When One Turned Against Five

So, what happened with that soldier in Iraq that shot dead five of his colleagues? This is what I found, but I'd love to hear from him- did he just go beserk? was he upset that other soldiers were killing people and perpetuating atrocities all around him? had he killed so many iraqis that it made no difference? was he having a bad reaction to prescription medication? there are some clues, and i've bolded them below. the media, the independent included, seems to have largely written this off as a subject of reasonable speculation. The sentence: "Understanding what he did, rationalising it, is a doomed project." - seems to be to me overly fatalistic. But let's wait and see, there may be more. I'm certainly tracking this one.

The deadly treatment of Sergeant John M Russell

Just six weeks before the end of his third Iraq tour, the veteran of Bosnia and Serbia shot dead five of his comrades. Why? David Randall investigates


Sunday, 17 May 2009

One day last week, the pressures of war in the US military brought six men together in a room in Baghdad. Five of them would not leave it alive. They were cut down by a sudden, scything spray of bullets fired by one of their comrades. Only one survived – the very man who pulled the trigger. What demons drove him to this, the most deadly soldier-on-soldier killing since Vietnam, makes this not only a story of waste and ill-fortune, but of how service in a war zone can turn even the most apparently loyal of soldiers against their own side.


The time was just after 2pm last Monday; the place was the clinic operated by the 55th Medical Company at Camp Liberty, the sprawling US base near Baghdad airport.

This is where soldiers and airmen who have trouble coping with duty in Iraq come to be assessed, and, possibly, helped. Differing circumstances had led these six men here. Some came willingly; others – all too aware of a military culture that scorned any sign of "wimpishness" – did not. There, too, were the specialists, doing their best to grapple with a psychological casualty rate that sees an estimated 15 per cent of American service people leave Iraq with emotional problems, many of them severe. Last year, a record 140 US military personnel committed suicide.

Every one of the men who found himself at the clinic had a tale to tell. There was Cmdr Charles Springle, known as "Keith", a 52-year-old from Wilmington, North Carolina, who had made a career out of treating combat stress, and ran a counselling centre back in the US that trained volunteers to assist returning military. Married with two children, he was an ardent campaigner against the stigma that attached to any soldier showing mental vulnerability. With him at the clinic that day was Major Matthew Houseal, 54, a psychiatrist from Amarillo, Texas, married to a kidney specialist, and father of six. He volunteered alarmed at the rising army suicide rate, and was due to return home on 1 June. Pte Michael Edward Yates Jr, just 19, with a one-year-old son, was there, because he had trouble readjusting to military life after spending most of April at his Maryland home. Present, too, were Specialist Jacob D Barton, of Lenox, Missouri, a 20-year-old who had cared for his grandmother before leaving for Iraq, and was known at Rolla High School for standing up against bullies; and Sgt Christian E Bueno-Galdos, 25, of Paterson, New Jersey. A native of Peru, whose father worked 14 hours a day in a clothing factory to bring his family to the US, he signed on partly as a reaction to 9/11.

And then there was Sgt John M Russell, a career army technician of 44, married, attached to the 54th Engineering Battalion, and just six weeks away from the end of his third Iraq tour. In photographs he has the look, with his unfashionable spectacles, of a well-meaning Sunday school teacher about to read the lesson. But it was he whose mind was so full of seething unreason that, last Monday, he took a gun and killed five men he barely knew.

This was not the first time that Sgt Russell had been to the clinic. Two weeks ago, his superior officers decided that he needed professional help. For what, precisely, is not known. He had served in Serbia and Bosnia, already had two previous year-long tours in Iraq, and had never been in combat, although his role (removing communications equipment after attacks) took him to the scene of roadside bombings and their revolting, dismembered results. He showed, say his family, no sign in messages home that he was traumatised by his job. Nevertheless, he was told to report to the clinic, and his weapon was taken from him – a potent symbol of disgrace in any army, let alone the US army.

If his family's testimony is accepted, Sgt Russell was more disturbed by being sent to the clinic than anything he had witnessed in Baghdad. His father, Wilburn Russell, claims his son feared, after angering a commanding officer, that he was being "set up" to be discharged. This, for a soldier who was already behind with the $1,500 (£982) a month mortgage payments on the home he had built in Texas, would put his salary and pension in jeopardy.

Mr Russell Snr said his son was undergoing stressful mental tests at the clinic, but did not understand that these were merely tests. He added: "They wanted to put as much pressure on him as they could to drum him out. I think they broke him." He said Russell's German-born wife recently had an email from him describing two recent days as "the worst of [my] life". He had also told her: "To hell with it. I'm going to get even with 'em." And Pte Yates had told his mother he found Sgt Russell "deeply angry" at the military. "Man, this guy's got issues," he said.

When Sgt Russell went to the clinic last Monday, he became so agitated and argumentative that an armed escort had to be summoned to remove him. A short while later, he grabbed another soldier's weapon (according to some reports, it was that of his escort), and went back to the clinic. His intention was obvious.

Young Jacob Barton tried to persuade him to drop the weapon, and moved across to shield one of Russell's targets. It was in vain. He, and the others, were shot dead in Sgt Russell's rage against what he felt the army, an organisation he had served without blemish for 15 years, had done to him.

His father said: "If the army turns against him, he doesn't have a life as far as he is concerned ... he's going to lose everything .... They trained him to kill, and that's the only thing that came to his mind." Then, his murderous anger assuaged, Sgt. Russell subsided into custody, and was soon charged with murdering five men, each of whom would have thought of him as a brother-in-arms.

Families now had to be told. What possible military euphemism could be deployed to cover the circumstances of their deaths? Fragging – that ugly army slang, derived from Vietnam War troops lobbing fragmentation grenades into the tent of an unpopular officer? Hardly. Friendly fire? You would think that, even by the army's elastic use of language, those two hollow words could not stretch to the tragedy at Camp Liberty. But that was the message carried to Pte Yates's mother when a staff car ominously pulled up outside her home in Maryland. Others were told their loved ones had died in a "noncombat-related incident".

A different kind of message was taken to Sgt Russell's wife. Whatever words were said by the officer and army chaplain at the home she kept at the Bamberg army base in Germany, when she phoned her husband's parents in Texas, it came out as: "John went crazy and shot five soldiers."

Crazy? That didn't sound like their son, but then, it never does. His father said: "He was calm under most circumstances. I'm gonna say, though, if he thought someone was lying to him, or about him, he's quite defensive about right or wrong. He sees things in black and white." He added his son thought of himself "as a John Wayne".

Strong, silent types who fancy themselves as righters of wrongs are not exactly unknown in uniform, and Russell's history is as prosaic as his choice of role model.

He enlisted in the National Guard in 1988, partly to top up his income from his lowly paid maintenance jobs. He joined the army after divorce and a series of minor criminal scrapes, all of them relating to the acrimonious split with his then wife. He is in regular touch with his 20-year-old son and planned to retire in five years to the home he had built in Texas. He was, by family accounts, a quiet, cerebral type.

Understanding what he did, rationalising it, is a doomed project. And the image left behind is, as ever, not the faces of victims, but the features of the perpetrator, frozen by a snapshot into a rictus of normality. John Russell looks as if he'd have problems in unarmed combat with the skin of a rice pudding, and yet, a week ago tomorrow, he made widows of three women and left nine children without a father. But then, in all kinds of pointless ways, that's what war does. It kills people, anyway it can.

Mown down by a comrade

The five soldiers who were killed by Sgt John M Russell were: Major Matthew P Houseal, Pte Michael Edward Yates, Cmdr Charles 'Keith' Springle, Specialist Jacob D Barton and Sgt Christian E Bueno-Galdos. Sgt Russell was thought by his parents to be under stress because he suspected the army was trying to drum him out by forcing him to attend its clinic for soldiers affected by combat.