On November 19, Marines from Kilo Co., 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines were patrolling the town of Haditha in west­ern Iraq when a road­side bomb exploded. Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, 20, was killed.
“Everybody agrees agrees that this was the trig­ger­ing event,” lawyer Paul Hackett told The Washington Post. “The ques­tion is, what hap­pened after­ward?“
The Marine Corps reported that one Marine and 15 civil­ians were killed in the bomb­ing. The Post and The New York Times quote wit­nesses say­ing that only Terrazas died in the bomb­ing, and that enraged Marines stormed sev­eral houses and killed as many as two dozen inno­cent Iraqi civil­ians in retal­i­a­tion. Sen. John Warner (R-​​Vir.), chair­man of the Armed Services Committee, which is inves­ti­gat­ing the inci­dent, insists there was no cover-​​up.
I don’t know what hap­pened in Haditha that day. But I do know this: the U.S. Marine Corps trains its peo­ple to respect rules of engage­ment and to pro­tect inno­cent lives on the bat­tle­field.
“In a counter-​​insurgency, you don’t have a clear delin­eation of bound­aries [between civil­ians and com­bat­ants], so the rules of engage­ment and the esca­la­tion of force a Marine needs to take … we’re empha­siz­ing those more,” Lt. Col. Tracy Tafolla, head of Marine Air-​​Ground Task Force Training Branch, U.S. Marine Corps Training and Education Command, told me recently. He con­tin­ued:
One of our most impor­tant lessons is [regard­ing] cul­tural train­ing. We’ve incor­po­rated [cul­tural] train­ing across our train­ing con­tin­uum. Marines are receiv­ing that all the way from the School of Infantry to service-​​level exer­cises, to the point where we have Arabic-​​speakers as role-​​players [in exer­cises], giv­ing us good feed­back. The role-​​players responses to the Marines and their actions — that is some­thing that we’ve tried to make sure our Marines under­stand. Something we as Marines don’t think twice about may be an offense to peo­ple over there [in Iraq]. We try to make sure we treat Iraqis fairly and with respect. We don’t want to do any­thing to dis­re­spect those who might be friendly to us. You must under­stand who you’re deal­ing with, what are their ways. You keep those who are friendly, friendly.
There has been no resis­tance to the train­ing. As a mat­ter of fact, the infor­ma­tion we get back [from Marines] is good. If we’re miss­ing the mark, its crit­i­cal that the Marines tell us what we need to do. Across the board, Marines are glad to get the train­ing.

Maj. Gen. Keith Stalder, chief of Training and Education Command chimed in too:
How to get along with the civil­ian pop­u­la­tion is at the core of [our cul­tural train­ing]. Marines get enough lan­guage train­ing to be con­ver­sa­tional, to be polite, sen­si­tive and in fact to oper­ate in a more coher­ent way in an insur­gency envi­ron­ment. We stress the cul­tural inter­ac­tion. We use what we call vignettes where we chal­lenge units to react prop­erly given a very very chal­leng­ing prob­lem.
Consider Haditha the most chal­leng­ing prob­lem ever. You’ve just been blown up. Your buddy is dead. You’re angry. You feel vul­ner­a­ble. You have great power at the end of your trig­ger fin­ger, power to lash out, pun­ish some­one — any­one — for the pain you’ve suf­fered.
What do you do?
What do you do?
These Haditha alle­ga­tions have the poten­tial to cause great harm to the U.S. war effort and to the U.S. Marine Corps. We should not shrug from the truth. Nor should we for­get that a few bad Marines do not rep­re­sent the entire Marine Corps or the entire U.S. mil­i­tary.
I’ll be cov­er­ing Haditha for Military​.com. Anyone with any tips or thoughts on the sub­ject, please email me ASAP.
–David Axe