Probing Bloodbath

Left to their own devices, grunts sometimes improvise. It is possible that Kilo Company was determined to "leave a calling card," which is to say, to warn Haditha that IEDs would be met with heavy retribution. It's an old and primitive counter-insurgency tactic. Long ago, the Romans used it against barbarians.

With Sarah Childress in Baghdad, Salih Mahdi in Haditha, John Barry, Dan Ephron and Michael Hirsh in Washington, Michael Hastings in New York, Jamie Reno in San Diego, Rod Nordland in London, Stefan Theil in Berlin and Babak Dehghanpisheh in Beirut

© 2006