The Army vs. Spec. Richmond

Edward was pale and holding his rifle with one hand. He said the Iraqi had jumped at the sergeant.

Brain matter was seeping from the man's eyes. His cows were wandering away in the field.

Another soldier came up. Seeing the dead man's bound hands, he said to Edward with profane prescience, "You are f - - - - - ."

Edward had been in Iraq less than three weeks.

A Soldier's Trial

Eddie Richmond bought a $1,700 ticket from New Orleans to Kuwait, then caught military transports the rest of the way in. A hot, sandy wind swirled through the Black Hawk helicopter that carried him to the 1st First Infantry Division's headquarters in Tikrit. Edward's battalion, normally with the 25th Infantry Division, fell under the command of the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq.

As the months had passed, Eddie felt sure that the Army would drop its case against Edward. "I know my son, and he would not just shoot someone," he said. "How many of our kids over there hesitate and die?"

But the Army charged Edward with unpremeditated murder and scheduled his general court-martial in Tikrit in August. He faced life in prison.

The trial was held in one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces near the Tigris River. At night, father and son slept in a room with some special operations soldiers. Eddie found it surreal: The same Army that was his gracious host was prosecuting his son.

He sat behind Edward in the makeshift courtroom. When the prosecution showed photos of the dead cow herder on a projection screen, Eddie felt a knot in his stomach. The man's name was Muhamad Husain Kadir. Part of his head was missing.

The key witness against Edward was Waruch. The sergeant testified that after he handcuffed Kadir, he patted him on the shoulder and said to Edward, "He's good, let's go." Waruch said he even saw Edward lower his rifle. Then came the blast.

Edward took the stand, wearing his desert camouflage and glasses. His accent dripped like the river parish he came from.

Edward testified that Waruch ordered him to shoot Kadir if he moved, so he raised his rifle and aimed at the man's head. Looking through his scope, he was unable to see Waruch put the handcuffs on. When he saw what looked like Kadir lunging at Waruch, he believed that his sergeant's life was in danger.

The defense tried to keep out a statement Edward gave a month after the incident, admitting that he was pumped on adrenaline and "had to know" that Kadir was cuffed "before I shot him but it just did not register in my mind at that time." Edward signed the statement after an agent with the Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) told him he flunked a polygraph; he really hadn't.

Prosecutors goaded him. Hadn't it been obvious that a herder walking in a field with cows was not fleeing the village?

"You don't look at everybody as Saddam Hussein himself, sir, but until it is clarified otherwise, you have to be suspicious," Edward answered. "I mean, people are dying every day, so you have be suspicious of everyone, sir."

"Answer the question," the prosecutor said. "Did you or did you not assume that Mr. Kadir had escaped from the village?"

"I knew he had come from the village, sir," Edward said. "I didn't know. I hadn't formed an opinion based off that."

Two of Edward's fellow soldiers testified that he often talked about wanting to kill an Iraqi. But under cross-examination, they said most soldiers did. Edward's sergeant said he was one of the better soldiers in his platoon.

Waruch's credibility was also on trial. Staff Sgt. Marcus Warner testified that Waruch was a "compulsive liar." His nickname was "Shady Jay."

Eddie Richmond watched his son, admiring his confidence. Edward never second-guessed himself. "Daddy, I've done my job, and I did what I thought was right," he said. He believed he would be acquitted.

He was only partly right. The jury found him not guilty of unpremeditated murder but guilty of voluntary manslaughter. The prosecution was recommending eight years in prison and a dishonorable discharge.

Edward had one chance to address the court before sentencing. Instead of asking for mercy, he expressed a vague regret.

"If I had known everything then that I know now, it wouldn't have happened, and I am sorry that it had to come to this," he said.

The jury gave him three years, a demotion in rank and a dishonorable discharge. He was shipped to the Fort Sill Regional Correctional Facility, an Army prison in the hills of Oklahoma, where he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Sadness Turns To Anger

His father went home to Gonzales.

"You could see the mourning," said his friend Marvin "Bud" Ragland, a retired rice farmer. "His son -- his oldest child -- went to war for his country and was branded by that country as a murderer."

But Eddie received something in the mail that would shift him to outrage. Inside an envelope with no return address were confidential Army documents. One page was stamped "Serious Incident Report." It was part of an Army investigative file, known as a 15-6. The subject was Sgt. Jeffrey Waruch.

Eddie sat in his kitchen and began to read. Waruch had shot three female civilians, one of whom died. Eddie vaguely remembered the sergeant being asked about it at Edward's trial, but the judge had limited the questions. Edward never mentioned it to him. The documents Eddie held in his hand -- sworn statements by Waruch and several other soldiers -- laid out what happened in detail.

Ten days before Edward shot the cow herder, the mortar platoon was riding in a convoy to Al-Abassi when a roadside bomb exploded. Soldiers began firing from the sides of their vehicles. No one was seriously hurt by the bomb, but orders went out to stop any Iraqis fleeing the area.

Waruch began running across farmland after a group of several Iraqis in the distance. After crossing a muddy stream in pursuit, he fired warning shots in the air and screamed for them to stop.

According to his written statement, Waruch said he was 200 yards away when one of the Iraqis knelt down with what looked like a tube-like object, possibly a rocket-propelled grenade. Waruch fired about five times, knocking down two bodies. This subdued the group, but as he moved closer, two other Iraqis suddenly started to run toward him, with one reaching into her clothes. He fired five more rounds.

Arriving at the group in the field, he saw that a girl was shot in the head and her pulse was gone. Another female was hit in the thigh and going into shock. Another was shot in the knee.

Waruch had fired on a mother and her two daughters, killing a 14-year-old. The survivors would later tell a reporter that they had been weeding a bean field and had started to run as the Americans ran toward them.

Waruch was initially cleared of any wrongdoing, but a second review found that he had violated the rules of engagement. The girl had been trying to surrender when she was shot. No weapons were found.

As a result of the shootings, the battalion commander ordered that the soldiers be retrained: no spraying of bullets, aimed shots only, and only when under hostile intent.

Eddie felt his eyes burning with tears. Whoever sent him the file wanted him to see that the prosecution's key witness against his son was under investigation for his own civilian casualties. As he studied the documents, he saw that one soldier had escaped punishment and that another was needed to pay for the platoon's mistakes.

Eddie wrote to members of Congress and the Army CID. When a reporter from the Dayton Daily News in Ohio called, researching a story on civilian deaths in Iraq, Eddie shared his documents and pushed the Army for more. Eddie wanted the same spotlight that burned on his son to burn on Waruch.

In May 2005, more than a year after the incident, the CID opened an investigation into the shooting of the three female civilians. Waruch left the Army early this year. The investigation remains open. Attempts to reach Waruch for comment for this story were unsuccessful.

Edward turned 22 in prison. He subscribed to the Wall Street Journal, gorged on science fiction novels and built muscle. He refused to bend to the will of Fort Sill, spending much of his time in a segregation cell for discipline violations.

"It's a mental war," he wrote his parents. "I'll be fine."

Eddie contacted Defend the Defenders, an organization that raises funds for the legal defense of soldiers and Marines accused of crimes in combat. It was founded by Merry Pantano, whose son, Marine 2nd Lt. Ilario Pantano, was charged with murdering two Iraqis but was acquitted last year by the Marine Corps. Pantano agreed to fund Edward's appeal.

Eddie slapped his truck with "Defend the Defenders" stickers and wore the group's T-shirt that said, "Who's Got Their Backs?" The war in Iraq roiled on, but for Eddie it was frozen on two days, 10 days apart, in February 2004.

Then came a break. In April, the Army's clemency board granted Edward parole.

When he was released in June, he had served nearly two years of a three-year sentence. He called from the airport in Lawton, Okla., and told his parents, "I'm a free man." They picked him up in Baton Rouge. He was pale but rock-hard from exercise, and still had a grunt's haircut.

He soon received a congratulatory call from Ilario Pantano, the Marine acquitted of murder. In a sense they both belonged to the same fraternity of the misunderstood.

Edward told his father he didn't want anyone feeling sorry for him. He wanted to start over. But his father could not let go so easily. After Edward put his Army uniform and ribbons in the trash, Eddie retrieved them and took them to the charity bins behind the grocery store in town.

In Iraq, the Army has tried to make up for the tragedies.

The family of Muhamad Husain Kadir was paid $1,000 for his death.

The Army paid more than $4,000 to the family of the girl killed by Waruch, among them her wounded sister and mother, whose leg was amputated. The 1st Battalion commander wrote a sympathy letter to the family. "I ask for your continued support as we attempt to provide a safe and secure environment," wrote Lt. Col. C. Scott Leith. He closed by quoting the Koran: "We belong to Allah and to him we shall return."

The former 1st Infantry Division commander in Iraq, Batiste, is now the president of a steel company.

Edward is earning $10 an hour at the foundry.

The chapter was closing, but not for Eddie Richmond.

"I just want the truth to come out," he said. As summer turns to fall, he wears his Defend the Defenders T-shirt, waiting for word on his son's appeal.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.