Probing Bloodbath

THE MARINES KNOW HOW TO GET PSYCHED UP FOR a big fight. In November 2004, before the Battle of Fallujah, the Third Battalion, First Marines, better known as the "3/1" or "Thundering Third," held a chariot race. Horses had been confiscated from suspected insurgents, and charioteers were urged to go all-out. The men of Kilo Company--honored to be first into the city on the day of the battle--wore togas and cardboard helmets, and hoisted a shield emblazoned with a large K. As speakers blasted a heavy-metal song, "Cum On Feel the Noize," the warriors of Kilo Company carried a home-made mace, and a ball-and-chain studded with M-16 bullets. A company captain intoned a line from a scene in the movie "Gladiator," in which the Romans prepare to slaughter the barbarians: "What you do here echoes in eternity."

Fallujah was a vicious battle. The 3/1 lost 17 men in 10 days, fighting house to house. But the Marines were prepared. They had been taught to tie a rope to a wounded man to pull him to safety and to lay down a murderous blanket of covering fire. They expected their foe to resort to ruses, like dressing as women and using human shields. But the men of the Thundering Third had been given liberal rules of engagement to make sure people who looked like civilians didn't trigger hidden roadside bombs. "If you see someone with a cell phone," said one of the commanders, half-jokingly, "put a bullet in their f---ing head." During the battle, a TV camera crew photographed a Marine shooting a wounded, unarmed man. The Marine was later exonerated.

Fallujah was another victory for a Marine battalion with a bloody, valorous history--Guadalcanal, Okinawa, Inchon, Cho-sin Reservoir, Hué City. But Haditha, that was different. In the fall of 2005, when Kilo Company arrived in the flyblown city in Anbar province, three hours from Baghdad, up where the jihadists slipped across the Syrian border, the young Marines were worn out. This was their third tour in Iraq in three years, but they were not quite sure what to expect. The place was alien, sinister. The local jihadists were said to chop off the head of anyone found cooperating with the Americans. The Marines found scores of unexploded IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, but the insurgents seemed to have slipped away--or maybe they'd just gone behind closed doors, or blended into the population. Some of the locals seemed friendly enough, bringing them soft drinks and sweets and even helping them find the bombs. But could they really be trusted? And why didn't anyone warn them about those 155mm artillery shells wired to a telephone, found along the road in mid-November?

The Marine grunts of Kilo Company had been trained to kill, not to practice "counterinsurgency," whatever that meant. Not that their leaders were much better informed. Neither the Army nor the Marines had a counterinsurgency doctrine when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, and since then soldiers and Marines had received at best patchwork training in the subtle arts of winning hearts and minds. (Indeed, only now, in the late spring of 2006, when the Iraq war has been spluttering along for almost as long as the time it took America to win World War II, is the military finalizing a draft of a manual on counterinsurgency.) Haditha, quiet but menacing for the first several weeks after Kilo Company arrived, is far more the norm in Iraq than the full-scale, all-out fighting of Fallujah. In Haditha, the Marines of Kilo Company sometimes handed out candy to kids but mostly patrolled about in Humvees, making some kind of show of force, presumably, but really just offering themselves as targets.

It is not clear exactly what happened in Haditha on the morning of Nov. 19. One Marine and 24 Iraqis died, that much is certain. Local survivors say Americans on a rampage massacred their neighbors in cold blood. The videotaped eyewitness accounts provided to NEWSWEEK and other news organizations are horrifying, hard to believe in their sordidness and brutality. The Marines at first said 15 civilians, along with Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, 20, had been killed by an IED, and that the rest died in a shoot-out with insurgents. But the official story changed, in part because of a Time magazine exposé in March. Now, according to congressmen who have been briefed by the Pentagon, the military is investigating Kilo Company for possible war crimes. Investigators have seen grisly photographs and are pursuing allegations of a cover-up. Ominously, there are also reports of atrocities in other places, committed by young soldiers who cracked under the pressure of a war fought on a battlefield with no front lines, no easy way to tell civilians from insurgents, and no end in sight.

In Vietnam, when the doleful news came home of burned villages and slaughtered civilians, many Americans blamed the military. Vets came home to be spat upon and called "baby killers." Americans have learned from their disgraceful behavior back then, and generally honor today's Marines, soldiers, sailors and airmen. But increasingly, they blame their leaders for putting young men and women into situations they were not trained or equipped to handle. As more accounts of civilian killings come to light, the pressure is likely to grow on the Bush administration to bring home the troops, not just to save their lives, but to rescue their honor and decency.