LAST WEEKEND, we joined hundreds of young veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan gathered near Washington, D.C., for the Winter Soldier Hearings: Iraq and Afghanistan. In a packed conference auditorium, under the glare of lights and the cameras of the BBC and other international and national media, former and active-duty troops brought the day-to-day reality of the war home to hundreds of people attending this historic event. They gave eyewitness accounts of what they saw and did with their units during the invasion and war whose fifth anniversary is upon us, as well as in the now six-year-old occupation of Afghanistan.

Named in response to Tom Paine’s Revolutionary War indictment of the “summer soldier and the sunshine patriot,” the D.C. hearings follow in a long tradition of soldier dissent, including a similar tribunal held by anti-war veterans in Detroit in 1971, during the Vietnam War. Last weekend’s event brought together nearly 300 veterans — mostly men and women in their twenties. They told of their year, or two or three in Iraq and Afghanistan and what they saw and did there.

The veterans sharply criticized the military’s Rules of Engagement (ROE) and provided testimony that these ROE were inconsistent and loose to the point of legitimating widespread abuses against civilians. The soldiers and Marines were often instructed to shoot “whenever they felt threatened,” which came to mean virtually all situations outside the wire of U.S. bases.

The vets told riveting stories of their own missions and recounted in often grotesque detail the effect of these operations on Iraqi civilians. They documented how this treatment of Iraqis and Afghanis was regularly sanctioned or overlooked by commanders.

The veterans told of:

• U.S. troops raiding home after home after home in which no insurgent activity or evidence was found, terrorizing the families inside.

• U.S. troops kicking, butt stroking and clothes-lining Iraqi prisoners of war, whom they were told to always call “detainees” so that Geneva Conventions did not apply.

• U.S. troops spraying machine-gun fire into homes after hearing a single shot from somewhere in a village.

• U.S. troops throwing urine-filled bottles and feces-packed food at people walking along the side of the road.

• U.S. troops shooting farmers working in their fields at night (to take advantage of the erratic electricity to run their irrigation systems) simply because they were out after a U.S.-mandated curfew.

• U.S. troops commanded not to stop for pedestrians, and instead to run over anyone or anything in the road as their convoys roar down highways;

• U.S. troops commanded to destroy boxes containing entire archives of birth certificates of the people of Fallujah, after a U.S. scorched-earth campaign in that city in 2004.

In addition, numerous women veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations testified at the Winter Soldier Hearings last week about repeated cases of sexual assault and harassment that they experienced at the hands of their fellow U.S. troops, and the obstacles placed in the way of female soldiers and Marines who attempted to report these crimes.

The anti-war veterans explained that abuses and killings of random civilians sometimes occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan because troops were angry about the death of comrades in their units. Many also testified to the motivation provided by an endemic racial hatred expressed by enlisteds and officers alike. They said they understood the frustration and rage, but they emphatically declared in their testimony that crimes against the people of Iraq at the hands of the U.S. armed forces were not isolated incidents of pent-up resentment or a matter of a few bad apples spoiling an otherwise healthy barrel.

The acts were habitual, repeated and officially promoted or condoned.

And their frequency helps explain poll numbers that show that the overwhelming majority of Iraqis want the U.S. to leave the country, and to do so immediately. In August 2007, for example, 79 percent of the Iraqi people said they opposed the U.S. occupation, and a Department of Defense survey of Iraqis found that fully 88 percent believe that the presence of U.S. forces has made the security situation in their country worse, not better.

What can we as American citizens do? Demand more honest media coverage of the war, for one thing. While we realize that sex sells better than a bloody war, it is sad commentary when watching the mainstream media last weekend would leave you more likely know the details of Eliot Spitzer’s sexcapades or an unusual weather event in Atlanta than about this crucial source of information about the nature of the wars in which we are engaged as a nation.

For another, watch this testimony, available on the Web at www.ivaw.org, and demand more of our candidates for president. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain all call for leaving major bases and tens of thousands of troops behind in perpetuity. Let them know that half an occupation is still an occupation, and will create the conditions for continuing violence and atrocity.

Catherine Lutz, a professor of anthropology at Brown University, is the author of Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century (Beacon Press 2001). Matthew Gutmann is a professor of anthropology at Brown.