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
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If you know you’re history you’ll know that the Mongols had an anti-insurgency policy that the people in the middle east got to experience first hand.
This could be a ground level decision to eductate people on the cost of harboring insurgents and/or allowing them to operate in the region. I’m not there so I’m just positing
I won’t say it’s good or bad either, war fighters get close to their team and sometimes someone goes off.. and the rest follow suit.
But usually there’s a good reason for that flare up.
Good Afternoon David,
Lets let the military sourt this out. All of us know that the media is getting it wrong the first time around, ie. PFC Jessica Lynch, Abu Ghraib etc. Before any judgement is made either way lets see what really happened on that patrol.
Having been there myself I know somewhat what went wrong if anythig did. I think it has to be considered that the 3/1 Marines were on there third deployment to Iraq and many of the Marines in that squad had been on all three tours, a good case can be stated for “Combat Fatigue”.
There is only so much that a person can take of combat and then the systems start to close down and things happen that wouldn’t have happened on the first tour.
Soldiers and Marine suffer from being human and they wear out, the answer to keeping up troop levelsin Iraq is not to keep sending the same people back over and over again but to have more men and women so that those who do go and fight don’thave to so often.
If in fact, what is feared happened, I don’t hold those Marines at fault, accountable of course, thats the military way, but the problem is the policies of the DoD and Sec. Rumsfeld who is trying to fight two wars with to few men and women.
ALLONS,
Byron Skinner
> All of us know that the media is
> getting it wrong the first time
> around, ie. PFC Jessica Lynch,
> Abu Ghraib etc.
Let’s be honest here: the media was _deliberately misled_ by both the Administration and military leadership in both the Lynch and Abu Graib situations. The Defense Dept. has admitted to having a group dedicated to planting phony stories in _US_ (not foreign) media, and several so-called “journalists” have been caught doing the same for the Bush Administration.
But the “media” gets the story wrong? Hmmm.
Not
Those people on the other side will attempt to convince the uninformed that whatever happened at Haditha was a common practice, that all our warfighters are war criminals who just haven’t been caught yet, that OIF itself was illegal, yada yada etc., etc. Not much different from what they have being trying to sell all along, but this time they will have more buyers, especially when the pictures are published.
We can’t defend the indefensible, but we can patiently explain, over and over again, even to the willfully obtuse, that Operation Iraqi Freedom is a noble endeavor, that our Marines and soldiers are honorable warriors who do not tolerate dishonorable acts from within their own ranks, and that the evil done by the few does not negate the accomplishments of the proud.
Day 120:
Saw more combat. Took control of key area in the middle of a hostile city. Now on constant watch for retaliation. One member of unit shot by sniper
Day 130:
Have begun patrols at edge of secured area. Two members of unit shot today by snipers, but no one killed. Supply truck on it’s way here was hit by an IED though…have to wait another week for another one.
Day 140:
Gang of Iraqi kids were throwing stones and bottles at us from the street. Dispersed with warning, but they are constantly around. Another unit last week had a passenger car plow through their roadstop and blow up. Three Marines killed.
Day 150:
Were told today to watch for women pushing baby carriages near gates…could be a bomb. Always on edge here.
This is what these guys deal with on a daily basis over there. It becomes very hard to draw a distinction between ‘civilians’ and a person that wants to blow you up. So when something happens to confirm your paranoia, it’s easy to see how the target could become anyone that’s immediately around.
Not to condone what they did, but to shed some light on why it may have happened.
An event like Haditha was in the cards as soon as our country went along with this idiotic desert adventure.
Until someone puts together a chronology of the events of Haditha I’ll wait and see: it’s possible that the women and children were engaging the Americans (this has happened in Mogadishu, sadly enough); though the local’s accounts give no indication of a fire exchange. What probably happened is that someone ran away from the scene of the blast and they assumed that that person was the bomber, gave chase and ended up at the house. How this leads to dead civilians I have yet to figure out…
> f you know you’re history you’ll know that
> the Mongols had an anti-insurgency policy
> that the people in the middle east got to
> experience first hand.
>
> This could be a ground level decision to
> eductate people on the cost of harboring
> insurgents and/or allowing them to operate
> in the region. I’m not there so I’m just
> positing
Yeah, that’ll learn ‘em to get invaded for their own good.
Little problem in logic there (not to mention morals), but not an issue for people who have stated explicitly that they Create Their Own Reality.
Not Really
Good Morning Folks,
I’m in agreement with “Not Really”, in large part the reason the media gets so much wrong about Iraq is that they afre being fed there information by the DoD.
It appears that many, if not most “journalist?”, execpt David and Noah of course, would rather plant there butts in the “Green Zone” and suck up war stories over Diet Cokes from base camp commandos and feed it to the American people on their 30 sec. tape spot on the nightly news as fact.
ALLONS,
Byron Skinner
Well none of the witness accounts mention human shields. Additionally, the accounts mention that the buildings weren’t all shot to hell, the typical indicator of a firefight. Nor was any building blown up by JDAM or SDB, which happens when the insurgents can’t be uprooted from a building. The evidence seems stacked against a sustained firefight.
Whether civilian casualties are caused deliberately (eg by insurgents trying to kick off the civil war) accidentally (eg by airstrikes) or somewhere in between, we all know that their effects will resonate for years to come, and every case like this one makes the war worse.
and the next topic Defense Tech is the Haditha incident of killing of civilians, with happy trigger Defense Tech staffs to protrait soldiers as evils and people at the top of chain of command just days after Memorial Day.
and Ali Khan the coward kafir promoting takfir writes from home without joining the Mujahidin. 17,000 or more Mujahidins that surrendered without fighting to the last blood are happy they still have a life at prison in Iraq. 5,000 other stupid Muslims that took their guns bite the ground. Hey Ali Khan, Falluja is still occupied by Americans, and Taliban are scared that they are hiding in Pakistan. Why are you still sitting in front of your computer and not going to Iraq or Afghanistan to join your friends? LOL! Anyways, Defense Tech, I hope you guys now understand Muslims are watching this site. Everytime you write something, you are risking lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ali Khan…
How do you come to this ingenious conclusion about Americans? Where are you from? If you know anything about the USA, or anything at all for that matter, you know that every country on this Earth has people who are good and civil and peaceful, and also people who are violent and murderous. EVERY COUNTRY. That means Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, UK…and yes, USA. So, before you categorize a HUGE group of people (295,734,134 people in the USA) as “sub human”, you may want to look around you and wake up to reality.
Pedestrian,
Are you proposing that we abandon all journalism because insurgents might be reading? You might as well burn the constitution, hand in your voter registration card and kiss democracy goodbye.
Cheers.
One of the most fundamental principles of a democratic society is that one is innocent until proven guilty. And as someone has already pointed out, the press has a tendency to get it wrong, certainly the first time around. So until the Judge Advocate General is done, I’ll reserve judgement.
Having said that: Yes, it is frustrating, and scary, and stressful and much more, to live day in day out in an environment where you can’t tell friend from foe, where that cute kid waving and smiling at you from the roadside could be waiting for the right moment to toss a grenade into your vehicle, or trigger an IED, where you know that every day, you life or the life of one of your closest friends could end, due to an IED or a sniper.
BUT: THESE FACTS CANNOT AND MUST NOT BE USED TO JUSTIFY OR EXCUSE THE DELIBERATE (OR FOR THAT MATTER ACCIDENTAL) KILLING OF INNOCENTS!
If that was an excuse or a justification, then the people who suddenly go on a killing spree in a mall, at their workplace or at the local highschool, should be just sent home with a sympathetic pat on the head, since they were probably abused as children, had alcoholic parents or whatever, so it’s not their fault, really.
I’m hoping the US military learned something i Vie…Ooops, sorry, almost said the V-word there…and the incident in Haditha turns out to be just enemy propaganda (“If we’re doing it, it’s PR, if they’re doing it, it’s propaganda”). But if not: Prosecute the guilty, both those who gave the order, and those who pulled the triggers.
As such, I remain,
Thomas L. Nielsen
Denmark
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do learn from history are doomed to make new mistakes.
Those who learn only select lessons from history are doomed to do both.
Thomas L. Nielsen
Denmark
Every military massacre could probably be excused or explained away by citing: grueling OPTEMPO, strength of enemy resistance, restiveness among redeployed units, fear and anger toward native populations, or even confusion in the ranks. Using these criteria, the Massacre at Malmedy could (and has) been characterized as a mistake by follow on units! Face it, the vast majority of our armed forces would never conduct themselves in this manner. But the reluctance to criticize those who do is both a slur on the character of 99.99% of our troops as well as a sign of malignant brain rot brought on (I suppose) by Faux-Patriotitis. Call a spade a spade, isn’t that what we claim Americans are so good at?