'Lethal Warriors' in Iraq, linked to string of crimes back home

[Ichingcarpenter]

Men from the Army's 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry regiment have been accused or convicted in a string of alleged robberies and domestic violence and random murder. Official denies any war link.

By Paloma Esquivel and Christine Hanley and Christopher Goffard


December 21, 2008
Reporting from Orange County and Colorado Springs -- They nicknamed themselves the Lethal Warriors, and during two tours in Iraq, the soldiers of the Army's 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry regiment confronted some of the war's cruelest fighting, hunting insurgents through the warrens of Baghdad and Tikrit amid roadside bombs, mortar fire and close-quarters firefights. By June 2007, in what one field commander called the "heart of darkness," the unit was losing a soldier a day in a body bag or on a stretcher. Over two tours, 33 of them had died.

On Nov. 30, 2007, Kenneth Eastridge, a wiry, heavily tattooed survivor of the fighting, found himself at a rough Colorado Springs bar called the Rum Bay, not far from the unit's Ft. Carson base. Eastridge, a high school dropout from the projects of Louisville, Ky., had joined the Army to escape what seemed the dead-end prospects of civilian life, only to run repeatedly afoul of Army rules and face a court-martial.>>>>snip

Yet there is a larger story of those who fought with the 700-soldier unit: a string of alleged robberies, domestic violence and senseless murder.

Six of the veterans are behind bars, implicated in four separate shooting incidents and five slayings since August 2007. The killings stretch from Colorado to an Orange County beach town, where a veteran of the company is accused of beating his girlfriend to death. >>>>>snip


http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-battalion21-2008dec21,0,6536356.story