Probing Bloodbath

But Lucian Read, a freelance photographer who spent seven months with Kilo Company, both in Fallujah and Haditha, did not see warning signs. "Their morale wasn't bad, it was more fatalistic; this is the grunts-get-screwed-every-time," he said. "They were not happy, not pleased, but not angry, either," Read said. "Nothing they ever did or said even hinted at this kind of event. I never saw it coming. No one saw it coming."

When marines of the Thundering Third returned home to Pendleton this past winter, they were given sensitivity training and told to stop using some of their more- offensive call signs, like "Slayer" and "Killer." They were also admonished against the usual growling retorts of a Marine grunt, a kind of "rrrrr" sound. "Everyone was wondering, 'Why this soft stuff?' " says the wife of the 3/1 staff sergeant. Since the Haditha scandal broke, however, all Marines--not just the ones in the 3/1--are being required to spend more time learning "core values."

What the Marines and all the U.S. soldiers in Iraq really need is better training in counterinsurgency. After losing a guerrilla war in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and early '70s, the Pentagon inexplicably chose not to learn from its mistakes, but rather focused on more-conventional warfare, which favored American technology. Guerrilla fighting was left to Special Forces, the "snake eaters" disdained by most regular Army and Marine commanders. When General Casey took over as commander of U.S. and Coalition forces in Iraq two years ago, he told his staff to set up a meeting with his HQ's counterinsurgency expert. He was told there wasn't one.

That story is told in an essay called "Fire the Generals!" written by retired Col. Douglas MacGregor, who was one of the architects of the original lean-and-mean invasion of Iraq. The initial, sudden and overwhelming rout of Saddam's rotten Army gave the military a false sense of superiority. Some at the top knew the victory was hollow. As the insurgency began to take shape, the then acting chief of staff of the Army, Gen. Jack Keane, warned his fellow chiefs, "The United States Army does big wars. We do them better than anyone. But we have no skills in counterinsurgency."

In July 2003, Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of all U.S. forces in the region, acknowledged that the United States faced a "classic guerrilla-type campaign." But MacGregor points out that Abizaid did nothing to alter American deployments or tactics. Rather, he exhorted everyone to turn over responsibility to the Iraqis--who had no military or police force worth mentioning. The Joint Staff was extremely slow to provide the training teams needed to build a new Iraqi Army.

MacGregor also faulted U.S. generals for not accompanying platoon and squad leaders as they patrolled--to better understand their environment and what they needed to survive in it. Had the generals done so, writes MacGregor, they would have known what a sergeant on patrol in Ramadi meant when he told a journalist, "You can have my job. It's easy. You just have to drive around all day and wait for someone to bomb you. Thing is, you have to hate Arabs."