Army Kill Team Leader Wanted a Necklace of Fingers
By Spencer Ackerman September 30, 2010 | 9:07 am
Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs didnt just stock up on bootleg DVDs and mess-hall snacks, like a typical deployed soldier. During his deployment to Kandahar, Gibbs kept a water bottle with two wads of cloth wedged into it. Wrapped in the cloth were fingers that he chopped off two corpses. One of his fellow soldiers said Gibbs wanted enough for a necklace.
Thats according to Army investigation documents leaked to the Washington Post. Gibbs, 25, is the alleged ringleader of the Kill Team, a rogue execution unit from the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division thats on trial for the murder of three Afghan civilians and may have killed a fourth. His fellow Kill Team members say that Gibbs impunity didnt just extend to Afghans: he threatened to murder the mother of a soldier who didnt keep his mouth shut.
Even though the team didnt mind documenting its kills some kept photographs the documents suggest that Gibbs took it much further, possessing a certain comfort with mutilation. Investigators found bone fragments the water bottle where he kept his severed fingers, and he also kept teeth. Evidently, he thought little of removing parts of dead bodies: Gibbs told soldiers that it would be funny to include them in care packages, just to mess with people. He got away with that and more in Iraq, he told his friends, and the tattoos of skulls and pistols on his calf were testaments to the body count he racked up. (The Post reports that the Army is now also investigating Gibbs earlier Iraq tour.)
Gibbs is facing murder charges at Joint Base Lewis-McChord for the deaths of three Afghan civilians. But there may have been a fourth victim. On January 28, Gibbs and his Kill-Team platoonmates killed a Afghan man walking along the highway in Kandahar. They claimed that he didnt respond to orders to stay back, opening fire out of fear he was a suicide bomber. That was initially enough for the chain of command. But two soldiers have said that the team simply targeted an unarmed man for death and then planted ammunition near his corpse to claim he was a danger like they did the other three.
Gibbs also enforced a code of silence. Private First Class Justin Stoner reported the Kill Teams proclivity for hashish to the chain of command and caught a beating for that. But in another tape acquired by ABC News, another alleged member of the team reported Gibbs had even more brutal plans for Stoner.
He basically told me that when we got back to Fort Lewis he was going to cripple him you know, paralyze him something to that effect, Specialist Adam Kelly, whos facing lesser charges in the case, tells an Army investigator. Basically just fuck him up so that he was never going to be right again. And that he was going to kill his mom, so he would forever have to live with that, knowing that, you know, theres no such thing as a free lunch.
According to the Post, when another soldier learned that Gibbs was mutilating corpses, he called the sergeant a savage. That apparently was something Gibbs didnt want to hear. He got really mad in response.