Colo. Marine in eye of storm

[thedrifter]

Colo. Marine in eye of storm
Career officer relieved of duty amid investigation

By Joe Garner, Rocky Mountain News
May 27, 2006

RANGELY - Jeff Chessani was a straight arrow growing up in small-town western Colorado.

He graduated from Rangely High School in 1982, earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Northern Colorado in 1988 and has made a career as a Marine Corps officer.

He had advanced to lieutenant colonel when he was relieved of command April 7 in the wake of an ongoing military investigation.

The two-pronged investigation focuses first on the deaths of as many as two dozen Iraqi civilians in Haditha, an insurgent stronghold. That inquiry could result in murder charges against Marines in the battalion that Chessani commanded.

If the accusations are true, the deaths could rank as the worst case of unprovoked killing of Iraqis by U.S. forces in the war - an Iraqi version of the My Lai massacre, the 1968 murders of at least 100 and perhaps as many as 200 Vietnamese villagers.

Second, the military is investigating accusations that Marines covered up the Haditha shootings, beginning with false reports about what happened Nov. 19, 2005, as Chessani's battalion was on combat patrol through palm groves near the Euphrates River.

The initial report was that a roadside bomb killed a Marine lance corporal driving a Humvee. Now, investigators say they believe the blast never occurred.

The next day, a Marine Corps communique reported that the lance corporal and 15 Iraqis were killed by the improvised bomb. The communique further said that gunmen attacked the convoy, prompting the Marines to return fire, killing eight insurgents.

Now, investigators say they believe that not only was the bomb nonexistent, but also that 24 civilian Iraqi men, women and children were killed in a sustained operation in the next five hours, including the eight identified as insurgents.

But the image of the quiet, -athletic boy who grew up in Rangely does not square with the news reports of a military investigation involving a man whom townspeople have seen only occasionally since he graduated from high school.

"I cannot believe he was there and allowed anything like that to happen," said Peggy Rector, a former mayor and Rio Blanco County commissioner. Her son Jeff Rector was a junior when Chessani was a senior. "That is not the Jeff Chessani we knew. I'm flabbergasted. I'm completely stunned.

"Jeff Chessani was one of the nicest young men you'll ever meet."

A dedicated Marine

Jeffrey R. Chessani, 42, is the oldest of three children.

"I completely support my brother," said Melissa Fellows, the youngest of the three, who lives in Meeker. Their mother, Cynthia Huber, lives in the same town, which is about 60 miles east of Rangely.

"He's my brother, and I love him, and I support him," Fellows said. "We all love him and support him."

Still, she said, she had not talked with her brother about the investigation. "Nor would I talk to him over the telephone about this," Fellows said.

She said her brother is married and the father of a large family.

Huber called her son "a dedicated, patriotic person, let alone a Marine. He's a wonderful son, and I support everything he does."

Christopher Chessani, of Grand Junction, the middle child of the family, did not respond to a request for an interview.

Huber's pride is clear when she talks about her son going "from a class of 29 at Rangely High School to a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps."

While Jeff Chessani studied meteorology and earth sciences at UNC, he completed Marine Corps training during the summers and was commissioned the autumn after he graduated.

"He's been deployed all over the world for the past 20 years," his mother said. "So he's had no time to come home. That's why people here don't know him."

'That's just war'

"Chessani is not a name from around here," said Tom Kilduff, a Marine combat veteran of two tours in Vietnam who is commander of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post No. 5843 in Meeker. "I don't know the name."

But Kilduff can identify with the stress and anguish that Chessani's troops faced in combat in Iraq.

"The insurgents are like the Viet Cong, who would pop up and kill your friends right beside you," he said. "Pretty soon, there are incidents where innocent civilians are going to get killed.

"That's just war. That's what happens. That's not right, but that's what it's like in war."

Kilduff said his sense is that Rio Blanco County supports the war in Iraq "because of the troops who are doing the fighting."

Still, the daily, routine horrors and terrors of combat are not truly understood, even with high- tech news coverage, he said

"Any time the troops on the ground do anything, it's the officers who usually take the fall," Kilduff said. "But everyone down the line usually gets in trouble, too."

A son of the heartland

Whatever the temptations Rangely offered in the 1970s and '80s, Chessani is remembered as a kid who stayed straight and avoided many of the perils of being a teenager.

He had lots of friends among other kids in the town - population 2,113 in the 1980 census - that is set among mesas and arroyos near the Colorado-Utah state line.

"I think we had geometry class together," said Judy Steele Allred, a former classmate who teaches English at Rangely High School. "He was just a really good person. He didn't have problems. We all hung out at the drive-in and played Pac-Man. . . . It was the '80s.

"It seems like he left right after high school, and I've just lost touch with him."

Longtime Rangely residents remembered the Chessanis as a family that arrived in town with one of the energy booms that swing the community's fortunes up and down along with oil and gas prices. It's a transient, oil-camp kind of town today, booming again thanks to record energy prices.

Chessani played sports for the Panthers, including football his senior year, when the team went 5-3.

Bill Mitchem, a now-retired science teacher, remembered Chessani as a boy "who seemed to be determined. He seemed to have decent values."

"I don't believe he took any role in leadership," Mitchem said, "but it wasn't something he shied away from."

Desk duty

Chessani, who declined to be interviewed for this story, has been on desk duty at Camp Pendleton, Calif., since April 7.

Maj. Gen. Richard Natonki, 1st Marine Division commander, sacked him and two captains who were Chessani's company commanders, a week after the unit returned from Iraq.

Natonki, speaking through a military spokesman, said the reassignments were "due to lack of confidence in their leadership abilities stemming from their performance during a recent deployment to Iraq." Natonki did not refer directly to the Haditha incident.

Chessani and the two captains, Luke McConnell and James Kimber, are free to come and go from Camp Pendleton during the investigation, said Lt. Col. Sean Gibson, a spokesman for the Marines assigned to Central Command. The Tampa, Fla.- based command oversees joint operations in southwest Asia.

"No charges have been preferred against anyone," Gibson said. "They are not in the judicial system yet."

However, as senior Marine officers and other military officials have briefed members of Congress about the investigation, the Haditha incident has come -into focus as something that has shamed the corps.

Gibson said the military has no timeline for completing its investigation, which, The New York Times has reported, centers on a staff sergeant who was a squad leader. The Marines have declined to say where Chessani and his two captains were at the time of the shootings because their roles are part of the investigation, Gibson said.

The commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, flew from Washington to Iraq on Thursday to give a series of speeches re-emphasizing compliance with international laws of armed conflict, the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. military's own rules of engagement.

Former Marines who are members of Congress have been stunned and outraged by briefings on the Haditha shootings.

Rep. John Murtha, D-Penn., who was decorated for his service in Vietnam, said that U.S. troops "overreacted because of the pressure on them" and that the initial military communique about a bomb blast and firefight was a fabrication.

From the other side of the aisle, Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., a retired Marine colonel, said the allegations indicated that "this was not an accident."

"This was direct fire by Marines at civilians."

garnerj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5421

Ellie

[thedrifter]

No direct link ties Marine to deaths
Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani of Rangely lost his post after his unit was implicated in civilian slayings, but officials say the two actions may not be connected.

By Kirk Mitchell
Denver Post Staff Writer
DenverPost.com

The Colorado Marine officer relieved of command after his unit was implicated in the deaths of as many as 24 Iraqi civilians in November is not necessarily suspected of participating directly in the killings, people familiar with the situation said.

Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, 42, a highly decorated officer who grew up in the northwestern Colorado town of Rangely and served in the Gulf War and Panama invasion, was relieved of command of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marine Regiment, along with two of his commanders, on April 7 for what the military called "lack of confidence in their leadership abilities stemming from their performance during a recent deployment to Iraq."

No mention was made of the Nov. 19 killings of civilians in the western Iraqi town of Hadithah.

Military, congressional and human rights officials cautioned that the officers' discipline may not be directly related to the killings, but they did note that a separate investigation is underway into how the incident was reported up the chain of command.

In Chessani's hometown Saturday, residents said they were tired - tired of opposition to the Iraq war, tired of the political banter around it and, now, tired of the questions about their native son.

"You go do his job," said Stan Johnson, a hired hand at a sheep ranch in surrounding Rio Blanco County.

Lt. Col. Sean Gibson, spokesman for U.S. Marine Corps Forces, Central Command, in Tampa, Fla., said Saturday that it isn't necessarily correct to assume a connection between Chessani's discipline and the Hadithah incident.

"What people have done is associated it with Hadithah completely," Gibson said. "People see an investigation and they draw a straight line to Hadithah, making an assumption that isn't necessarily correct."

Chessani could not be reached Saturday. His family in Colorado said he has been ordered not to discuss the matter.

Slayings covered up?

Military officials are investigating allegations that U.S. Marines in Chessani's battalion murdered as many as two dozen Iraqi civilians in Hadithah.

Also being investigated is whether the true nature of the Nov. 19 deaths - reported the next day as the result of a roadside bomb blast and a subsequent firefight with insurgents - was covered up or misreported.

"I understand the investigation shows that in fact there was no firefight, there was no explosion that killed the civilians. ... There was only bullet holes inside the house where the Marines had gone in," Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., an ex-Marine with close ties to the service, told reporters May 18.

The Washington Post on Saturday quoted Hadithah residents who reportedly witnessed the killings as saying that the Americans shot civilians at close range in retaliation for the death of a Marine lance corporal in a bombing. The dead included children and the women who were trying to protect them, the newspaper quoted witnesses as saying.

Time magazine first reported the incident in March, quoting "eyewitnesses and local officials" as saying that Marines "went on a rampage."

Meantime, Colorado state Treasurer Mike Coffman, a Marine major who recently returned from a voluntary tour of duty in Iraq, said Saturday that he met Chessani while stationed in Hadithah in January. He said the commander didn't seem upset about anything.

"He was a nice guy," Coffman said.

Iraqis given reparations

Coffman said he also spoke with a Marine officer who paid $38,000 in reparations to Iraqi families of those killed during the Hadithah incident.

The officer, whom Coffman identified as Dana Hyatt, asked him while they were serving together in Hadithah in March how he should respond to an interview request by Time magazine.

Hyatt told Coffman that Marines may have overreacted following an explosion at Hadithah and shot at what they thought were insurgents loading guns when they were actually firing at a large family eating breakfast, Coffman said, adding that the sound the Marines heard may have been plates clinking together.

Hyatt could not be reached Saturday.

The fact that the U.S. paid as much as they did to the relatives of the dead indicates the Marines knew the operation was flawed, Coffman said.

"On its face, there was a problem," he said.

Coffman said he will write a report about what he knows about the incident and send it to Marine headquarters.

Chessani is a decorated Marine who as a second lieutenant captured several of then- Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega's top military officers during the Panama invasion in 1989, said his mother, Cynthia Huber of Meeker.

"He played a big role in that," Huber said. "He's achieved quite a lot in his 42 years."

She said she never had any problems raising Chessani, who played center in football and third base in baseball for Rangely High School.

On May 6, 2005, Huber attended the ceremony at Camp Pendleton, near San Diego, where her son was given command over the 1,000-man 3rd Battalion.

"He's been a person they obviously have totally depended on," she said. "I support my son 100 percent."

She emphasized that her son has not been accused of any war crime.

"He's not out in the field," she said. "He was the commander."

On March 12, the Marine Corps asked the Naval Criminal Investigative Service to launch an investigation of the killings. A week later, on March 19, Army Maj. Gen. Eldon Bargewell, an outside investigator, was appointed to conduct a second investigation - known as an AR-15-6 - into how the incident was handled by the Marines.

"If there were problems in the chain of command; if there was a coverup; if anything wasn't reported, let the chips fall where they may," Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told reporters May 19, promising to hold hearings when the report was concluded.

Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters recently that he was briefed by the Marine Corps commandant on Wednesday, and his whole committee was briefed Thursday.

Warner said that, among the other evidence provided by investigators, the committee would be examining photographs from the incident.

He declined to confirm that the suspension of the three Marine officers was connected to Hadithah.

Rights group involved

John Sifton, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, said his organization worked with Time to "try and keep this issue alive." He said that an Iraqi human rights group obtained a video from Hadithah from a student journalist who had filmed the scene soon after the shootings.

"It became clear the original reports the Marines had provided in November were completely erroneous," Sifton said.

Sifton said that his military and congressional sources have told Human Rights Watch that "the Marine investigation has confirmed the villagers' accounts: that there was no firefight, no battle, no ambiguity in the situations where the Marines had killed civilians."

Sifton said that the other issue "is the coverup."

"As everybody knows now, the initial bulletin released by Marines on Nov. 20 was not just inaccurate but clearly falsified. ... There is no question that military personnel lied. It is just a question at what level."

Sifton said, however, that as far as his organization knows, the suspension of Chessani and the other two officers has not yet been proved to be connected to a Hadithah coverup.

"The other possibility out there, raised by some of our sources, is when the military starts investigating a crime, they usually come across other things as well. There is a lot of stuff going on in the field. Possibly some of the officers were relieved of duty for other reasons unconnected to Hadithah."

Penchant for patriotism

Chessani grew up in Rangely, and his name still is quickly recognized there. Like many people since, he left soon after high school graduation in 1982, away from the ranches, mines and oil fields that have continued to fade from the dusty landscape of northern Colorado.

Chessani was pegged for military service early, according to those who knew him. He was a clean-cut straight arrow with good manners and a penchant for patriotism.

"He was a nice kid," said Cherry Bracken, who runs the Guesthouse Motel. "I think the media is blowing this out of proportion. It definitely bothers me. The whole thing."

Army veteran Bill Hume, the owner, butcher and deliveryman from Rangely's Nichols Market since 1973, said Chessani is caught in a political crossfire between Republicans who want to stay the course in Iraq and Democrats who he said want to cut and run.

Chessani is most likely being held to account for the actions of his troops, Humes said.

"It's not right that they go after the ones higher up the command," he said. "It's just like they want to hold President Bush accountable for everything, whether he had anything to do with it or knew anything about it."

This story was written by Kirk Mitchell in Denver, with reports from John Aloysius Farrell and Mike Soraghan in Washington and Joey Bunch in Rangely.

Ellie