in April 2012, before a joint mission with the Afghan army in Kandahar province. (Baz Ratner/Reuters)
On the day of the killings for which he would be convicted, Lorance posted a sign in the platoon headquarters stating that no motorcycles would be permitted in his unit’s sector. The platoon’s soldiers were falsely told before the day’s patrol that motorcycles should be considered “hostile and engaged on sight.” Several soldiers testified that Lorance told them that senior U.S. officials had ordered the change. At least two sergeants recalled the guidance had come from the Afghans and did not apply to U.S. forces. Due to the conflicting testimony, the jury of Army officers acquitted Lorance of changing the rules of engagement. Still, Lorance’s actions left soldiers confused on the critical, life-or-death question of when they were authorized to open fire.

The mission that day was a foot patrol into a nearby village to meet the elders.

Less than 30 minutes after they rolled out of the gate, three men on a motorcycle approached a cluster of Afghan National Army troops at the front of their formation. Lorance and his troops were standing about 150 to 200 yards away in an orchard, tucked behind a series of five-foot-high mud walls on which the Afghans grew grapes.

At the trial, Lorance’s soldiers recalled how he had ordered them to fire.

“Why aren’t you shooting?” he demanded.

A U.S. soldier fired and missed. The motorcycle carrying the three men, none of whom appeared to be armed, came to a stop. Upon hearing the shots, McGuinness began running toward Lorance, who was closer to the front of the U.S. patrol, to see why they were shooting.

The puzzled Afghans were now standing next to the stopped motorcycle, “trying to figure out what had happened,” according to one soldier’s testimony. Gray, who was watching from a nearby armored vehicle, recognized the eldest of the three men as someone the Americans regularly met with in the village. He recalled the Afghans waving at them.

Image: Todd Fitzgerald testifies during Clint Lorance’s 2013 court-martial at Fort Bragg, N.C.
Todd Fitzgerald testifies during Clint Lorance’s 2013 court-martial at Fort Bragg, N.C.
“Smoke ’em,” Lorance ordered over the radio.

At first Gray and the other soldiers in the armored vehicle weren’t sure whom Lorance wanted them to shoot. “There was a back and forth with the three of us in the vehicle,” Gray recalled in an interview.

Then Pvt. David Shilo, who was in the turret of the armored vehicle just inches from Gray, fired, striking one of the men, who fell into a drainage ditch. Because the platoon had been told that morning that motorcycles weren’t allowed in their sector, Shilo testified that he thought he was acting on a lawful order. Shilo declined to be interviewed.

The two surviving Afghan men bent to retrieve their dead colleague when Shilo cleared his weapon and shot again, killing a second Afghan. The third man ran away. Two U.S. soldiers testified that it was possible that an Afghan soldier also fired.

A few minutes later, a boy approached the dead men and the motorcycle, which was standing on the side of the road with its kickstand still down. Lorance ordered Shilo to fire a third time and disable the bike. This time he refused.

“I wasn’t going to shoot a 12-year-old boy,” Shilo testified.

Image: David Shilo testifies during Clint Lorance’s 2013 trial at Fort Bragg, N.C.
David Shilo testifies during Clint Lorance’s 2013 trial at Fort Bragg, N.C.
Relatives of the dead were now on the scene screaming and crying. Lorance’s immediate superior officer, Capt. Patrick Swanson, who was two miles away and couldn’t see what was happening, ordered him over the radio to search the bodies.

Lorance was convicted of lying to Swanson, telling him that villagers had carried off the corpses before his men could examine them. In fact, Lorance’s troops searched the bodies of the dead Afghans and found ID cards, scissors, some pens and three cucumbers, but no weapons, according to testimony.

The troops continued their patrol into the village while McGuinness and a small team of soldiers provided cover from a nearby roof. About 30 minutes after the first shooting, McGuinness spotted two Afghan men talking on radios.

“We have to do something to the Americans,” one of the men was saying, according to U.S. intercepts. McGuinness and his troops received permission from the company headquarters to fire and killed the two men. The platoon cut short the patrol and returned to the base.

At the outpost the soldiers were shaken. “This doesn’t feel right,” Gray said.

“It’s not f---ing right at all,” McGuinness replied.

Image: Lucas Gray, Joe Fjeldheim and Mike McGuinness in Afghanistan 2012.
Lucas Gray, Joe Fjeldheim and Mike McGuinness in Afghanistan 2012. (Courtesy of the Carson family)
A few minutes later Lorance burst into the platoon’s headquarters ebullient. “That was f---ing awesome,” he exclaimed, according to court testimony.

“Ayres looked sick,” one of the platoon’s soldiers testified. McGuinness was furious.

The lieutenant tried to reassure his sergeants. “I know how to report it up [so] nobody gets in trouble,” he said, according to testimony.

Lorance’s soldiers turned him in that evening, and at the July 2013 trial, 14 of his men testified under oath against him. Four of those soldiers received immunity in exchange for their testimony. Lorance did not appear on the stand, and not one of his former 1st Platoon soldiers spoke in his defense. The trial lasted three days. It took the jury of Army officers three hours to find him guilty of second-degree murder, making false statements and ordering his men to fire at Afghan civilians. The jury handed down a 20-year sentence.

In response to a Lorance clemency request, an Army general reviewed the conviction and reduced the sentence by one year.

‘Why do you care so much?’
Image: Dave Zettel reveals a tattoo of a lighter to represent the 82nd deployment outside his home in Blythewood, S.C.
Dave Zettel reveals a tattoo of a lighter to represent the 82nd deployment outside his home in Blythewood, S.C. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
The war crimes and their aftermath followed Lorance’s soldiers home to Fort Bragg and, in some cases, into their nightmares. On many nights Gray woke up to the image of a group of Afghan soldiers surrounding his cot and emptying their rifles into his sleeping body in retaliation for the murders.

“I dreamed it,” he said, “because I thought that’s what would happen.”

Dave Zettel wasn’t on the patrol when the killings were committed but was in the guard tower when Lorance ordered him and another soldier to fire harassing shots into the neighboring village. On his first full day back in the States, Zettel went out to a dinner with a large group from the platoon and their families.

By the end of the night, the soldiers, rattled from the tour, the stress of Lorance’s upcoming trial and the return home, were intoxicated and emotionally falling apart. Zettel held it together until he was alone in a taxi with his wife and brother. In the quiet of the cab, he felt a crushing guilt that he had made it home unscathed.

“I just lost my s---. I felt like a failure,” he said. “I felt abandoned and so f---ing angry.”

In Afghanistan, Army investigators, who were primarily pursuing Lorance, threatened Zettel with aggravated assault charges for the shootings in the tower. And they showed McGuinness a charge sheet accusing him of murder for killing the Afghans who were talking on the radios about targeting Americans.

The threats of prosecution hung over them for months. Eventually, the Army concluded that McGuinness’s actions were justified. Prosecutors never pursued charges against Zettel.

Instead the Army issued administrative letters of reprimand to Zettel and Matthew Rush, the soldier who fired the rounds at the civilians from the tower. Zettel had watched from the tower but did not shoot.

Image: The 1st Platoon leadership team in Afghanistan in May 2012. From left: Dan Williams, Mike McGuinness, Chris Murray (sitting), Keith Ayres, Dominic Latino and Jace Myers (sitting, right).
The 1st Platoon leadership team in Afghanistan in May 2012. From left: Dan Williams, Mike McGuinness, Chris Murray (sitting), Keith Ayres, Dominic Latino and Jace Myers (sitting, right). (Courtesy of the Carson family)
Ayres and McGuinness — the senior sergeants in the platoon — received disciplinary letters, which can hinder or delay promotions, for their failure to turn Lorance in sooner or stop the killings on the third day.

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