Friendly fire in Iraq -- and a coverup

"Are you Jean Feggins?" one of the uniformed men asked.

"Are you here about my son?" she responded.

"Yes, ma'am," one of the soldiers said, nervously folding his beret in his hands. "But we would rather talk to you about that inside."

The three went up the front steps, stepped inside the front door and turned left into a small den.

"We think you should sit down," one of the men said, gesturing to a brown sofa. "The United States Army regrets to inform you that your son, Albert Markee Nelson, has been killed in Iraq."

Nelson, whom his mother had always called Mark, had not even told his mother he was in Iraq. She thought he was still training at Fort Carson. He had only been in Iraq six weeks when he died. "Maybe he didn't want me to worry," Feggins said nearly two years after the casualty officers' visit, sitting on that same brown sofa.

Feggins is 53. She is taut and thin and looks too young to have six kids, five boys and a girl. Thirty-one at the time of his death, Pfc. Nelson was the oldest.

Feggins still regularly refers to Nelson as "my baby." He was good-looking, popular with the ladies, a natural jokester. In a scrapbook, he's hamming it up for the camera, striking a pose on some desert hill in Iraq, camels loping behind him. Feggins says that if they ever make a movie about 2nd Platoon, Will Smith should play Nelson's role. "They just seem so much alike," she told me.

"The casualty officer, the first day that I saw him, said, 'There is a possibility that your son was killed by friendly fire,'" she remembered. "But there was no proof yet. There was no report yet."

On Dec. 15, 2006, the Department of Defense announced that Nelson had been killed by small arms fire from the enemy.

But then Feggins heard almost nothing further. She received the death certificate, which listed the cause of death as "homicide."

The Army told her the incident was under investigation. Weeks passed. Then months. By the following spring, Feggins still hadn't received any more information on her son's death.

It didn't feel right to Feggins. "Every night I was crying myself to sleep because I kept saying to myself, 'Something is wrong. I don't know what's wrong, but something is wrong,'" she remembered. "And  [I wasn't] going to be able to relax or be comfortable or have closure, as they say, until I found out what [was] going on."

She requested an autopsy report. She began writing letters and e-mails asking for answers. She wrote Nelson's chain of command. She wrote the president. "I know in my heart that the Army is lying about the circumstances surrounding his death," Feggins wrote in a Feb. 2, 2007, letter to the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Chuck Ferry, that she shared with me.

One day the phone rang. An officer was going to brief her on the death of her son.

She had a meeting with an officer, whose name she still cannot recall. He had a laptop and a PowerPoint presentation showing that shrapnel from an enemy mortar had killed her son.

"He said to me, 'I know as a mother you are concerned about whether or not your son suffered. But I am here to tell you that your son didn't suffer,'" she recalled. "He said, 'He was killed instantly. He was killed so fast that he didn't have time to feel pain, and he never knew what hit him,'" she remembered. "He said, 'Also, when we found him on the roof, he was still in his position, holding his weapon.'"

"He just straight lied right in my face," she said after watching the video that showed her son suffering for 25 minutes. "And he did it with a straight face. I have a problem with that," she added. "I understand friendly fire because I'm a police officer. I had friends who were killed in friendly fire ... I don't like liars and I cannot deal with lies."

"These are the people that are in control of our safety and these are the people that the country is supposed to trust," she said angrily. "How are you going to trust somebody who can sit there and lie like that? They need to have more accountability," she added. "It is so important to tell this story."

And then, through tears, Feggins offered words of comfort to the surviving men of 2nd Platoon. Informed that some are haunted by what they insist was a friendly fire incident, followed by a coverup that includes hiding the truth from the families of the dead, she asked them not to feel guilty.

"For the soldiers that served with him, I just want you guys to know you are all my heroes, and I'm sorry that you had to go through that because I know what kind of friends Mark attracts and I know that it hurts you deeply, especially being told that you couldn't tell the truth about it," she said through tears. "So now you are feeling some type of weight. But it's not your fault. You had to do what you had to do."

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In an effort to get the Army to respond to questions about the incident and the subsequent investigation, I contacted the Army and Fort Carson public affairs officials via telephone and e-mail in late September requesting interviews.

I sought to speak to leaders of the tank and infantry units involved in investigating the deaths of Nelson and Suarez. The interview requests stated that Salon had obtained "evidence suggesting that the two men were, in fact, killed by friendly fire."

The Army demanded details on this evidence prior to granting any interviews. "Sir, I'm going to need some idea as to the nature of this new, solid reporting before we can start the interview," Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman, wrote in a Sept. 25 e-mail. "I'm sure that with such solid journalist efforts you wouldn't mind at least saying specifically what has brought on such confidence." I offered to detail the evidence during any interviews -- but not before.

Efforts to contact some of the officers directly produced similar results. "I'd like to know in advance what you think you have discovered," Col. Sean MacFarland, the tank brigade commander who signed off on the Army's investigation, wrote in a Sept. 26 e-mail. "If it is new, I will make time to talk to you. Otherwise, I would not want to waste either of our valuable time." In a second e-mail, MacFarland said that "the supporting evidence" behind the Army's investigation further proved that a tank did not kill Nelson and Suarez -- but that evidence could not be produced because it was classified. He did not consent to an interview.

The infantry battalion commander, Lt. Col. Chuck Ferry, was curt. "Don't know who you are and I am not familiar with your organization," he wrote on Sept. 30 in response to an interview request. "Sounds like you have already made up your mind about your story. Why should I talk to you?"

Ultimately Boyce, the Army spokesman, forwarded a written statement that didn't diverge from the findings of the Army's 2006 investigation. He reiterated the report's finding that two mortars landing simultaneously killed Nelson and Suarez. Boyce wrote, "Shrapnel, uniform scraps, impact-point analysis and audio analysis of the Soldier's video clearly show fratricide did not occur during the attack."