SAN DIEGO — Since he left the Army in January as a conscientious objector, Aidan Delgado has traveled the country giving audiences a disturbing account of routine brutality that he claims he saw during his year in Iraq.
His grisly roadshow has triggered two military investigations.
Delgado said he saw an Army master sergeant lash Iraqi children with a Humvee antenna. He recalled seeing a Marine send another child flying with a boot to the chest, and men in his unit pelt Iraqi civilians in Nasiriyah with glass soda bottles thrown from a military vehicle.
Wearing a black T-shirt with the word "Peace" in English, Hebrew and Arabic, the former Army specialist punctuated a recent talk to about 50 people with slides of gruesome war images that few civilians see.
One picture showed a bullet-shattered corpse in a partially open body bag. It was followed by an image of a soldier bending over what Delgado said was the same body bag, holding a spoon.
"The point of showing this is not to shock you," Delgado, 23, told his audience at the University of San Diego's Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice, one of dozens of stops on his intermittent national tour.
"We don't have a really good sense of Iraqi civilians as human beings. It's not part of the news coverage," he said.
Some pictures were taken by Delgado, whose tour of duty included six months at Abu Ghraib prison, where abuse of prisoners had already led to courts martial and international outrage. Other shots were provided by fellow soldiers.
The 81st Regional Readiness Command, which oversees Delgado's former unit in Florida, has launched an investigation into Delgado's claims, said Maj. William D. Ritter, a spokesman. A colonel visited Delgado a week ago to take a sworn statement.
The Army Criminal Investigation Command in Fort Belvoir, Va., also has opened an investigation, spokesman Chris Grey said.
Delgado said he made a statement to an Army criminal investigator, who took copies of the body bag photos and other images from his slideshow.
Emiliano Toro, a former sergeant who served as Delgado's supervisor in Iraq, said he was aware of the alleged incidents involving the children struck with the antenna and civilians hit with soda bottles.
"I did see these things or I did hear about them," he said.
