Posted on 03/29/2005 5:32:00 AM PST by jigsaw
He was the commander of the Aggressors.
An ass-kicking group of tankers out of the 1st Armored Division.
He got the bullet hole in his flak vest the old fashioned way – in the dark of the night on some Iraqi back street. And when Najaf fell he was the one who told the world about the 40 insurgents they had to take out to make it so.
He’s on trial this week.
For something just short of murder.
His name is Capt. Roger Maynulet. A 30-year-old out of the ROTC program at Champaign-Urbana.
By all accounts he is a good man, a capable combat commander and – until now – a rising Army officer.
But that’s all over now. By the end of the week, he could be facing 20 years in the stockade.
It was May 21 of last year. He was near the end of a deployment to Iraq as commander of Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion of the 1st Armored Division’s 37th Armored Regiment. The Alpha Company soldiers are nicknamed the Aggressors.
And they must have lived up to the billing.
Because Maynulet and his men got the assignment to capture Moqtada al Sadr. He was the king of the insurgents and Public Enemy No. 1.
And intelligence had it that a certain sedan was going to come down a certain road at a certain time with Moqtada al Sadr inside. And it was Maynulet’s Aggressors who got the nod to stop him.
When the thing went off, it was a whole lot of crap that hit the fan.
There was a sedan ripping in and out through a cramped neighborhood, veering this way and that, with a string of Army vehicles racing behind it, and things got pretty intense.
But Captain Maynulet’s men got a shot at the car and opened fire. The back window was blown out and the vehicle crashed. A bunch of guys from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves rolled out of the back and took off.
But not the driver.
He had been shot in the head.
“He was sitting up and sounded like he was choking,” the soldier who found him told the “Chicago Tribune.”
Captain Maynulet called his medic to aid the Iraqi. The medic – a sergeant – pulled the injured man from the car and laid him on the ground.
He was hemorrhaging in an incredible way. His arm was thrashing around. He was in clear agony.
“I told Captain Maynulet (that) he wasn’t going to make it,” the sergeant said. “With all the blood, I was stunned. I went, ‘Wow!’”
Then the first soldier ran off to look for the people who’d escaped and the captain sent the medic on to look after another wounded Iraqi.
That left Roger Maynulet alone with a dying Karim Hassan Abed Ali al-Haleji.
It was too dangerous to call in a helicopter evacuation for the man, he was spurting blood like nobody’s business, he was thrashing around as if in great pain, a piece of his head was missing and the competent medical authority on the scene had said he was going to die.
The man was in horrific death throes.
So what do you do?
If you’re Captain Maynulet, a young American kid out of Illinois, what do you do?
What is the right thing to do? Morally, in that situation, what do you do?
Captain Maynulet shot him.
He lowered his M-4 and discharged it twice, killing the man instantly.
To “tell the truth,” the captain told the medic, “I shot him to put him out of his misery.”
That’s what Captain Maynulet did. He killed the man to stop his suffering. He was too gravely injured to live. He faced the prospect of bleeding to death there, in agony, on the dirt, and the captain spared him.
That’s what he told everyone. That’s what he put in his report. That’s what he told his superiors.
And now that’s his defense.
At first it was a murder charge, but now it’s something called “assault with intent to murder.” And it’s worth 20 years. It turns out that being merciful is against the regs. The lead prosecutor said, “There is no exception for mercy killing in the code of military justice.”
And there’s no way an American GI can catch a break for doing the right thing in this politically correct war. Roger Maynulet did an honorable and caring thing, he spared a man an agonizing death which – in a war – is sometimes as generous as circumstance allows you to be.
So Roger Maynulet is being hung out to dry.
Which is enough of an outrage.
But it becomes all the more incomprehensible in the context of what’s happening in Florida. In the week Terri Schiavo is finally starved to death – under the protection of an American court – this man may lose 20 years of his life for a mercy killing.
A mercy killing that was for more justified and far more humane than what Terri Schiavo has faced.
The Iraqi driver was in pain, he was going to be dead within minutes, and he was dispatched in a way that killed him in the blink of an eye without any pain.
Terri Schiavo was fine, she probably would have continued to live for decades, and she was put down in an excruciatingly slow manner that has required a morphine drip to minimize the pain.
And it’s Captain Maynulet who’s on trial.
Which is a clear sign of just how screwed up things are.
In the war zone, and here at home.
- by Bob Lonsberry © 2005
I can't believe this
But not the driver.
Sounds like they should be sentenced to more time at the range...
Your tagline sums it up nicely.
Yep, if they keep this crap up there will be no brave men joining our military service, and with good reason.
Right now half the country is defending the starving of a woman to death, a bullet would be more merciful.
Shame on the people bringing these charges.
I would have just let the sob bleed to death.
In the case of an ambush, a team of soldiers "sweeps" across the ambush site to secure it, and are trained to double-tap each enemy on the way across because anyone left alive after the site is secured is now a POW - and therefore must be cared for and schlepped along.
I pray this Captain gets acquitted because of his merciful aims (assuming there isn't a hidden side to the situation - just to be complete and fair). But, he made a serious error in judgement that will (and probably should) cost him his career.
BTW - I resigned my commission as an army Captain in 1997.
Or, maybe the initial injuries didn't look quite so mortal to the others that saw them.
The Army Captain knew better.
The human who was the Army Captain did not know better.
His best defense is battle fatigue/shock, imho.
Which he apparently deserved to do. The Captain should have left him to his fate. He could complain later to Allah.
Where it only one!
save
Question: how many of our total Representatives in Congress and our Senators are NOT lawyers?
Hint: you can count them on both hands...that's all you need.
These are our "lawmakers"...dare we expect anything else?
I feel deeply for the good captain, but I fear he is just another casualty of war (or will be).
Were I the Army, I wouldn't use his story in an attempt to recruit more soldiers!
a waste of Class V...he could have used those bullets on someone else (another enemy combatant, aka insurgent, aka terrorist, aka asshole...)
I despise the Dr. Suess-like writing style of Bob Lonsberry.
Don't forget that conjunctions are taxed heavily here in New York.
(Subordinating conjuctions are especially expensive.)
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