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Battling his own Army

April 25, 2004 1:10 am

Jim Williams joined the Army to get the kind of experiences his father had during World War II.

It wasn't so much the war stories that appealed to him, although he certainly heard a lot about the Battle of the Bulge as a boy growing up in Westmoreland County.

Williams wanted the camaraderie his dad described--and he found it in the Army.

During 17 years of field exercises and deployments, Williams has relished being elbow-to-elbow with soldiers in the jungles of Panama or the foxholes of Iraq.

"It's a good time because you get to know what people are really made of," said Williams, who spent three years as a recruiter in Fredericksburg.

But times haven't been so good lately for the 37-year-old who's traveled the world in an Army uniform.

Sgt. 1st Class James H. Williams faces a court-martial for actions during the war in Iraq. He's charged with armed robbery for taking a vehicle from a rich tribal sheik in April 2003, when his platoon was near Mosul and had mechanical problems with their Humvees.

He's also been charged with dereliction of duty for letting his men drink in May after President Bush went on national television and declared from an aircraft carrier that major combat was over.

Williams, stationed with the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky., will plead innocent at his arraignment tomorrow. If found guilty at his general court-martial, probably in June, Williams would face up to 15 years in military prison. He would be convicted of a felony and dishonorably discharged.

Friends and family members say the charges don't fit the crime--or the soldier.

"He's getting railroaded," said Daniel Shumac, a Woodbridge contractor who served with Williams and spent 20 years in the Army.

"None of this passes the common-sense test," Shumac added. "They're trying to wreck this guy, and for what purpose I don't know. He was just doing what he had to do to get the job done."

The Army says Williams, a platoon sergeant with the 326th Engineer Battalion, violated the rules of engagement when he and his soldiers took the 2001 Toyota Land Cruiser.

Army prosecutor Capt. Micah Pharris said Williams should have known better. Williams is a senior noncommissioned officer and has been in the Army more than twice as long as most of the young soldiers he serves with.

He's the platoon sergeant--second in command of a group of about 30. Platoon sergeants typically advise their platoon leaders, who are younger and less experienced but still outrank them.

"A platoon sergeant has a duty to ensure all soldiers comply with lawful orders," Pharris said during a March hearing for Williams.

The prosecutor, who did not return a reporter's phone calls, was quoted in an April 1 story in The Leaf-Chronicle newspaper of Clarksville, Tenn., near Fort Campbell.

Stories about the pending court-martial at Fort Campbell, home of the "Screaming Eagles," have been published in nearby papers in Tennessee and Kentucky and as far away as Australia.

People who know Williams, a sergeant with a buzz haircut and a hefty build, say the Army is his life.

In his 2002 NCO Evaluation Report, he received the highest rating and was described as "trusted to accomplish the mission and motivate others."

Sometimes the sergeant wishes he were still with his platoon, back in war-torn Iraq.

"I was under a lot less stress there," he said.

Last March, Williams' platoon arrived in Iraq and was on the move north, with the big American push toward Baghdad and, later, Mosul. His soldiers were supposed to blow up any weapons found--that's their speciality--and he says they came across caches of rifles, small arms and land mines in every school they entered.

His platoon had four Humvees and four trailers--and recurring mechanical problems. "These are the same vehicles we had in Desert Storm," said Williams, who also fought in the 1991 Gulf War. "They're really old."

The platoon was down one Humvee, sometimes two, and trying to squeeze soldiers, food, communications equipment and ammunition into fewer vehicles.

Some of the soldiers talked about taking a civilian vehicle, which Williams says was commonly done.

On one convoy, the soldiers spotted a Toyota in good shape, with a military tow hitch on the back, and went after it.

During Williams' Article 32 hearing, which is similar to a civilian grand jury hearing, testimony showed that Williams didn't pull the driver from the Toyota at gunpoint or drive away with the Land Cruiser.

But he is the one who should have given the driver a receipt for the vehicle, according to Army rules. The soldiers were on a narrow street, surrounded by tall buildings, and Williams saw about 30 Iraqis congregating.

They were already "enflamed" by the Americans' actions, and Williams said he wasn't going to hang around to see what happened next.

"That's where we made our fatal mistake," Williams said, by not writing out a receipt.

But the Army says the soldiers shouldn't have taken the vehicle at all. The colonel who commanded Williams' regiment said he had changed the rules of engagement to prohibit the taking of civilian vehicles.

Americans couldn't win the hearts and minds of the Iraqis if they were taking their belongings, Col. Joseph Anderson said. "They are hungry, they are poor, and we didn't need to be driving around in their vehicles," he was quoted in The Tennessean, a Nashville newspaper.

Williams contends he wasn't notified of any changes and, as platoon sergeant, he keeps up with that kind of detail. He not only reviewed the rules of engagement, which are printed on small cards the soldiers carry, but he also taught classes on them both at Fort Campbell and in Kuwait.

The public affairs office at Fort Campbell said the rules allowed soldiers to take civilian vehicles "in certain limited circumstances," and "these circumstances do not appear to be present in this case," wrote Lt. Col. Hugh Cate in an e-mail.

Williams still has a lot of ties to this area. He served in the Army's recruiting office in Fredericksburg from 1999 to 2002, after he hurt his knees jumping out of an airplane.

Sgt. Linwood Walker, his recruiting supervisor, nominated Williams for his fifth Army Commendation Medal, and wrote on the recommendation that Williams was handpicked to draw up maps and safety procedures for the National Scout Jamboree in 2001 at Fort A.P. Hill.

One of the current recruiters in Fredericksburg says Williams is the kind of platoon sergeant who's "always looking out for his soldiers."

"I never knew him to do anything but the right thing," said Staff Sgt. Vincent Simonetti, who also served with Williams at Fort Lewis, Wash., and Fort Bragg, N.C.

Williams is the youngest of five children of Russell and India Williams. His father died in 1986, but his mother still lives in the same house Jim Williams grew up in on Leedstown Road.

His brother, Gill Williams, is the principal of Washington & Lee High School in Montross. His sister, Alice Winebarger, is a social worker in Westmoreland County.

She's trying to drum up moral and financial support from friends and legislators for her brother, who could lose his career--and probably his home--if found guilty. He's already paid his civilian lawyer $10,000 and must pay another $20,000 for his court-martial defense.

Williams' brother sought help from Rep. Jo Ann Davis, R-1st District, who serves on the House Armed Services Committee.

Chris Connelly, Davis' spokesman, acknowledged that her office is looking into the case but would not comment further.

Williams' sister believes the people he grew up with in the rural county of Westmoreland, where folks still know their neighbors, will stand up for her baby brother.

"He's being used as a political scapegoat," Winebarger said. "If it had been anybody else's vehicle, it wouldn't have been such a big deal."

The SUV in question belonged to Sheik Ahmed Watban Al-Faisal, an influential tribal leader, according to published reports. The sheik's son was driving the Toyota when it was taken, and the sheik later complained to two high-ranking officers: Anderson, the commander of Williams' regiment, and Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, the commanding general of the 101st Airborne Division at the time.

Army investigators looked into the complaint and paid the sheik $32,000 in cash. Williams said his men ditched the SUV a few days after they took it, on the advice of their superiors, and it was stripped by the locals.

Investigators filed criminal charges against Williams, the squad leader who drove off with the vehicle, and their platoon leader, a second lieutenant.

Williams' sister believes the case has been blown out of proportion because her brother took something from the wrong person, but the identity of the victim matters in military justice, said Eugene R. Fidell, a military-law practitioner in Washington.

"Picking the wrong victim can kick off huge amounts of hostility," he said during a phone interview this week. "Sometimes you have to prosecute because if you don't, people in the occupied country may really take offense."

Williams told his side of the story to The Free Lance-Star last weekend, during an interview at his home in Cameron, N.C., about 50 miles southwest of Raleigh.

He and his wife, Kim, bought the home in 1997 when he was stationed at nearby Fort Bragg. She and their two children have stayed there while he worked in Fredericksburg and then Fort Campbell.

Jim Williams makes the 10-hour trip from Kentucky to Cameron most weekends, but says the drive is worth it. His children are involved in school activities, and his wife is an assistant manager at the local Piggly Wiggly store.

The family's one-story home is compact, but the Williamses love the hardwood floors and paneled walls that go with the grandfather clock and other hand-made furnishings they brought back from Germany.

They live in a rural subdivision called Knotty Pines, and have a big front yard with lots of tall pines and blooming azalea bushes. When the wind blows the wrong way they're reminded of the chicken farm across the road, but "It still smells better than Iraq," Williams says.

The case against Williams "is going to boil down to who knew what when," said Mike Little, a Lee's Hill resident consulted by The Free Lance-Star.

Little is a retired lieutenant colonel who spent 25 years in the military--including time with the 101st Airborne. He now works for a company that publishes military reference books.

If he were hearing the case, Little says, he'd want to see written proof of what the rules of engagement were at the time. If they had changed, he'd want to know the exact date and what the procedures were for telling the soldiers in the field.

"You'd have to show me proof that he did something worthy of being hung out to dry," Little said.

When the investigation started, Williams figured he'd get reprimanded for not writing out the receipt for the vehicle--and for letting his men drink, an offense he didn't take too seriously because, he said, "Everybody did that."

He thought he'd get reprimanded and not be promoted again--and retire in 21/2 years. He considered that punishment acceptable, and never expected the case to go this far.

"I've never said I didn't do anything wrong," he said. "What I said is I don't think I deserve to lose everything I've ever worked for because of it."

To reach CATHY DYSON: 540/374-5425 cdyson@freelancestar.com