Lynndie England became infamous around the world in 2004, when photos of her and other U.S. soldiers humiliating and torturing Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison became public. In 2005, the then 22-year-old England received a three-year sentence for her role in the abuses. She was paroled after 521 days of serving her term and dishonorably discharged. Tara McKelvey was the first journalist to interview England after the story broke. In this excerpt from the 2007 Monstering: Inside America’s Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War, McKelvey travels to England’s hometown of Fort Ashby, West Virginia.
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by Tara McKelvey
The IGA supermarket in Lynndie England’s hometown of Fort Ashby, WV (population 1,354), was boarded up on an August afternoon. Kansas’s “Dust in the Wind” blared from the radio of a rental car: “All we are is dust in the wind. Nothing more than dust in the wind.”
England grew up in mobile home down the road from the IGA in a dirt-and-gravel patch of land situated off Route 46, behind a sheep farm, next to the windowless Roadside Pub. Her parents, Terrie and Kenneth, and her two-year-old son, Carter Allen, live here in a $200-a-month rented trailer. Her sister, Jessie Klinestiver, her brother-in-law James and their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Allee, live in a mobile home yards away. Terrie, 46, a former housekeeper with Dawn View Center, a retirement home down the road from the trailer park, has pale eyes, deep etches in her face and three gold rings on her left hand.
The one-stoplight town of Fort Ashby has a frozen-in-amber quality that makes it seem like a small town in the 1970s. The main hangouts are 7-Eleven and Evan’s Dairy Dip. The Fort Ashby Public Library is located near the IGA parking lot. It is the site of a Brown Bag Program for low-income families. More than 20 men, women and children stopped by the library that day and carried away cardboard boxes full of applesauce, soup, cooking oil, KitKat bars, Pace salsa and other items. The median family income in Fort Ashby is $32,375, according to data provided by librarian Cindy Shanholtz, who helps coordinate the Brown Bag Program. But many survive on less. Kenneth makes $1,500 a month as a railroad utility worker when he doesn’t put in overtime, says Klinestiver, 27.
Nobody in the England family has a bachelor’s degree. The men work the night shift—Kenneth at CSX, a railroad company; their younger brother, Josh, 21, at Wal-Mart; and Jamie at Pilgrim’s Pride, a chicken-processing plant in Moorefield, WV.
Kleinstiver says they played cops and robbers, carrying pop guns and shooting them off as they ran through the tall grass, as children. “Lynndie was always the cop. That was her big thing,” says Kleinstiver. “That didn’t work out too good.”
England’s ticket out of the trailer park was the U.S. Army. She signed up at age 17 in a Pittsburgh recruiter’s office in December 1999. She did it over the protests of Terrie. “I joined because I wanted to. And I wanted to pay for college,” England says. “I didn’t think there would be a war. But I was ready to go if there was one.”
Long before England was deployed to Iraq, Terrie tells me, she and her sister worked the same shift as cashiers at the IGA. England met a stock boy, James Fike, and fell in love. They got married in March 2002. Like many people in eastern West Virginia, England and Fike applied for jobs at Pilgrim’s Pride. At the factory, England made $10.50 an hour, more than twice a cashier’s wages.
Fike worked in Breast/Debone, and England worked in Marination. England noticed that unhealthy-looking chicken parts were being sent down the line. She told her supervisors, but they ignored her. Her sister recalls her walking over to her station and taking off her smock “I said, ‘What are you doing?’” Klinestiver says. “She said, ‘I quit,’ and walked out the door.” “I didn’t like the way management was doing things,” England explains. “People would take the good chicken off and put the bad chicken on. Management didn’t care.”
It was worse in Live Hang—located in Pilgrim’s Pride Moorefield Fresh Plant next door. During her shift as a cashier at the nearby Dollar General Store, Barr describes the plant’s slaughterhouse. Workers grab the chickens, fasten hooks on their claws and hang them upside down from a conveyer belt, she explains. Then chickens are transported to the “kill room,” where, Barr says, “They go through an electrical shock. There’s a big saw where their necks go across.”
A People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) activist was hired as a plant worker and conducted a secret, eight-month investigation of the plant from late 2003 to early 2004. He described how workers would stomp on chickens, soaking the room in blood. On November 13, 2003, according to the investigator, 200 chickens “were slammed against the wall” by employees. “Several hours later, many of the birds were still alive.” Three days later, a worker “twisted the neck of a live chicken until the head popped off; he then used what remained of the bloodied body of the chicken to write graffiti on the wall.” Klinestiver says the employees did more than beat the animals. “They told me that people there actually fucked chickens,” she says. “They’d grab the beaks and rip them apart and make them bigger. Then they shoved their sexual parts into their beaks. Besides being overly gross and sexual, it was like morally wrong.”
On July 25, 2004, a Los Angeles Times op-ed appeared under the headline: “Echoes of Abu Ghraib in Chicken Slaughterhouse.” Several employees were fired. But no one was prosecuted.
Klinestiver and England were both shocked by the behavior of coworkers at the plant. And England had even protested shoddy plant standards. She was a whistle-blower. “A lot of people complained about it,” England says defensively. “It wasn’t just me.” When I ask her why she didn’t stand up to the abusive practices at Abu Ghraib, she falls silent and looks at her hands.
After leaving her job at Pilgrim’s Pride, England, then 20, got a job as an army administrative clerk in Cresaptown, MD. She processed the paperwork of Graner, 35, for the 372nd Military Police Company when he arrived in November 2002. “He was funny, the jokester,” she recalls. Other times, he was raunchy. “An outlaw,” she calls him. Their affair started in March 2003 while they were stationed in Fort Lee. “After Lynndie joined the army and was working as an orderly in the U.S., she didn’t know anybody. She was a really quiet girl,” Janis Karpinski, a former commanding officer at Abu Ghraib, tells me. “Enter Charles Graner. He’s much older, and he’s full of himself. He’s just got that kind of personality.” “She was blown away,” Karpinski says. “She felt like someone was finally talking to her. Paying attention. He seemed far more experienced and worldly than anyone she knew. It only took a few, short conversations. She was enamored with him.” “Graner was the total opposite of Jamie [Fike],” says Kleinstiver. “Lynndie told me, ‘He’s real open. He likes to do stuff. Wild stuff.’”
Graner has admitted to beating his former wife, Staci Morris, and dragging her by her hair across a room. He was accused in a federal suit, Horatio Nimley v. Charles A. Graner, filed on May 25, 1999, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, of injuring an inmate, Horatio Nimley, while Graner was working as a prison guard at Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution-Greene. On June 29, 1998, according to the suit, Graner and another guard hid a razor blade in a side dish of mashed potatoes that was served to Nimley. He bit down on the razor, slicing the inside of his mouth, and bled profusely.
In March 2003, England went with Graner and another soldier to Virginia Beach. Their friend took a picture of England performing oral sex on Graner. In addition, Graner took a series of pictures as they engaged in anal sex, showing the progression of the sex act, “minute by minute,” says Hardy.
“Everything they did, he took a picture of it,” says Hardy. “She was asked why she let him. She said, ‘You know, guys like that. I just wanted to make him happy.’ She was like a little plaything for him. I think the sexual stuff—and the way he put her in those positions—was his way of saying, ‘Let me see what I can make you do.’”
Graner flaunted his affair with England, and the photos were passed around among the soldiers in their unit. Military rules forbid soldiers from taking lewd photographs. Also, England was married to Fike. Her affair with Graner violated army rules. Neither England nor Graner got in serious trouble, though. Several weeks later, they got ready for their deployment to Iraq and were eventually stationed at Abu Ghraib.
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Tara McKelvey is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review. Her work has also appeared in Columbia Journalism Review, The Washington Post, Boston Review and other publications. She is currently a fellow with the Alicia Patterson Foundation.
