Sergeant John Diem: “We can only do our best to deserve the public’s trust.”

John Diem in Iraq

Sergeant John Diem had four hours to think about his decision.

War Crimes, Hard Choices, and Harder Consequences: John Diem’s Story

[Continued from Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV.]

After Justin Watt told Diem about the war crime, Diem had guard duty. He had decided, within seconds of hearing Watt’s story, to report it. But then he sat in a guard tower, with hours to change his mind.

He didn’t know Watt had already reported the crime. As far as he knew, he would be the whistleblower. He knew the turmoil that would result from reporting it. Heads would roll, and not just the heads of those responsible. He initially brushed off Watt’s fears of retaliation, because he “just couldn’t see a firefight happening between American soldiers.” But he eventually realized Watt was right; the soldiers he reported might try to kill him. Diem was in the same platoon, and logically would face the same danger of retaliation.

And Diem could have just washed his hands of the whole thing. He thought Watt was going to report it anyway. Diem didn’t have to get involved at all.

But Diem never considered staying quiet.

When Watt told Diem about the murders, Diem saw only one course of action. He had to notify his chain of command. The probable second- and third-order effects of reporting the crime were obvious, and substantial. He never let those concerns affect his decision.

As soon as his guard shift was over, he went straight to his platoon sergeant and platoon leader and relayed Watt’s story. He intentionally went around his squad leader. He made the platoon leader tell him when he was going to report it higher. The report went up the chain exactly the way it was supposed to. Diem never doubted for a second that he had done the right thing. And he never worried about retaliation, either. He did what he had to do, and didn’t look back.

Watt and Diem shared traits which suggest Watt’s decision should have been as “simple” as Diem’s. In 2006 they were only twenty-three years old. Both are smart guys. Both had substantial combat experience. So why, I wondered, was Watt so terrified about reporting the crime, but Diem so calm about it?

Diem was calm partly because his circumstances were different. While Watt and Diem were both young, Diem was far more experienced and established. He was a veteran of the Iraq invasion and had been promoted to sergeant shortly before the 2006 deployment. Watt was a peer to the men who committed the rape and murders, but Diem, as a sergeant, was above and intentionally distant from them. He was there to lead soldiers, not to be their friends. And despite all the problems with discipline and failed leadership in first platoon, Diem still had a solid NCO network behind him. Watt only had the few people he trusted for support.

Strangely enough, nobody seemed angry at Diem for reporting the crime. Nobody I spoke to mentioned threats against Diem, and Diem says he was never threatened or rebuked. Apparently, nobody in the platoon expected him to do anything other than report it. Watt has been the target of much anger for his decision, but Diem seems to have been given a pass. Maybe that’s because Watt, as a lower-enlisted soldier, is viewed as having had a choice.

But Diem was, well, Diem. Nobody thought he would do anything but report it. Watt is seen as the whistleblower, Diem simply the conduit.

But I don’t think differences in their status or situation are all that made Diem so confident in his decision. I think Diem just believed so strongly in the mission and in what being a soldier means, he simply didn’t feel fear over doing the right thing. I suspect he wouldn’t have been scared even if he had been in PFC Watt’s shoes, rather than being a sergeant in another squad. Which doesn’t mean Watt shouldn’t have been scared, or that Diem would have been right not to be. It just means his confidence in his beliefs somehow transcends fear.

In Blackhearts, Diem is described as a Dungeons and Dragons-playing nerd. Diem bristles at that depiction. So does Watt. Watt says, “Yeah, John plays computer games. And he’s an absolute killer in combat. The rock-steady tone he uses in phone conversations is the same tone he uses when someone’s shooting at him. He’s just a solid, unshakeable guy.”

None of the soldiers I interviewed about this incident are stupid. All are well above average intelligence, but Diem is brilliant. As a former armorer, range coach, tanker, scout and current intelligence soldier, I’ve made many good-natured jabs toward my “dumb infantry” friends. But nobody who spends ten seconds talking to Diem could even joke about him being stupid (during the recent FIFA championship he posted on Facebook, “I think the current uptick in soccer’s popularity is a fairly strong case for a considerable amount of slumbering nationalism present in the US population. We are just looking for an acceptable opportunity,” to which I replied, “Are you sure you’re infantry?”). Diem could be, and probably will be, a college professor someday, despite the fact that he doesn’t yet have a college education.

Some of the nonveteran public likes to view soldiers as poor, stupid, mostly minority kids who only joined the military because they couldn’t find a job. If they meet Diem, a profoundly intelligent man who willingly chose an infantryman’s life and four combat deployments, they’ll likely never buy that stereotype again. He truly believes in the Army and in soldiering. Like me, he’s not a blind idealist; he sees the problems that plague the Army, and recognizes institutional shortcomings that contributed to the Yusufiyah murders. Unlike me, he believes the solutions to those problems lie within Army doctrine, training and education. He’s self-assured, introspective, and brutally candid about leadership failures.

About his 2006 deployment, he says, “We did not deploy to win, we deployed to bring everyone home at the company level. Some junior leaders wanted to conduct combat operations but did not tie these operations to a coherent tactical vision. It was too reactive. For the most part we only did what we had to.”

Alone among the men I interviewed for this story, Diem chose to stay in the Army. And he’s not just staying for a paycheck, or biding his time until he can retire with benefits. He’s actively trying to make institutional changes that will prevent another incident like the one that destroyed an innocent Iraqi family and nearly tore his unit apart in 2006. He’s one of the few “true believers” I’ve met during my military and law enforcement careers.

I know a little about true believers. As a cop I helped train many officers how to respond to mass shooting incidents like Sandy Hook or Columbine. One thing we stressed to our students was belief in the mission; if you truly believed in what you were doing, you were less likely to hesitate when circumstances demanded action. An officer who thinks “I’m not dying for someone else’s kids” or “My only job is to get home at the end of my shift” isn’t who you want to show up when someone opens fire inside a school. You need an officer who believes in his heart that the lives of strangers’ children are just as precious as his own. You need someone who doesn’t view survival as the only indicator of success, you need cops who know that dying to defend the innocent is better than staying safe while innocents are slaughtered. You need true believers.

Many of us look back with envy at the warriors of World War II because, in our idealized view of that war, they epitomize the true believer. Yes, they faced horrible combat and staggering losses, much worse than what most of us Iraq and Afghanistan vets faced. But unlike our generation’s dubious struggles to create democracy for people who don’t want it, the causes during WWII seem pure. Hitler’s evil and the Imperial Japanese Army’s inhuman brutality were worth dying to defeat. As a child I often heard my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles discuss family and friends who died in Europe or the Pacific. They never discussed those losses with bitterness or resentment. Yes, the deaths were painful and tragic. No, those young lives weren’t wasted. They died for a just cause.

In Iraq, I struggled to believe in the mission. My company had the unglamorous job of escorting supply convoys to various bases. We didn’t often escort material vital to the war effort, instead we usually guarded food and creature comforts. The objective truth was that we were risking our lives to ensure “fobbits” had weekly steak and lobster, the latest gangsta rap CDs and every XBox game known to man. And I was bitterly resentful about that. That made convoy missions harder for me, because I just didn’t think they were worth my life. I never tried to weasel out of one, but I never truly believed in their importance.

Afghanistan was, to a point, very different. I did believe in the mission. For most of my deployment I felt, should I have died there, it would have been worth it. The belief helped me through difficult times. During one fight, a captain simply suggested I help him do something vitally important. I knew, without question, this thing had to be done. We all would have died rather than leave it undone, and there was a very good chance we would die doing it. Because I believed so strongly in this task, I did it without hesitation. Looking back now, five years later, I don’t remember feeling any fear at all. I had accepted its importance. I understood that my life was worth less than this task. I was, for that short time, a true believer.

John Diem leads his life as a true believer.

After Diem reported the crime, he waited for the battalion commander to take action. Colonel Kunk’s decision to publicly berate and abandon Justin Watt wasn’t what he expected. He remembers watching Colonel Kunk’s convoy leave Watt’s patrol base and asking Kunk on the radio if he had Watt. He doesn’t recall saying “If you leave him there, they’ll kill him.” “I don’t think I’d say anything that hysterical,” he recently told me. “But I’m sure I said words to that effect.”

Over the next few days he watched the platoon and company crumble. The murderers, along with Howard and Yribe, were arrested. His platoon leader and company commander were relieved. When the company was sent to FOB Mahmudiyah, first platoon gathered in a tent, where Colonel Kunk told them what undisciplined, worthless pieces of shit they were. Soldiers angrily lashed back at Kunk, but Eric Lauzier remembers Diem’s steady, even statement of fact: “This platoon accomplished every mission it was ever assigned, sir.” To Lauzier, there was more “Fuck you, sir,” in Diem’s words than in any of the other soldiers’ furious replies.

Diem didn’t intend it the way Lauzier heard it. “The point wasn’t to tell Colonel Kunk to fuck off, though I can see how it was interpreted that way. The point was to remind everyone present that we were on the same side, and if we were failures, it was because we were pursuing Kunk’s guidance to the best of our ability. Basically, you don’t get to act like a tough guy when you are the one with the burden of command. Yelling at privates about operational level failures is like yelling at a dog for failing to graduate medical school.”

Not long afterward, Diem was on guard when the battalion operations officer was giving their replacements a tour of the FOB. As they stood mere feet behind Diem, the operations officer said, “This is first platoon’s area. First is full of fuckups and troublemakers, they’ve had nothing but problems since we got here.” Diem fumed silently, thinking, Hey asshole, I’m right here. You could at least say that somewhere else.

Eventually Diem came home from Iraq. He watched the legal dramas surrounding the crime and wasn’t sad to see the criminals punished. He deployed twice more, to Afghanistan. One of the Afghan deployments was just as trying as his 2006 Iraq tour. As he puts it, “I’ve had two very bloody deployments.” He’s analyzed the actions and leadership of many soldiers he served with. He’s extremely critical of what he sees as weakness, even if it’s understandable human weakness. Even if it’s his own.

John Diem today

“We needed leaders,” he says. “We didn’t need our officers and NCOs to be our buddies, we didn’t need them to be nice guys. Dead people who thought you were good dudes are still dead. We needed people who would take command and do the hard things that nobody wants to do. That would have prevented the Yusufiyah murders.”

Today Diem is a staff sergeant and recruiter. He joins Watt at Army events to speak about the crime, and hopes his efforts will someday lead to major institutional change. He feels a duty to tell people how the crime happened and what it meant, and to search for a way to prevent anything like it from happening again. He does these things for the Army that he loves, and for the American people he defends.

“We will never be worthy of the trust we’re given by the public,” he says. “We can only do our best to deserve that trust.”

Those are the words of a true believer.

This Friday: Eric Lauzier’s story.

[Links to Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV and Part VI.]

If interested you can find the Blackhearts book on Amazon here.

Chris Hernandez Mad Duo Chris (seen here on patrol in Afghanistan) may just be the crustiest member of the eeeee-LIGHT writin’ team here at Breach-Bang-Clear. He is a veteran of both the Marine Corps and the Army National Guard who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also a veteran police officer of nearly two decades who spent a long (and eye-opening) deployment as part of a UN police mission in Kosovo. He is the author of White Flags & Dropped Rifles – the Real Truth About Working With the French Army and The Military Within the Military as well as the modern military fiction novels Line in the Valley and Proof of Our Resolve. When he isn’t groaning about a change in the weather and snacking on Osteo Bi-Flex he writes on his own blog, Iron Mike Magazine, Kit Up! and Under the Radar. You can find his author page here on Tactical 16.