Washington - A former United States soldier accused of raping and murdering an Iraqi girl compared killing people in Iraq to "squashing an ant" in an interview with a reporter about a month before the attack.
Steven Green, 21, a former private with the 101st Airborne Division, is under arrest in Kentucky and could face the death penalty if convicted of the March 12 murders of the Iraqi girl and three of her relatives.
Writing in Sunday's editions of The Washington Post, Andrew Tilghman, a former correspondent for the US military newspaper Stars And Stripes, said he interviewed Green several times in February at his unit south of Baghdad.
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"I came over here because I wanted to kill people," he quoted Green as saying. "The truth is, it wasn't all I thought it was cracked up to be.
| 'I came over here because I wanted to kill people' |
"I mean, I thought killing somebody would be this life-changing experience," Green was quoted as saying. "And then I did it, and I was like, 'All right, whatever'."
"I shot a guy who wouldn't stop when we were out at a traffic checkpoint and it was like nothing," Green was quoted as saying. "Over here, killing people is like squashing an ant.
"I mean, you kill somebody and it's like, 'All right, let's go get some pizza'."
Green, who was honourably discharged from the military for a "personality disorder", has pleaded not guilty to killing the Iraqi girl and three members of her family.
Five other US soldiers have been charged in connection with the incident in the town of Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad.
| 'I just want to go home alive' |
Tilghman said "danger was everywhere" in the area where Green's unit was based and the battalion was losing an average of about one soldier a week, including a sergeant whose death in December had a big impact on Green.
He said Green saw the war in Iraq as pointless. "I just want to go home alive," he quoted the soldier from west Texas as saying.
"See, this war is different from all the ones that our fathers and grandfathers fought. Those wars were for something. This war is for nothing," Green reportedly said. - Sapa-AFP
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