thedrifter
02-12-07, 02:39 PM
Rules of Engagement
On November 19, 2005, in Haditha, during Kilo Company's third tour of duty in Iraq, a land mine planted by insurgents exploded beneath a Humvee, killing a 20-year-old Marine. What happened next—the slaughter of 24 Iraqi men, women, and children—was not entirely an aberration. These actions were rooted in the very conduct of the war.
by
William Langewiesche
November 2006
This article originally appeared in the November 2006 issue of Vanity Fair. On December 21, 2006, military prosecutors charged four Marines with unpremeditated murder in connection with the Haditha killings. In addition, four Marine officers were charged with dereliction of duty for failure to properly investigate and accurately report the incident. The four men pictured below have all been charged with unpremeditated murder.
Also on VF.com: Q&A with William Langewiesche
I: One Morning in November
The Euphrates is a peaceful river. It meanders silently through the desert province of Anbar like a ribbon of life, flanked by the greenery that grows along its banks, sustaining palm groves and farms, and a string of well-watered cities and towns. Fallujah, Ramadi, Hit, Haditha. These are among the places made famous by battle—conservative, once quiet communities where American power has been checked, and where despite all the narrow measures of military success the Sunni insurgency continues to grow. On that short list, Haditha is the smallest and farthest upstream. It extends along the Euphrates' western bank with a population of about 50,000, in a disarray of dusty streets and individual houses, many with walled gardens in which private jungles grow. It has a market, mosques, schools, and a hospital with a morgue. Snipers permitting, you can walk it top to bottom in less than an hour, allowing time enough to stone the dogs. Before the American invasion, it was known as an idyllic spot, where families came from as far away as Baghdad to while away their summers splashing in the river and sipping tea in the shade of trees. No longer, of course. Now, all through Anbar, and indeed the Middle East, Haditha is known as a city of death, or more simply as a name, a war cry against the United States.
November 19, 2005, is the date people remember. Near the center of Haditha the U.S. Marines had established a forward operating base they called Sparta. It was manned by the roughly 200 Marines of Kilo Company of the Third Battalion, First Marine Division, out of Camp Pendleton, California. This was Kilo Company's third tour in Iraq. It had participated in the invasion, in the spring of 2003, and again in the hard-fought battle for Fallujah in the fall of 2004. Because of normal rotations, however, only about two-thirds of its current members had been to Iraq before. The average age was 21. The company commander was a captain, an Annapolis graduate named Lucas McConnell, who was 32 and, like all but one of his lieutenants, was on his first tour at war. McConnell was a can-do guy, more of a believer than a thinker, disciplined, moderately religious, somewhat moralistic, and deeply invested in his beloved Marine Corps.
Winter was coming. At dawn Haditha was cool and clear. McConnell dispatched a convoy of four armored Humvees on a routine mission to deliver hot breakfasts and a radio-coding card to an observation post, a fortified checkpoint about three miles away, on River Road south of town. Some of the Humvees were equipped with top-mounted machine guns; two were "high-back" vehicles with open rear beds like those of pickup trucks, designed to carry troops and supplies, and wrapped in high protective siding. Between them the four Humvees held a squad of 12 heavily armed Marines, which was considered to be the minimum desirable force even for such a milk run as this. The men carried grenades, 9-mm. pistols, and variations of the basic assault rifle, the M16. They were led by a sergeant named Frank Wuterich, aged 25, who of all the sergeants of Kilo Company was known to be the most unassuming and considerate, the slowest to anger. He was another first-timer at war.
They rolled south toward the outpost, rattling through sleeping neighborhoods in single file, spaced well apart. Any insurgents watching them from the houses—and there likely were some—would have perceived the men behind the top-mounted guns as robotic figures swaddled in protective armor and cloth, and would barely have glimpsed the others through the small panes of thick, dusty, bulletproof glass, or above the armored high-back sides. Over the years on the streets of Iraq, living outside the American protective bubbles, I have often imagined that killing Americans is easier for their anonymity, because it allows insurgents to take on the machines or the uniforms without dwelling on the individuals inside. This was the experience of Resistance fighters when slaughtering hapless German conscripts during World War II in France, and presumably also of the mujahideen when killing Russians in Afghanistan. But the men on the receiving end of an attack have a different view of the effects. They know one another as individuals and friends. Even the newcomers to Kilo Company, for instance, had spent at least six months together already, and had grown so close that they could identify one another on sight, from behind, when all geared up and walking on patrols at night.
It was a 15-minute drive from Sparta Base to the outpost south of town. Sergeant Wuterich's squad unloaded the hot breakfasts and other supplies, and picked up several Iraqi soldiers from the apprentice Iraqi Army—trainees attached to the company, who lived in their own compound adjoining that of the Marines. The Iraqis were armed with the ubiquitous Iraqi weapon, the banana-clip, Russian-designed AK-47. After a brief delay the squad headed up River Road for Sparta Base. It is possible to judge the mood. Because the conflict in Iraq is a guerrilla war without progressive front lines, and American combat troops operate from immobile forts with fixed zones of responsibility, most patrols consist of predictable out-and-returns. The pattern is well known to the insurgents. Routes can be varied, but the choices typically are limited, especially if the patrols must stick to the roads and the distances are short. As a result, one of the basic facts of life for those troops who are actually in the fight is that the return to base is the most dangerous trip in Iraq: if the mujahideen are going to hit you at all, the chances are they'll hit you then. Nonetheless, for individual soldiers even in places as threatening as Haditha, most days are quiet, and weeks can go by with little sign of the enemy. There is no reason to believe that Wuterich's men were pumped up for the drive home. Were they alert? Sure, why not, but another fact of life is that you cannot see much out of an armored Humvee, and even if you could, you have no chance of identifying the enemy until first you come under attack. You've got all these weapons, and you've been told that you're a mighty warrior, a Spartan, but what are you going to shoot—the dogs? You're a Marine without a beach. So you sit zipped into a filthy Humvee, trusting the guys up on the guns to watch the rooftops and the traffic on the road, trusting your driver to keep his eyes on the ground ahead, holding your M16 muzzle-up between your knees, calmly enduring the ride. The radio crackles. Your head bobs with the bumps. You don't talk much. There's not much to say. If you're dumb you trust your luck. If you're smart you're fatalistic. Either way it usually works out fine.
They turned west off River Road, onto a street known to them as Route Chestnut—a wide thoroughfare running through a district of clustered houses. It was 7:15 in the morning. Up ahead and unbeknownst to them, insurgents had planted a land mine, probably weeks before. In the bureaucratized language of this war, such mines are known as improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s. The ordinary ones are made from small artillery rounds, and rigged to detonate upon reception of an electronic signal from a short-range line-of-sight transmitter—a cordless telephone, a garage-door opener, a toy-car remote control. The insurgents of Haditha produced plenty of them; Kilo Company had discovered dozens in the previous weeks, and in the following weeks would discover many more. Most had been laid hastily and were poorly tucked into soft dirt or trash beside the roads, sometimes with wires showing. But the land mine this morning was different. It was a sizable propane tank stuffed with high explosives. More important, it had been buried directly in the road, and so lovingly paved over that apparently no surface disturbance was visible. The first Humvee rolled across it without incident. On board were three Marines, named Salinas, Rodriguez, and Sharratt. The second Humvee crossed, carrying Mendoza, De La Cruz, and Tatum. The third Humvee was the command vehicle. It crossed, with Wuterich, Graviss, and a medic named Whitt. Somewhere in these vehicles sat the Iraqi soldiers as well.
The fourth Humvee carried the final three Marines. It was a high-back model. At the steering wheel was a veteran of the Fallujah fight, a plump 20-year-old named Miguel Terrazas, from El Paso, Texas, who was one of the most popular soldiers in Kilo Company, known for certain kills he had made, and yet also for his irrepressible good humor. Sitting to his right was another Fallujah veteran, James Crossan, aged 20, from North Bend, Washington. Crossan was frustrated with the mission in Haditha, which he saw as an attempt to play policeman in the midst of an active war. In the open back was Salvador Guzman, aged 19, a first-timer to Iraq, who was known as a typically easygoing Marine. Guzman was from Crystal Lake, Illinois. He faced rearward in the Humvee pointing his weapon over the protective siding, watching the street behind.
As this trio passed unsuspectingly over the buried land mine, a spotter watching from nearby, probably in one of the houses, pushed a button. With a boom that shook the surrounding neighborhood, the device detonated directly under Terrazas in a fireball of violently expanding gases. The blast simultaneously lifted the Humvee and split it in two, separating the top half from the bottom. Guzman was blown clear and landed in the dirt behind the wreckage. He lay there bruised and stunned, with a broken foot but no serious injury. Crossan, in the right front seat, was not so fortunate. He was blown through the right door and then had part of the Humvee fall on him. He lay pinned under the heavy steel, suffering from multiple bone fractures and internal injuries. Others from the squad came running up. He heard someone shouting, "Get some morphine!" and he passed out.
The morphine can only have been meant for Crossan, because Guzman was not so badly hurt, and Terrazas was already beyond such needs. It is a requirement of understanding the events in Haditha—and the circumstances of this war—not to shy away from the physical realities here, or to soften the scene in the interest of politics or taste. Terrazas was torn in half. His bottom half remained under the steering wheel. His top half was blown into the road, where he landed spilling his entrails and organs. He probably did not suffer, at least. He must have lost consciousness instantly and have died soon after hitting the ground. He had a hole in his chin. His eyes were rolled back. He did not look peaceful at all. He looked bloody and grotesque.
Get morphine? No, not for Terrazas. For Wuterich and the nine intact members of the squad, Terrazas's fate was extremely disturbing. They were all of them professional soldiers who had willingly assumed the risk. But just a minute ago Terrazas had been driving home, relaxed and good-humored as usual, and now in a flash he was irretrievably gone. Such is the nature of death in Iraq: you are alive, and the streets seem calm and normal, until suddenly, inevitably, with no warning, you are dead or maimed for the rest of time. With no distant thunder to approach, the loss seems worse for the lack of any ability to prepare.
The wreckage smoked black. The air smelled of cordite, dust, and burned rubber. Wuterich called for backup, and for medical helicopters to evacuate the casualties. He did what a squad leader is supposed to do. A few Marines struggled to free Crossan. After a period of confusion the others crouched with weapons to their shoulders, scanning the nearby rooftops, walls, and windows in the hope of spotting the spotter, and alert to the possibility of further attack. They ordered the Iraqi soldiers to do the same. The Iraqis complied, but somewhat reluctantly, as if perhaps they thought this was not really their fight. In any case, though much remains confused about the immediate aftermath of the attack, and indeed about the hours that followed, what is nearly certain is that at first the squad took no fire. When reinforcements arrived from Sparta Base, after about 10 minutes, one of them was able to kneel gently over Terrazas's remains. He said, "You are my brother by another mother. I love you, man." He covered Terrazas with a poncho, closing him off from sight.
By that time the killing of Iraqis had already begun, though here again uncertainty reigns. From transcripts, conversations, documents, press reports, and above all a sense for the plausible in Iraq, it is possible to reconstruct a lot. Nonetheless, given the complexities of guerrilla war, and the confusion that exists in the minds of those closest to battle, only the barest facts are indisputable. After the land-mine explosion, Wuterich's Marines remained in the immediate vicinity throughout the morning and beyond. Over the next few hours, until maybe around lunchtime, they killed 24 Iraqis. To accomplish the job, they used a few grenades, and maybe a pistol, but primarily their assault rifles. They suffered not a single casualty during this time. Five of the dead were young men who had approached in a car. The remaining 19 were people from the neighborhood, found and killed in the rooms or yards of four family houses, two on the south side of the road, and two on the north. They included nine men, four women, and six children. Many had been sleeping, and were woken by the land-mine blast. Some were shot down in their pajamas. The oldest man was 76. He was blind and decrepit, and sat in a wheelchair. His elderly wife was killed, too. The dead children ranged in age from 15 to 3. They included boys and girls. The Marines later delivered the corpses to the morgue, where they were catalogued by the local coroner. Photographs and videos were taken independently by Americans and Iraqis in the neighborhood and at the morgue. The images showed blood-splattered rooms, as well as victims. The dead did not look peaceful. They looked bloody and grotesque. You are my brother by another mother, you are my daughter by my wife. The dead were buried by angry, grieving crowds.
On the second day, a Marine Corps press officer at the big base downriver in Ramadi issued a wildly misleading statement attributing the civilian deaths to the enemy's I.E.D., as if the families had crowded around the device before it exploded. That statement was later held out to be a deliberate lie, a cover-up, but in fairness it resulted from the isolation of the base, and was more self-delusional than underhanded. The press statement was not seen by Captain McConnell or his men, who had no chance therefore to correct it. Once it was issued, it became an official truth that the Marine Corps, even today, has rigidly refused to retract, despite the fact that within the Corps a more plausible official truth existed almost from the start: the day after the press statement was issued, McConnell visited the battalion headquarters at a dam five miles north of Haditha, where he gave his commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Chessani, a PowerPoint briefing on the action, explaining that some number of civilians had been killed by Wuterich's squad while they suppressed a "complex ambush" that had started with the explosion of the land mine and had continued with an attack by hidden gunmen. Most of the briefing concerned other small firefights that had erupted in Haditha the same day. Chessani authorized the maximum compensation payments of $2,500 to the families for each of the dead who could be certified not to have been insurgents. A Marine major was assigned to do at least that much of an investigation. McConnell's version was passed up the chain of command. McConnell returned to his fight for Haditha.
But one month later a reporter at Time magazine's Baghdad bureau, Tim McGirk, viewed a gruesome video of the aftermath, which suggested that people had been shot and killed inside the houses. Such is the nature of this war, with its routine collateral horrors, that had McGirk been privy to McConnell's report the video might not have surprised him. But with only the press statement about a land mine to go by, it was obvious that something about the official description was very wrong. McGirk's initial queries to the Marine Corps were rebuffed with an e-mail accusing him of buying into insurgent propaganda, and, implicitly, of aiding and abetting the enemy in a time of war. Whoever wrote the e-mail was out of his league. Negative publicity does indeed help the insurgency, but it's the killing of bystanders that really does the trick. Iraq is a small country with large family ties. After three years of war, the locals hardly needed Time to tell them the score. Rather, it was the Americans back home who needed help—any little insight into why the war kept getting worse. McGirk and others in the Baghdad bureau continued with their inquiry, focusing increasingly on the possibility that a massacre and cover-up had occurred. They did not draw conclusions, but laid out what was known and, in mid-March 2006, published the first of several carefully considered accounts.
Knowing that the articles were coming, the Marine Corps had been forced to accept two independent military investigations, one led by an Army general, concentrating on the responsibilities of command, and the other by the criminal investigative branch of the Navy, which focused on reconstructing events on the ground. News from the investigations occasionally emerged, and did not look good for the Marines. Pennsylvania congressman John Murtha, a former Marine and a powerful friend of the Pentagon, stated bluntly that his sources were telling him that a massacre had indeed occurred; he said that there had been no firefight, and that Wuterich's squad had simply gone berserk. Murtha's larger point was that impossible pressure was being placed on U.S. troops, and that they should be withdrawn from a self-destructive war. Following his statements, Haditha became yet another test in a polarized nation, and never mind the details: if you liked President George W. Bush, you believed that no massacre had taken place; if you disliked him, you believed the opposite. As part of the package, Time came in for Internet attacks, hate-filled attempts to find any small discrepancies in its reporting, and, again, never mind the underlying truth.
Amid the vitriol came allegations of other U.S. atrocities in Iraq, some of which turned out to be real. The Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who had enjoyed the strong support of the U.S. government, stated publicly what has long been obvious on the streets—that the abuse of Iraqi civilians by American soldiers is routine. He did not say what is equally obvious—that abuse of Iraqis by Iraqis is even more routine, and that, along with horrors inflicted by Sunni groups, much of the worst is done by Shiite militias, who constitute a significant portion of the government's own forces as Iraq slips into civil war. Al-Maliki vowed to launch his own independent investigation of the Haditha killings—wishful thinking for a government leader forced to hunker down in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone. But tempers were fraying in both Iraq and the United States.
Meanwhile, Kilo Company and the rest of the Third Battalion had returned to California on schedule in the early spring of 2006, and had been greeted with the usual fanfare. But one week later the division's top general relieved Captain McConnell and Lieutenant Colonel Chessani of their commands, stating that he had lost confidence in their abilities to lead. The two officers remained on duty in other roles, though straining against bitterness, and anxious about the future. McConnell hoped that by remaining silent he might prevail, standing against the assault as a Spartan would. Semper fi. Nonetheless, it seems eventually to have dawned on him that his own beloved Corps might not be at his side. Reluctantly, McConnell hired a private defense lawyer, as did Wuterich and others. The naval investigation dragged on, and in midsummer produced a 3,500-page report. The report has not been made public, but apparently suggests that some members of the squad had engaged in murder, and that afterward they and perhaps others had agreed on a narrative to hide the crime. The Marine Corps began to ready charges, and to prepare for military trials and lesser career-ending disciplinary actions. The trials will take place at Pendleton, probably sometime before spring. The penalties may include capital punishment and prison for life. In the most general terms the outcome is already known. A former officer close to McConnell said to me, "The Corps has this reflex when it feels threatened at home. It has a history of eating its young."
II: The Fallujah Legacy
Who among these young should be eaten, and how, are questions that Marine Corps justice will decide. But the story of Haditha is about more than the fate of just a few men, the loss of their friend, or the casualties they inflicted along the Euphrates River one cool November morning. More fully explored, it is about the observable realities of an expanding guerrilla war—about mistakes that have been made and, regrettably, about the inability to fix what is wrong. Those limitations appear to be inherent in the military, and though they certainly have much to do with the reactions and resentments of the least competent soldiers, they also, in a different way, apply to the very best. No matter how sophisticated or subtle our military thinkers may be, ultimately they have use of only this very blunt device—a heavy American force that is simply not up to suppressing a popular rebellion in a foreign land. Despite all the fine words and intentions, the U.S. military turns out to be a tool that is too large and too powerful to be sharpened. Our soldiers collectively did not want this war, and many have come to believe that it cannot be won, but they are not in positions to act on those thoughts, and have no choice but to perform their assignments as their capacities allow.
The starting point of the Haditha killings is early 2004, when the occupation was nearly a year old, and the Marines were brought back to Iraq to take over from the U.S. Army west of Baghdad, in the Sunni strongholds of Anbar Province. Anbar was said to be restive, but it was already dangerous as hell. The Army had blundered there. Soon after the invasion, in April 2003, soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division had gone into the center of Fallujah, where they set up an observation post in a schoolhouse. The best account yet of the consequences, and indeed of the entire war, is contained in the recent book Fiasco, written by Thomas E. Ricks of The Washington Post. Ricks quotes the Army colonel in command, who said, "We came in to show presence just so the average citizen would feel safe." But it didn't work out that way, as it has not worked out for all the iterations of "presence" ever since.
This is an aspect of the war still poorly accepted by the military, and by critics who believe that by sending more troops the U.S. might have done a better job, or could do so today. The view from the street has always been different. Iraq steps aside to let soldiers pass by, and then immediately fills in the void behind them. The soldiers are targets as hapless as any German conscript ever was. Reduced to giving candy to children, and cut off by language and ignorance from the culture around them, they work in such isolation that the potentially positive effects of their presence usually amount to nil. The potentially negative effects, however, are significant. Back in April 2003, the U.S. colonel's average Iraqi citizen might have told him, "You don't know what you don't know, and, sir, you don't know a lot."
The colonel's soldiers had set up the observation post high in the schoolhouse, from which they could see over the tops of garden walls and into family compounds where unveiled women did housework and hung laundry to dry. The soldiers did not understand that this amounted to a violation of the local women, and a serious insult to their men. An angry crowd gathered in front of the school to demand the soldiers' withdrawal. From their positions in the building, the soldiers eyed the demonstrators warily for a while, but then rifle rounds began to hit the walls, fired perhaps from both a rooftop and the street, and the soldiers responded by firing directly into the crowd. Massive response had been the norm during the recent invasion, when the opponents were enemy troops, but times had changed and these were mostly noncombatants on the street. As many as 71 people were wounded, and between 5 and 17 died, depending on the truth of the American or Iraqi versions. The commander of the 82nd Airborne, General Charles Swannack Jr., later claimed that his men's marksmanship had been precise—and indeed so accurate that every one of the casualties (he counted five or six) was an identifiable instigator who deserved what he got. In other words, within the Army there was no question of disciplinary action. But the schoolhouse shootings had given the insurgency a cause, and the guerrilla war had begun.
By the time the Marines arrived in early 2004, nearly two years before the killings in Haditha, the war was out of hand. This was true not just in Anbar but all through central Iraq, where it was obvious that the crude tactics of the Army were failing, and playing into the insurgents' plans. Individual soldiers were brave, but the Army as an institution was averse to risk, and it was making a show of its fear by living on overprotected bases, running patrols only in armored vehicles, and overdoing its responses to the pinprick attacks by the insurgents—arresting far too many men, and answering rifle fire with tanks, rockets, artillery, and air strikes. It became so common to call down precision bombs against even individual suspected insurgents (for instance, someone spotted by drone, walking with a shovel along a road at night) that a new term was coined, based on the physical effects that could sometimes be observed on video. "Pink misting," some soldiers called it, and in their growing frustration they said it with glee.
Excessive force was employed not merely because the weapons were available but also because high technology had led Americans to expect low-casualty wars. Especially in the context of a conflict that had never been adequately explained, the U.S. military for political reasons could not afford any implication that it was squandering its soldiers' lives in Iraq. It is difficult to argue publicly that the military's caution was not a good thing. Strictly in gaming terms, however, there was a problem: by squandering innocent Iraqi lives instead, in order to save American soldiers, the Army in particular was spawning untold numbers of new enemies who would mount more frequent attacks against those same soldiers in the future. This was happening, and fast. The Army was locked into a self-defeating cycle by the very need to keep its casualties down. Meanwhile, the insurgent campaign was expanding in proportion to the number of noncombatants dishonored, brutalized, or killed. It was expanding in proportion to outrage.
Perhaps because of their history in irregular wars, the Marines seem to have a special sense for such cycles of violence. Despite their public image as leathernecks and fighters, they possess a contemplative strain, and their organization, because it is relatively small, is also relatively amenable to change. When they returned to Iraq in 2004, they knew that the fight had grown much trickier than before, and they announced that in Anbar they would demonstrate a new approach to winning the war. They would shed the excess of armor, use military precision rather than power, get out of their vehicles and walk through the towns, knock on doors rather than break them down, and go out of their way to accommodate the Iraqi culture. They would base their tactics on good intelligence. They would not over-react when provoked. They would shoot insurgents, and even enjoy the kills, but they would be careful not to hurt innocent bystanders. They would provide the necessary stability to allow a civil Iraqi society to grow. They would be understood, and they would make friends.
It was to be a textbook counter-insurgency campaign. In abstraction the strategy made sense, and it was the obvious choice—indeed, the only potentially productive one remaining. In practice, however, it quickly encountered an uncooperative Iraq. With its population of 250,000, Fallujah was particularly tough. In addition to all the native insurgents there, it contained foreign fighters from elsewhere in the Middle East, who had arrived to do battle under the banners of God. Within a couple of weeks the Marines were being forced by hostile fire back into their armored vehicles, and were encountering the same frustrations that the Army had, of not speaking Arabic, not having reliable translators, not knowing whose advice to trust, and not being able to distinguish between the enemy and ordinary people on the streets. As for the Iraqis in Anbar, the distinction so dear to the American forces, between the Army and the Marines, meant little to them. The view from the rooftops was that all these guys wore the same stars and stripes, and were crusaders for Zionists and oilmen, if not necessarily for Christ. Recently on Capitol Hill, John Murtha, the congressman and former Marine who has been so vocal about the killings in Haditha, mentioned those early encounters with reality to me. He said, "The Marines came over here to my office and said, 'Jesus, they're shooting at us!' And I said, 'Well, where did you think you were going?'"
The Marines did not formally abandon their strategy, but they saw it torn from their grasp. On March 31, 2004, precisely two years before Captain McConnell and his Kilo Company came home from their momentous tour in Haditha, four American employees of a security firm called Blackwater were ambushed and killed in Fallujah. Their corpses were hacked apart and burned, and two of them were hung from a bridge amid celebrations on the street. Images were beamed around the world. Judging correctly that it could not leave the insult unanswered, the Bush administration, after brief consideration of the options, decided on an all-out assault against the city. That decision continues to stand as one of the worst of the war, ranking only below the decision to disband the Iraqi Army and the initial decision to invade. At the time, for those of us living independently in Iraq outside of the American security zones, and with some sense therefore of the mood on the streets, it demonstrated once again the inability of officials to imagine the trouble that the United States was in, and the astonishing insularity of Washington, D.C.
The Marines knew better. They wanted to respond to the Blackwater ambush by going after the individual killers, and then following through with a well-crafted counter-insurgency campaign to stabilize and mollify the city. But when they were overruled and ordered to do the opposite—to mount an immediate full-frontal offensive—they set aside their theories, and as professional soldiers they dutifully complied. It was a disaster. Backed up by tanks and combat aircraft, the Marines went into Fallujah dealing destruction, and quickly bogged down in house-to-house fighting against a competent and determined foe. To make matters worse, the showcase battalion of the new Iraqi Army mutinied and refused to join the fight. The battle cost several dozen American dead and many more wounded, and did immeasurable damage to the prospects for American success. It turned into a humiliation for the United States when, after four days of struggle, the Marines were ordered by a nervous Washington to withdraw. Again they dutifully complied. Afterward, the jubilant insurgents took full public control of the city, and with the help of the foreign fighters turned it into a fortified haven which U.S. forces did not dare to enter.
To get a feeling for Kilo Company and the killings in Haditha, it is necessary to remember this. After the spring battle was lost, Fallujah became an open challenge to the American presence in Iraq. There were plenty of other challenges, and to speak only of Fallujah is grossly to simplify the war. Still, Fallujah was the most obvious one, and the United States, unless it was to quit and go home, had no choice but to take the city back. Everyone knew it, on all sides, and for months the antagonists prepared. Because of the fortifications and the expectation of active resistance, there was no question this time of a patient counter-insurgency campaign: the Marines were going to have to go in and simply smash the city down. In November of 2004, they did just that, with a force about 10,000 strong. Before attacking they gave the city warning, and allowed an exodus to occur. Nearly the entire population fled, including most of the insurgents, who spread into Baghdad or up the Euphrates to carry on the rebellion, leaving behind, however, a rear guard of perhaps 1,000 gunmen who, exceptionally, wanted to make a stand. This was their mistake. The Marines attacked with high explosives and heavy weapons. Over the 10 days it took to move through Fallujah, and the following weeks of methodical house-to-house clearing, they wrecked the city's infrastructure, damaged or destroyed 20,000 houses or more, and did the same to dozens of schools and mosques. They were not crusaders. They did not Christianize the place. They turned Fallujah into Stalingrad.
continued...........................
On November 19, 2005, in Haditha, during Kilo Company's third tour of duty in Iraq, a land mine planted by insurgents exploded beneath a Humvee, killing a 20-year-old Marine. What happened next—the slaughter of 24 Iraqi men, women, and children—was not entirely an aberration. These actions were rooted in the very conduct of the war.
by
William Langewiesche
November 2006
This article originally appeared in the November 2006 issue of Vanity Fair. On December 21, 2006, military prosecutors charged four Marines with unpremeditated murder in connection with the Haditha killings. In addition, four Marine officers were charged with dereliction of duty for failure to properly investigate and accurately report the incident. The four men pictured below have all been charged with unpremeditated murder.
Also on VF.com: Q&A with William Langewiesche
I: One Morning in November
The Euphrates is a peaceful river. It meanders silently through the desert province of Anbar like a ribbon of life, flanked by the greenery that grows along its banks, sustaining palm groves and farms, and a string of well-watered cities and towns. Fallujah, Ramadi, Hit, Haditha. These are among the places made famous by battle—conservative, once quiet communities where American power has been checked, and where despite all the narrow measures of military success the Sunni insurgency continues to grow. On that short list, Haditha is the smallest and farthest upstream. It extends along the Euphrates' western bank with a population of about 50,000, in a disarray of dusty streets and individual houses, many with walled gardens in which private jungles grow. It has a market, mosques, schools, and a hospital with a morgue. Snipers permitting, you can walk it top to bottom in less than an hour, allowing time enough to stone the dogs. Before the American invasion, it was known as an idyllic spot, where families came from as far away as Baghdad to while away their summers splashing in the river and sipping tea in the shade of trees. No longer, of course. Now, all through Anbar, and indeed the Middle East, Haditha is known as a city of death, or more simply as a name, a war cry against the United States.
November 19, 2005, is the date people remember. Near the center of Haditha the U.S. Marines had established a forward operating base they called Sparta. It was manned by the roughly 200 Marines of Kilo Company of the Third Battalion, First Marine Division, out of Camp Pendleton, California. This was Kilo Company's third tour in Iraq. It had participated in the invasion, in the spring of 2003, and again in the hard-fought battle for Fallujah in the fall of 2004. Because of normal rotations, however, only about two-thirds of its current members had been to Iraq before. The average age was 21. The company commander was a captain, an Annapolis graduate named Lucas McConnell, who was 32 and, like all but one of his lieutenants, was on his first tour at war. McConnell was a can-do guy, more of a believer than a thinker, disciplined, moderately religious, somewhat moralistic, and deeply invested in his beloved Marine Corps.
Winter was coming. At dawn Haditha was cool and clear. McConnell dispatched a convoy of four armored Humvees on a routine mission to deliver hot breakfasts and a radio-coding card to an observation post, a fortified checkpoint about three miles away, on River Road south of town. Some of the Humvees were equipped with top-mounted machine guns; two were "high-back" vehicles with open rear beds like those of pickup trucks, designed to carry troops and supplies, and wrapped in high protective siding. Between them the four Humvees held a squad of 12 heavily armed Marines, which was considered to be the minimum desirable force even for such a milk run as this. The men carried grenades, 9-mm. pistols, and variations of the basic assault rifle, the M16. They were led by a sergeant named Frank Wuterich, aged 25, who of all the sergeants of Kilo Company was known to be the most unassuming and considerate, the slowest to anger. He was another first-timer at war.
They rolled south toward the outpost, rattling through sleeping neighborhoods in single file, spaced well apart. Any insurgents watching them from the houses—and there likely were some—would have perceived the men behind the top-mounted guns as robotic figures swaddled in protective armor and cloth, and would barely have glimpsed the others through the small panes of thick, dusty, bulletproof glass, or above the armored high-back sides. Over the years on the streets of Iraq, living outside the American protective bubbles, I have often imagined that killing Americans is easier for their anonymity, because it allows insurgents to take on the machines or the uniforms without dwelling on the individuals inside. This was the experience of Resistance fighters when slaughtering hapless German conscripts during World War II in France, and presumably also of the mujahideen when killing Russians in Afghanistan. But the men on the receiving end of an attack have a different view of the effects. They know one another as individuals and friends. Even the newcomers to Kilo Company, for instance, had spent at least six months together already, and had grown so close that they could identify one another on sight, from behind, when all geared up and walking on patrols at night.
It was a 15-minute drive from Sparta Base to the outpost south of town. Sergeant Wuterich's squad unloaded the hot breakfasts and other supplies, and picked up several Iraqi soldiers from the apprentice Iraqi Army—trainees attached to the company, who lived in their own compound adjoining that of the Marines. The Iraqis were armed with the ubiquitous Iraqi weapon, the banana-clip, Russian-designed AK-47. After a brief delay the squad headed up River Road for Sparta Base. It is possible to judge the mood. Because the conflict in Iraq is a guerrilla war without progressive front lines, and American combat troops operate from immobile forts with fixed zones of responsibility, most patrols consist of predictable out-and-returns. The pattern is well known to the insurgents. Routes can be varied, but the choices typically are limited, especially if the patrols must stick to the roads and the distances are short. As a result, one of the basic facts of life for those troops who are actually in the fight is that the return to base is the most dangerous trip in Iraq: if the mujahideen are going to hit you at all, the chances are they'll hit you then. Nonetheless, for individual soldiers even in places as threatening as Haditha, most days are quiet, and weeks can go by with little sign of the enemy. There is no reason to believe that Wuterich's men were pumped up for the drive home. Were they alert? Sure, why not, but another fact of life is that you cannot see much out of an armored Humvee, and even if you could, you have no chance of identifying the enemy until first you come under attack. You've got all these weapons, and you've been told that you're a mighty warrior, a Spartan, but what are you going to shoot—the dogs? You're a Marine without a beach. So you sit zipped into a filthy Humvee, trusting the guys up on the guns to watch the rooftops and the traffic on the road, trusting your driver to keep his eyes on the ground ahead, holding your M16 muzzle-up between your knees, calmly enduring the ride. The radio crackles. Your head bobs with the bumps. You don't talk much. There's not much to say. If you're dumb you trust your luck. If you're smart you're fatalistic. Either way it usually works out fine.
They turned west off River Road, onto a street known to them as Route Chestnut—a wide thoroughfare running through a district of clustered houses. It was 7:15 in the morning. Up ahead and unbeknownst to them, insurgents had planted a land mine, probably weeks before. In the bureaucratized language of this war, such mines are known as improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s. The ordinary ones are made from small artillery rounds, and rigged to detonate upon reception of an electronic signal from a short-range line-of-sight transmitter—a cordless telephone, a garage-door opener, a toy-car remote control. The insurgents of Haditha produced plenty of them; Kilo Company had discovered dozens in the previous weeks, and in the following weeks would discover many more. Most had been laid hastily and were poorly tucked into soft dirt or trash beside the roads, sometimes with wires showing. But the land mine this morning was different. It was a sizable propane tank stuffed with high explosives. More important, it had been buried directly in the road, and so lovingly paved over that apparently no surface disturbance was visible. The first Humvee rolled across it without incident. On board were three Marines, named Salinas, Rodriguez, and Sharratt. The second Humvee crossed, carrying Mendoza, De La Cruz, and Tatum. The third Humvee was the command vehicle. It crossed, with Wuterich, Graviss, and a medic named Whitt. Somewhere in these vehicles sat the Iraqi soldiers as well.
The fourth Humvee carried the final three Marines. It was a high-back model. At the steering wheel was a veteran of the Fallujah fight, a plump 20-year-old named Miguel Terrazas, from El Paso, Texas, who was one of the most popular soldiers in Kilo Company, known for certain kills he had made, and yet also for his irrepressible good humor. Sitting to his right was another Fallujah veteran, James Crossan, aged 20, from North Bend, Washington. Crossan was frustrated with the mission in Haditha, which he saw as an attempt to play policeman in the midst of an active war. In the open back was Salvador Guzman, aged 19, a first-timer to Iraq, who was known as a typically easygoing Marine. Guzman was from Crystal Lake, Illinois. He faced rearward in the Humvee pointing his weapon over the protective siding, watching the street behind.
As this trio passed unsuspectingly over the buried land mine, a spotter watching from nearby, probably in one of the houses, pushed a button. With a boom that shook the surrounding neighborhood, the device detonated directly under Terrazas in a fireball of violently expanding gases. The blast simultaneously lifted the Humvee and split it in two, separating the top half from the bottom. Guzman was blown clear and landed in the dirt behind the wreckage. He lay there bruised and stunned, with a broken foot but no serious injury. Crossan, in the right front seat, was not so fortunate. He was blown through the right door and then had part of the Humvee fall on him. He lay pinned under the heavy steel, suffering from multiple bone fractures and internal injuries. Others from the squad came running up. He heard someone shouting, "Get some morphine!" and he passed out.
The morphine can only have been meant for Crossan, because Guzman was not so badly hurt, and Terrazas was already beyond such needs. It is a requirement of understanding the events in Haditha—and the circumstances of this war—not to shy away from the physical realities here, or to soften the scene in the interest of politics or taste. Terrazas was torn in half. His bottom half remained under the steering wheel. His top half was blown into the road, where he landed spilling his entrails and organs. He probably did not suffer, at least. He must have lost consciousness instantly and have died soon after hitting the ground. He had a hole in his chin. His eyes were rolled back. He did not look peaceful at all. He looked bloody and grotesque.
Get morphine? No, not for Terrazas. For Wuterich and the nine intact members of the squad, Terrazas's fate was extremely disturbing. They were all of them professional soldiers who had willingly assumed the risk. But just a minute ago Terrazas had been driving home, relaxed and good-humored as usual, and now in a flash he was irretrievably gone. Such is the nature of death in Iraq: you are alive, and the streets seem calm and normal, until suddenly, inevitably, with no warning, you are dead or maimed for the rest of time. With no distant thunder to approach, the loss seems worse for the lack of any ability to prepare.
The wreckage smoked black. The air smelled of cordite, dust, and burned rubber. Wuterich called for backup, and for medical helicopters to evacuate the casualties. He did what a squad leader is supposed to do. A few Marines struggled to free Crossan. After a period of confusion the others crouched with weapons to their shoulders, scanning the nearby rooftops, walls, and windows in the hope of spotting the spotter, and alert to the possibility of further attack. They ordered the Iraqi soldiers to do the same. The Iraqis complied, but somewhat reluctantly, as if perhaps they thought this was not really their fight. In any case, though much remains confused about the immediate aftermath of the attack, and indeed about the hours that followed, what is nearly certain is that at first the squad took no fire. When reinforcements arrived from Sparta Base, after about 10 minutes, one of them was able to kneel gently over Terrazas's remains. He said, "You are my brother by another mother. I love you, man." He covered Terrazas with a poncho, closing him off from sight.
By that time the killing of Iraqis had already begun, though here again uncertainty reigns. From transcripts, conversations, documents, press reports, and above all a sense for the plausible in Iraq, it is possible to reconstruct a lot. Nonetheless, given the complexities of guerrilla war, and the confusion that exists in the minds of those closest to battle, only the barest facts are indisputable. After the land-mine explosion, Wuterich's Marines remained in the immediate vicinity throughout the morning and beyond. Over the next few hours, until maybe around lunchtime, they killed 24 Iraqis. To accomplish the job, they used a few grenades, and maybe a pistol, but primarily their assault rifles. They suffered not a single casualty during this time. Five of the dead were young men who had approached in a car. The remaining 19 were people from the neighborhood, found and killed in the rooms or yards of four family houses, two on the south side of the road, and two on the north. They included nine men, four women, and six children. Many had been sleeping, and were woken by the land-mine blast. Some were shot down in their pajamas. The oldest man was 76. He was blind and decrepit, and sat in a wheelchair. His elderly wife was killed, too. The dead children ranged in age from 15 to 3. They included boys and girls. The Marines later delivered the corpses to the morgue, where they were catalogued by the local coroner. Photographs and videos were taken independently by Americans and Iraqis in the neighborhood and at the morgue. The images showed blood-splattered rooms, as well as victims. The dead did not look peaceful. They looked bloody and grotesque. You are my brother by another mother, you are my daughter by my wife. The dead were buried by angry, grieving crowds.
On the second day, a Marine Corps press officer at the big base downriver in Ramadi issued a wildly misleading statement attributing the civilian deaths to the enemy's I.E.D., as if the families had crowded around the device before it exploded. That statement was later held out to be a deliberate lie, a cover-up, but in fairness it resulted from the isolation of the base, and was more self-delusional than underhanded. The press statement was not seen by Captain McConnell or his men, who had no chance therefore to correct it. Once it was issued, it became an official truth that the Marine Corps, even today, has rigidly refused to retract, despite the fact that within the Corps a more plausible official truth existed almost from the start: the day after the press statement was issued, McConnell visited the battalion headquarters at a dam five miles north of Haditha, where he gave his commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Chessani, a PowerPoint briefing on the action, explaining that some number of civilians had been killed by Wuterich's squad while they suppressed a "complex ambush" that had started with the explosion of the land mine and had continued with an attack by hidden gunmen. Most of the briefing concerned other small firefights that had erupted in Haditha the same day. Chessani authorized the maximum compensation payments of $2,500 to the families for each of the dead who could be certified not to have been insurgents. A Marine major was assigned to do at least that much of an investigation. McConnell's version was passed up the chain of command. McConnell returned to his fight for Haditha.
But one month later a reporter at Time magazine's Baghdad bureau, Tim McGirk, viewed a gruesome video of the aftermath, which suggested that people had been shot and killed inside the houses. Such is the nature of this war, with its routine collateral horrors, that had McGirk been privy to McConnell's report the video might not have surprised him. But with only the press statement about a land mine to go by, it was obvious that something about the official description was very wrong. McGirk's initial queries to the Marine Corps were rebuffed with an e-mail accusing him of buying into insurgent propaganda, and, implicitly, of aiding and abetting the enemy in a time of war. Whoever wrote the e-mail was out of his league. Negative publicity does indeed help the insurgency, but it's the killing of bystanders that really does the trick. Iraq is a small country with large family ties. After three years of war, the locals hardly needed Time to tell them the score. Rather, it was the Americans back home who needed help—any little insight into why the war kept getting worse. McGirk and others in the Baghdad bureau continued with their inquiry, focusing increasingly on the possibility that a massacre and cover-up had occurred. They did not draw conclusions, but laid out what was known and, in mid-March 2006, published the first of several carefully considered accounts.
Knowing that the articles were coming, the Marine Corps had been forced to accept two independent military investigations, one led by an Army general, concentrating on the responsibilities of command, and the other by the criminal investigative branch of the Navy, which focused on reconstructing events on the ground. News from the investigations occasionally emerged, and did not look good for the Marines. Pennsylvania congressman John Murtha, a former Marine and a powerful friend of the Pentagon, stated bluntly that his sources were telling him that a massacre had indeed occurred; he said that there had been no firefight, and that Wuterich's squad had simply gone berserk. Murtha's larger point was that impossible pressure was being placed on U.S. troops, and that they should be withdrawn from a self-destructive war. Following his statements, Haditha became yet another test in a polarized nation, and never mind the details: if you liked President George W. Bush, you believed that no massacre had taken place; if you disliked him, you believed the opposite. As part of the package, Time came in for Internet attacks, hate-filled attempts to find any small discrepancies in its reporting, and, again, never mind the underlying truth.
Amid the vitriol came allegations of other U.S. atrocities in Iraq, some of which turned out to be real. The Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who had enjoyed the strong support of the U.S. government, stated publicly what has long been obvious on the streets—that the abuse of Iraqi civilians by American soldiers is routine. He did not say what is equally obvious—that abuse of Iraqis by Iraqis is even more routine, and that, along with horrors inflicted by Sunni groups, much of the worst is done by Shiite militias, who constitute a significant portion of the government's own forces as Iraq slips into civil war. Al-Maliki vowed to launch his own independent investigation of the Haditha killings—wishful thinking for a government leader forced to hunker down in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone. But tempers were fraying in both Iraq and the United States.
Meanwhile, Kilo Company and the rest of the Third Battalion had returned to California on schedule in the early spring of 2006, and had been greeted with the usual fanfare. But one week later the division's top general relieved Captain McConnell and Lieutenant Colonel Chessani of their commands, stating that he had lost confidence in their abilities to lead. The two officers remained on duty in other roles, though straining against bitterness, and anxious about the future. McConnell hoped that by remaining silent he might prevail, standing against the assault as a Spartan would. Semper fi. Nonetheless, it seems eventually to have dawned on him that his own beloved Corps might not be at his side. Reluctantly, McConnell hired a private defense lawyer, as did Wuterich and others. The naval investigation dragged on, and in midsummer produced a 3,500-page report. The report has not been made public, but apparently suggests that some members of the squad had engaged in murder, and that afterward they and perhaps others had agreed on a narrative to hide the crime. The Marine Corps began to ready charges, and to prepare for military trials and lesser career-ending disciplinary actions. The trials will take place at Pendleton, probably sometime before spring. The penalties may include capital punishment and prison for life. In the most general terms the outcome is already known. A former officer close to McConnell said to me, "The Corps has this reflex when it feels threatened at home. It has a history of eating its young."
II: The Fallujah Legacy
Who among these young should be eaten, and how, are questions that Marine Corps justice will decide. But the story of Haditha is about more than the fate of just a few men, the loss of their friend, or the casualties they inflicted along the Euphrates River one cool November morning. More fully explored, it is about the observable realities of an expanding guerrilla war—about mistakes that have been made and, regrettably, about the inability to fix what is wrong. Those limitations appear to be inherent in the military, and though they certainly have much to do with the reactions and resentments of the least competent soldiers, they also, in a different way, apply to the very best. No matter how sophisticated or subtle our military thinkers may be, ultimately they have use of only this very blunt device—a heavy American force that is simply not up to suppressing a popular rebellion in a foreign land. Despite all the fine words and intentions, the U.S. military turns out to be a tool that is too large and too powerful to be sharpened. Our soldiers collectively did not want this war, and many have come to believe that it cannot be won, but they are not in positions to act on those thoughts, and have no choice but to perform their assignments as their capacities allow.
The starting point of the Haditha killings is early 2004, when the occupation was nearly a year old, and the Marines were brought back to Iraq to take over from the U.S. Army west of Baghdad, in the Sunni strongholds of Anbar Province. Anbar was said to be restive, but it was already dangerous as hell. The Army had blundered there. Soon after the invasion, in April 2003, soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division had gone into the center of Fallujah, where they set up an observation post in a schoolhouse. The best account yet of the consequences, and indeed of the entire war, is contained in the recent book Fiasco, written by Thomas E. Ricks of The Washington Post. Ricks quotes the Army colonel in command, who said, "We came in to show presence just so the average citizen would feel safe." But it didn't work out that way, as it has not worked out for all the iterations of "presence" ever since.
This is an aspect of the war still poorly accepted by the military, and by critics who believe that by sending more troops the U.S. might have done a better job, or could do so today. The view from the street has always been different. Iraq steps aside to let soldiers pass by, and then immediately fills in the void behind them. The soldiers are targets as hapless as any German conscript ever was. Reduced to giving candy to children, and cut off by language and ignorance from the culture around them, they work in such isolation that the potentially positive effects of their presence usually amount to nil. The potentially negative effects, however, are significant. Back in April 2003, the U.S. colonel's average Iraqi citizen might have told him, "You don't know what you don't know, and, sir, you don't know a lot."
The colonel's soldiers had set up the observation post high in the schoolhouse, from which they could see over the tops of garden walls and into family compounds where unveiled women did housework and hung laundry to dry. The soldiers did not understand that this amounted to a violation of the local women, and a serious insult to their men. An angry crowd gathered in front of the school to demand the soldiers' withdrawal. From their positions in the building, the soldiers eyed the demonstrators warily for a while, but then rifle rounds began to hit the walls, fired perhaps from both a rooftop and the street, and the soldiers responded by firing directly into the crowd. Massive response had been the norm during the recent invasion, when the opponents were enemy troops, but times had changed and these were mostly noncombatants on the street. As many as 71 people were wounded, and between 5 and 17 died, depending on the truth of the American or Iraqi versions. The commander of the 82nd Airborne, General Charles Swannack Jr., later claimed that his men's marksmanship had been precise—and indeed so accurate that every one of the casualties (he counted five or six) was an identifiable instigator who deserved what he got. In other words, within the Army there was no question of disciplinary action. But the schoolhouse shootings had given the insurgency a cause, and the guerrilla war had begun.
By the time the Marines arrived in early 2004, nearly two years before the killings in Haditha, the war was out of hand. This was true not just in Anbar but all through central Iraq, where it was obvious that the crude tactics of the Army were failing, and playing into the insurgents' plans. Individual soldiers were brave, but the Army as an institution was averse to risk, and it was making a show of its fear by living on overprotected bases, running patrols only in armored vehicles, and overdoing its responses to the pinprick attacks by the insurgents—arresting far too many men, and answering rifle fire with tanks, rockets, artillery, and air strikes. It became so common to call down precision bombs against even individual suspected insurgents (for instance, someone spotted by drone, walking with a shovel along a road at night) that a new term was coined, based on the physical effects that could sometimes be observed on video. "Pink misting," some soldiers called it, and in their growing frustration they said it with glee.
Excessive force was employed not merely because the weapons were available but also because high technology had led Americans to expect low-casualty wars. Especially in the context of a conflict that had never been adequately explained, the U.S. military for political reasons could not afford any implication that it was squandering its soldiers' lives in Iraq. It is difficult to argue publicly that the military's caution was not a good thing. Strictly in gaming terms, however, there was a problem: by squandering innocent Iraqi lives instead, in order to save American soldiers, the Army in particular was spawning untold numbers of new enemies who would mount more frequent attacks against those same soldiers in the future. This was happening, and fast. The Army was locked into a self-defeating cycle by the very need to keep its casualties down. Meanwhile, the insurgent campaign was expanding in proportion to the number of noncombatants dishonored, brutalized, or killed. It was expanding in proportion to outrage.
Perhaps because of their history in irregular wars, the Marines seem to have a special sense for such cycles of violence. Despite their public image as leathernecks and fighters, they possess a contemplative strain, and their organization, because it is relatively small, is also relatively amenable to change. When they returned to Iraq in 2004, they knew that the fight had grown much trickier than before, and they announced that in Anbar they would demonstrate a new approach to winning the war. They would shed the excess of armor, use military precision rather than power, get out of their vehicles and walk through the towns, knock on doors rather than break them down, and go out of their way to accommodate the Iraqi culture. They would base their tactics on good intelligence. They would not over-react when provoked. They would shoot insurgents, and even enjoy the kills, but they would be careful not to hurt innocent bystanders. They would provide the necessary stability to allow a civil Iraqi society to grow. They would be understood, and they would make friends.
It was to be a textbook counter-insurgency campaign. In abstraction the strategy made sense, and it was the obvious choice—indeed, the only potentially productive one remaining. In practice, however, it quickly encountered an uncooperative Iraq. With its population of 250,000, Fallujah was particularly tough. In addition to all the native insurgents there, it contained foreign fighters from elsewhere in the Middle East, who had arrived to do battle under the banners of God. Within a couple of weeks the Marines were being forced by hostile fire back into their armored vehicles, and were encountering the same frustrations that the Army had, of not speaking Arabic, not having reliable translators, not knowing whose advice to trust, and not being able to distinguish between the enemy and ordinary people on the streets. As for the Iraqis in Anbar, the distinction so dear to the American forces, between the Army and the Marines, meant little to them. The view from the rooftops was that all these guys wore the same stars and stripes, and were crusaders for Zionists and oilmen, if not necessarily for Christ. Recently on Capitol Hill, John Murtha, the congressman and former Marine who has been so vocal about the killings in Haditha, mentioned those early encounters with reality to me. He said, "The Marines came over here to my office and said, 'Jesus, they're shooting at us!' And I said, 'Well, where did you think you were going?'"
The Marines did not formally abandon their strategy, but they saw it torn from their grasp. On March 31, 2004, precisely two years before Captain McConnell and his Kilo Company came home from their momentous tour in Haditha, four American employees of a security firm called Blackwater were ambushed and killed in Fallujah. Their corpses were hacked apart and burned, and two of them were hung from a bridge amid celebrations on the street. Images were beamed around the world. Judging correctly that it could not leave the insult unanswered, the Bush administration, after brief consideration of the options, decided on an all-out assault against the city. That decision continues to stand as one of the worst of the war, ranking only below the decision to disband the Iraqi Army and the initial decision to invade. At the time, for those of us living independently in Iraq outside of the American security zones, and with some sense therefore of the mood on the streets, it demonstrated once again the inability of officials to imagine the trouble that the United States was in, and the astonishing insularity of Washington, D.C.
The Marines knew better. They wanted to respond to the Blackwater ambush by going after the individual killers, and then following through with a well-crafted counter-insurgency campaign to stabilize and mollify the city. But when they were overruled and ordered to do the opposite—to mount an immediate full-frontal offensive—they set aside their theories, and as professional soldiers they dutifully complied. It was a disaster. Backed up by tanks and combat aircraft, the Marines went into Fallujah dealing destruction, and quickly bogged down in house-to-house fighting against a competent and determined foe. To make matters worse, the showcase battalion of the new Iraqi Army mutinied and refused to join the fight. The battle cost several dozen American dead and many more wounded, and did immeasurable damage to the prospects for American success. It turned into a humiliation for the United States when, after four days of struggle, the Marines were ordered by a nervous Washington to withdraw. Again they dutifully complied. Afterward, the jubilant insurgents took full public control of the city, and with the help of the foreign fighters turned it into a fortified haven which U.S. forces did not dare to enter.
To get a feeling for Kilo Company and the killings in Haditha, it is necessary to remember this. After the spring battle was lost, Fallujah became an open challenge to the American presence in Iraq. There were plenty of other challenges, and to speak only of Fallujah is grossly to simplify the war. Still, Fallujah was the most obvious one, and the United States, unless it was to quit and go home, had no choice but to take the city back. Everyone knew it, on all sides, and for months the antagonists prepared. Because of the fortifications and the expectation of active resistance, there was no question this time of a patient counter-insurgency campaign: the Marines were going to have to go in and simply smash the city down. In November of 2004, they did just that, with a force about 10,000 strong. Before attacking they gave the city warning, and allowed an exodus to occur. Nearly the entire population fled, including most of the insurgents, who spread into Baghdad or up the Euphrates to carry on the rebellion, leaving behind, however, a rear guard of perhaps 1,000 gunmen who, exceptionally, wanted to make a stand. This was their mistake. The Marines attacked with high explosives and heavy weapons. Over the 10 days it took to move through Fallujah, and the following weeks of methodical house-to-house clearing, they wrecked the city's infrastructure, damaged or destroyed 20,000 houses or more, and did the same to dozens of schools and mosques. They were not crusaders. They did not Christianize the place. They turned Fallujah into Stalingrad.
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