Unwicked

Former Private Steven Green
Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office/Associated Press

Private First Class Steven P. Green was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army before the full story was revealed about the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and her three family members. Because he had already been released from the military via discharge, the FBI arrested Green and he will be tried in a civilian court.

From last August on CNN.com:

Iraqi authorities have identified the girl who was raped and shot to death as Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi. Her father, mother and 5-year-old sister were also killed, and the 14-year-old’s body was set on fire after she was killed.

“They gathered over cards and booze to come up with a plan to rape and murder that little girl,” Pickands said. “She was young and attractive. They knew where she was because they had seen her on a previous patrol. She was close. She was vulnerable.”

Here The New York Times reports on the story back in July 2006:

The former soldier, Steven D. Green, 21, had recently been discharged from the Army for a “personality disorder,” the prosecutors said. They said Mr. Green and other soldiers had discussed the rape in advance and carried out the crimes after drinking alcohol, leaving a checkpoint and changing from their uniforms into black clothing.

A criminal complaint made public by the prosecutors on Monday charged that Mr. Green shot the three family members, including a child, with an AK-47 assault rifle found in the house in Mahmudiya before he and another soldier raped the woman. Citing interviews with unnamed participants, the document alleges that Mr. Green, his face covered with a brown T-shirt, then “walked over to the woman and shot her several times.” It says the soldiers returned to the checkpoint with blood on their clothes and agreed that the episode was “never to be discussed again.”

A startling piece from Andrew Tilghman of The Washington Post:

“I came over here because I wanted to kill people.”

Over a mess-tent dinner of turkey cutlets, the bony-faced 21-year-old private from West Texas looked right at me as he talked about killing Iraqis with casual indifference. It was February, and we were at his small patrol base about 20 miles south of Baghdad. “The truth is, it wasn’t all I thought it was cracked up to be. I mean, I thought killing somebody would be this life-changing experience. And then I did it, and I was like, ‘All right, whatever.’ ”

He shrugged.

And…

If there’s one place where a soldier might succumb to what the military calls “combat stress,” it’s this town where Green’s unit was posted on the edge of the so-called Triangle of Death, for the last three years a bloody center of the Sunni-led insurgency. Mahmudiyah is a deadly patch of earth that inspires such fear, foreboding and uneasiness that my most prominent memory of the three weeks I spent there was the unrelenting knot it caused in my stomach.

From the Guardian Unlimited:

Mr Green’s involvement has raised questions about the army’s recruiting procedures in an increasingly unpopular war that has killed nearly 3,000 US troops.

He entered the army soon after being arrested for underage drinking, and had a record of alcohol and drug abuse.

To make up for a recruitment shortfall, the army has begun accepting a higher number of “category four” candidates who score low on a military aptitude test.

A disturbing profile on the CBS News website by Allen G Breed of the AP contains many dark facts along with this interesting piece of information:

Steven Dale Green grew up in the west Texas oil town of Midland, which claims both President Bush and his wife, Laura, as natives.