The General Court Martial of U.S. Marine Corps Staff Sergeant Frank D. Wuterich became a certainty on November 20, 2005, one day after his squad lost one Marine and killed 24 Iraqis before passing the score of their bloody encounter up the chain of command.
At first glance the events at an obscure place called Haditha, Iraq seemed routine enough. If noticed at all, the blossoming debacle was just another soul-numbing calamity among the hundreds of random tragedies unfolding across the shattering region every week during the second year of the war.
The day after the November 19 skirmish, a routine Marine Corps press release from Camp Blue Diamond in Ramadi reported one Marine and 15 Iraqi civilians were killed by the IED blast. The Marine Corps’ colorless account noted that “gunmen attacked the convoy with small-arms fire.” When the shooting ended, the announcement said, eight insurgents were dead and a wounded insurgent was captured.
The report was written by 2nd Marine Division Public Affairs Officer Captain Jeffrey Pool, a career Marine officer responsible for briefing the vociferous press in al Anbar Province. In November 2005 Al Anbar was the hot ticket in Iraq for determined reporters, the place where they could make a name for themselves dancing briefly with the terrible danger the Marines faced every day. Pool was there to accommodate them.
Regrettably, Pool’s account was erroneous. Worse, he knew it at the time. Capt. Pool later claimed he released the inaccurate report because he believed the civilian deaths were attributable to the roadside bombing because “it led the Marines to counter-attack the hidden insurgents” who set it off.
It was not Pool’s personal opinion. When the Marine Corps wants captains to have a public opinion they tell them what it is. That’s what happened to Pool. A colonel named Richard A Sokoloski told him to write it. Not only was he a colonel, Sokoloski was Chief of Staff of the 2nd Marine Division and Pool’s boss. In any event, Pool’s innocuous report wasn’t considered by anyone except the dead to be earthshaking news.
The Marine who died was 20-year old LCpl Miguel Terrazas, the son of a retired Army staff sergeant. At the time, nobody up the chain knew his name, they just knew a faceless Marine was dead. Three months after the IED killed Terrazas a second bomb was remotely detonated by Time magazine from its Baghdad bureau. Time claimed the Iraqi citizens who died at Haditha were massacred, the victims of Marine vengeance. The magazine’s explosive account unleashed a monster that threatened the soul of the Corps.
It was written by Tim McGirk, a particularly resourceful and ambitious Time reporter who claimed the Iraqis were gunned down by merciless Marines gone berserk. Regrettably, like Capt. Pool, McGirk also got it wrong, remarkably wrong, but for different reasons. He was never there.
Before the Marine Corps could make his specious account right it was too late. To steal a time-worn phrase, the Marines had landed, but the situation was entirely out of hand. What happened in that brief encounter is what this story is all about. It did not happen in a vacuum.
Wuterich’s court martial has a large number of principle players. Of course there is Frank and his three little girls, and his defense attorneys: Neal Puckett, Haytham Faraj and Maj. Meridith Marshall. All three are Marine lawyers although Puckett and Faraj are retired now. Then there is the military judge, LtCol David Jones, an even tempered man with a friendly demeanor and a reputation for being hard as steel. The prosecution is led by Maj. Nicholas Gannon, a younger man, and LtCol Sean Sullivan, a fiery Chicago Irishman who has mellowed some in the four years he has been struggling for a conviction.
Seven other defendants, including three who have already testified, have been exonerated. The youngest is Justin Sharratt, a baby-faced kid when all this started. He killed three armed Iraqis in a room smaller than a lot of bathrooms with his pistol.
[snip]
Retired U.S. Marine Corps Sergeant Major Edward T. Sax landed several heavy blows on the government’s battered and bruised case against Haditha defendant SSgt Frank D. Wuterich Tuesday afternoon.
“Wuterich was a great Marine,” he told the eight member panel of officers and senior non-commissioned officers intently watching the exchange between Sax and defense attorney Haytham Faraj.
Sax, considered by both the officers and man of the Thundering Third to be a Marine’s Marine, told the panel of officers and senior non-commissioned officers that Wuterich’s decimated squad did it right when they blasted through two civilian houses where 14 Iraqi civilians died after being ambushed at Haditha more than six years ago.
Initially, chief prosecutor Maj. Nicholas Gannon compelled Sax to explain the vast differences between the vicious, no-holds barred month long battle at Fallujah in 2004 and the situation in Haditha almost a year later.
“What we did at Fallujah was something we never did again. There they are… go kill them,” he said. “Haditha was not Fallujah. Those conversations got emphasized before we got sent to regain control of Haditha. This was not going to be Fallujah. We are not pounding them down with artillery.”
“If I haven’t received fire I am not going to use hand grenades. We’d clear in a little different way. Taking fire from a structure in part dictates how you are going to clear that structure.”
“If I thought I received fire I am now going to use hand grenades,” Sax told Maj. Gannon, who then asked him what was the correct procedure for clearing a house where civilians might be hiding after receiving fire.
“I’m going to frag the room before I go in it. It was taught right at MOUT training. If I’m receiving fire, I’ve got to assume the house is hostile… if I send Marines in there they are going to get shot.”
Later in his testimony, Sax got down to cases when talking about what happened on November 19, 2005 when one Kilo, 3/1 Marine was killed and two more seriously wounded by a remotely detonated roadside bomb that signaled the attack on a stunned squad of riflemen trying to take cover on a hard surfaced road that didn’t offer any.
“On November 19, Haditha was more like Fallujah?” Faraj asked during his cross-examination.
“Yes, I think it was,” Sax replied.
It’s never a good idea to falsify documents, of course. But, the real criminals, aside from the vermin who attacked the Marines, are the politicians who’ve so tied their hands with the current rules of engagement.
@JustAl:
The particular mechanism of “tying ones hands” is not just limited to the battlefield, but the stakes there are usually higher than anywhere else. I seriously dislike the micro-manager types, whether military or civilian, who not only tell their subordinates WHAT they want done, but HOW to do it, ofttimes without knowing how it SHOULD be done. What results, in most cases, is that the job gets botched, and in many of those cases, the HOW that the managers set forth for their subordinates is the reason why. It happens because it does, as you say, “tie one’s hands” in getting a job done.
I much prefer the manager who trusts his subordinates to know what they are doing, and only tells them WHAT he/she wants done. If the manager has surrounded himself/herself with good people, the job gets completed the way it should, and the flexibility of the HOW a job gets done allows those subordinates to succeed either satisfactorily, or exemplary.
In the case above, and concerning our military, they get limited on the HOW by someone, usually who has never seen actual combat, and bad things happen. Micro-managers. I hate em’.