'We Were Put Out There To Be Bodyguards for Kellogg Brown & Root'
Kelly Dougherty is a prominent member of Iraq Veterans Against the War who served in southern Iraq with the Colorado National Guard's 220th Military Police Company. In 2003 and early 2004 her primary missions were patrol and escorting supply convoys run by the contractor giant Kellogg Brown & Root -- that is, she would provide firepower support if necessary for KBR's fuel tanker convoys supplying U.S. bases from Nasiriya to Diwaniya.
Occasionally the trucks would become disabled, either through attack (rare) or mechanical failure (frequent). The Iraqi citizens in her area of operations were in what she described as "abject poverty," unable to obtain food, fuel or cooking oil. They wanted to strip broken-down vehicles for anything -- cargo or scrap metal. "We were issued what we called less-than-lethal ammunition: rubber bullets, beanbag shots for the shotgun," she said at Winter Soldier. "We were doing crowd control."
Eventually the crowds got too large when the trucks broke down, and Dougherty's company felt overwhelmed. They were ordered to destroy the vehicles -- vehicles full of food, full of fuel, vehicles made of scrap metal that could be harvested and sold to feed a family -- rather than allow the Iraqi citizens to possess them. They would "light the fuel in the tankers on fire, so enough of it burns away so the Iraqis can't use it," she said. "We would fire grenades into engine blocks. Here we were, burning fuel in front of Iraqi civilians who have to wait hours just to get cooking oil... We were risking our lives and putting their lives in jeopardy to basically guarantee a profit for Kellogg Brown & Root."
Once she had to burn a junked ambulance "in front of all these Iraqi people who don't have a way to get to the hospital." Her company was ordered to burn a truck full of produce in front of the starving. On that mission, she was the gunner. "I was pointing the [Humvee gun] at all of these people," Dougherty said. "That made me feel really ashamed and really confused as to what we were really doing there. I am proud of my military service, I was proud at the time, but I wasn't proud of that. The thing I was proud of in Iraq was that we were able to keep each other safe... [Not the] way we were put out there to be bodyguards for Kellogg Brown & Root."
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