Bring out the Violins: Marines Defend Why Haditha Massacre

Combat stress takes a toll


Sgt. Juan Morales lays down a barrage of gunfire to cover his fellow Marines during a firefight in Ramadi, Iraq, in May. Photo by Samuel C. Peterson, U.S. Navy

As the 1st Marine Division moved across the desert into Iraq on March 19, 2003, each of the 25,000 leathernecks got a letter from their commander.

Although Maj. Gen. James Mattis was known as a tough, blunt warrior - he'd later say at a panel discussion in San Diego that "it's fun to shoot some people" - he told his troops to treat civilian non-combatants with "chivalry and soldierly compassion."

"Engage your brain," he instructed, "before you engage your weapon."

If only it were that easy.

Three years later, the Marines face an allegation that, if proved, would constitute one of the worst scandals in their history: that members of a squad killed as many as two dozen civilians last year in the city of Haditha in retaliation for a roadside bombing that killed one Marine. The military is still investigating the Haditha case and the possibility of a coverup. There are two contrasting, if not contradictory, versions of what happened Nov. 19 in the city on the Euphrates River in rebellious Anbar province.

Iraqi civilians have described a massacre in which a squad of angry Marines - from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines - deliberately killed innocent, unarmed civilians, some of them children and some of them elderly.

Lawyers for several Marines under suspicion say the killings were justifiable under rules of engagement that allow Marines to storm buildings apparently occupied by insurgents.

Considering the situation in Iraq - 140,000 U.S. troops engaged for three years in a fight against a relentless, faceless, ruthless guerrilla insurgency - military experts say the question is not whether such a violent encounter between troops and civilians can happen, but when.

"If you have so many people with so much power under so much stress, something's going to happen," says Maj. Peter Kilner, an infantry officer who teaches military ethics at West Point. "You can have a good war, and bad things are still going to happen."

Charles Figley, a Florida State University psychologist who has surveyed Vietnam War veterans about war crimes, says the only thing that surprised him about the Haditha reports was "that anyone was surprised. This is what happens in war."

Particularly when it's fought in what Marine Cpl. Michael Compton, writing by e-mail from Ramadi, calls "the most dangerous place in the world. ... The threat is all around you."

As a result, says Mike Harmon, an Army medic who served in Iraq, "There's a lot of little things that are never reported, like civilians getting slapped around, sticking rifles in their faces. Some people get off on that kind of power."

Regardless of the pressures American troops face, President Bush made it clear Wednesday that no quick end to U.S. involvement is likely. "If we stand down too soon, it won't enable us to achieve our objectives," the president said one day after a surprise trip to Iraq. Bush also said that any expectation of "zero violence" in Iraq was unreasonable. "That's not going to happen," he added.

Kilner says that no matter what happened at Haditha, U.S. troops in Iraq are the best trained and most humane ever fielded by a major power.

It's a point of pride among men like 2nd Lt. John Warren, a Marine serving in Ramadi: "My unit has been in what is referred to as 'the worst city in Iraq' for three months. They have been in countless combat engagements and have yet to receive a day off. Even in these conditions, I have yet to see one Marine come close to snapping."

Some observations differ.

"I have seen the best of friends fight, and even draw knives on each other, when you know that they don't really mean it," says Compton, the Marine corporal. "It's just the high stress of being in a place where people are trying to kill you every day."

Marine Lance Cpl. Mike Young restates the issue: "Do we come close to snapping? In our own little personal life we've built within the confines of our bases, yes. The key is, turn off all of those feelings and hostilities when you gear up and head out the door on patrol."

Marines are trained to deal with combat stress before they snap and turn on civilians. But Compton says "there really is no way of training for it. This is a fight for your life. Your body will compensate accordingly by making you more alert, edgy, and particularly short-tempered than you have ever been."

Fear 'you could be next'
Iraq has been a particularly stressful war for American troops. The insurgents wage a vicious urban guerrilla war with no lines and no rules. A cellphone can be a weapon. A child can be a lookout. Air support is of little or no use. The enemy hides in sacred buildings, uses civilians as shields and occasionally commits suicide to kill Americans.

"The threat is all around you," Compton says. "It could be one of the hundreds of windows facing your direction. ... Every window, every piece of trash, every person that looks at you twice, is a possible threat."

Even being on base doesn't guarantee safety. In December 2004, a suicide bomber slipped into the mess tent at a U.S. base in Mosul and blew himself up, killing 14 U.S. servicemen and four contractors.

As a result, soldiers are under constant stress - "always on your toes, 24/7," says Harmon, the medic. "You're eating dinner and there's an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) overhead. You're sleeping with mortars going off in the background. There's the constant fear you could be next."

The anxiety is compounded by frustration. "A Marine may go a week or more without ever seeing an actual insurgent," Warren says. "They may get hit with an IED or shot at by a sniper, but even this does not guarantee them a chance for a face-to-face with their assailant. The insurgents simply refuse to come out to play."

One result is an odd nostalgia for "conventional war," even though that included such hells-on-earth as the battle of Okinawa, where in 1945 the United States lost five times as many fighters in 2½ months as it has in Iraq in more than three years.

"In conventional war you have a uniformed enemy, and they fight head on," Compton says. "There is no question about who to kill and who is innocent. The choice is clear, and the fog of war is not nearly as thick."

Kilner, the West Point instructor, understands. "It was more comforting when you could say, 'See that tree line? That's the Germans.' It's the randomness of death in Iraq that's so hard to take."

The chivalry to which Mattis referred in 2003 requires appreciative or at least cooperative recipients. U.S. troops, however, are increasingly estranged from what they view as an apathetic or hostile Iraqi citizenry.

The enemy could be anyone. The translator could be a spy, the base food vendor could be marking off mortar measurements. "You hear it all the time," Kilner says. "You don't know who you can trust."

Insurgent hotbeds - like one near the city of Baqouba that Harmon's unit called "RPG Alley" - are the worst. "The kids were OK, but the adults were two-faced," Harmon says. "They'd say 'We love the U.S.,' and later they'd throw rocks at us."

He was at a checkpoint when an Iraqi woman got out of a car and pulled a gun from under her clothing. "They put her down," he says of the Army machine gunners. "After that you think, 'Anything's possible.'

" The mistrust is the result of civilian casualties, resentment of outside occupiers, the isolation of U.S. troops on their bases. Above all, it's the result of insurgents trying to drive a wedge between the Iraqis and their would-be liberators. The insurgents dress like, and hide among, civilians. When attacked, the Americans usually err on the side of protecting Americans.

'Don't trust these Hajis' "We engage enemy fire with overwhelming force," says Geoffrey Millard, a sergeant in the Army National Guard who finished an Iraq tour last year. "If you take fire, the procedure is to use the .50 caliber (machine gun) to lay down suppressive fire in the direction the shots came from. It puts soldiers in an impossible position, because if you don't fire back, you're asking to be fired on again."

He adds: "There's a dehumanizing factor. The Iraqis are called Hajis (by U.S. forces), as in 'Don't trust these Hajis.' Usually the f-word precedes it."

Other factors add to the stress:

• The tours pile up. In Vietnam, most soldiers served only one tour. In Iraq, many already have served two or three. The 3rd Marine battalion, whose men were at Haditha, is on its third tour in as many years (although not all its members are).

"Some of the guys have to go three times, and that gets them down," says Cpl. Dmitry Barkon, a scout sniper who has served in Iraq twice and is now at the Marine base at Twentynine Palms, Calif.

"People say, 'We want to go back,' but that kind of service can be psychologically debilitating," leaving troops more jaded, says Aine Donovan, who taught ethics at the Naval Academy for five years.

If they have killed in combat, Kilner wrote in a research paper last year, soldiers are even more likely to suffer from stress-related symptoms such as violent outbursts, nightmares and alcohol abuse.

"The bigwigs are stretching these guys," Harmon says. After several tours, some soldiers "get desensitized to other people. You just don't care."

Repeated absences lead to problems at home, he says. "Your mind is not on the mission. That can get you killed."

• 
  A brutal climate. Iraq is hot, dry and dusty enough to make some long for Vietnam.

"I can't say it's worse than Vietnam - I wasn't there," Millard says. "But it has all the negatives of Vietnam, plus some more. If you've never been in a desert sandstorm, you don't know bad weather or bad terrain."

• The allure of drugs. Mike Young, the lance corporal, says he deals with the stress of Iraq by strumming a beat-up guitar, working out at the gym and "smoking a lot of Newports."

Others cope by using drugs, Millard says. Part of the problem is boredom. "In Vietnam, you could at least go to Saigon and have a beer," he says. "In Iraq, the Americans don't leave the base unless they're on a mission."

Millard says some troops use amphetamines to keep alert. "Imagine driving around on patrol for 24 hours in 130 degree heat with no air conditioning."

• A dual mission: soldiers or cops? In a counterinsurgency, soldiers must act as police and warriors. Most Marines are trained as the latter.

Balancing those two roles is stressful.

"The complexity of the battlefield is incredibly difficult," Kilner says. "One part of the patrol will be involved in high-intensity fighting while another part is still handing out soccer balls."

Take a sniper. Soldiers go after him and try to kill him. Police, on the other hand, are most concerned about protecting civilians and will wait the sniper out if that's safest. Kilner says, "The Iraqis now expect us to act more like police."

• The objective seems like a mirage. Once a war's goal seems unclear or unreachable, morale sinks and stress rises.

"What makes being a soldier great is the nobility of it - good fighting evil," Kilner says. "If you lose that, all this sacrifice is for no good reason."

Kilner, who organizes online discussion forums for Army field officers, says he recently got an e-mail from an airborne unit commander who said he feared "some of our soldiers are marking time until that inevitable IED or sniper round finds them."

In Ramadi, Compton feels the Marines are fighting "a largely defensive battle, causing us to react rather than act."

Warren says it's difficult to measure progress in the war without yardsticks like territory seized or enemy soldiers killed.

"Soldiers need to see progress," Kilner says. "They can put up with anything if they can see progress."

In the absence of purpose or progress, according to Florida State's Figley, the unit focuses not on its mission but its own preservation - because "no one cares except my buddies."

When one of those buddies is lost - as happened in Kilo Company - the reaction can be extreme and irrational, he says.

By Kimberly Johnson and Rick Hampson, USA TODAY Hampson reported from New York. Contributing: Erica Solvig of The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, Calif. -2006