Rules of Engagement

On November 19, 2005, in Haditha, during Kilo Company's third tour of duty in Iraq, a land mine planted by insurgents exploded beneath a Humvee, killing a 20-year-old Marine. What happened next—the slaughter of 24 Iraqi men, women, and children—was not entirely an aberration. These actions were rooted in the very conduct of the war.

I: One Morning in November

The Euphrates is a peaceful river. It meanders silently through the desert province of Anbar like a ribbon of life, flanked by the greenery that grows along its banks, sustaining palm groves and farms, and a string of well-watered cities and towns. Fallujah, Ramadi, Hit, Haditha. These are among the places made famous by battle—conservative, once quiet communities where American power has been checked, and where despite all the narrow measures of military success the Sunni insurgency continues to grow. On that short list, Haditha is the smallest and farthest upstream. It extends along the Euphrates' western bank with a population of about 50,000, in a disarray of dusty streets and individual houses, many with walled gardens in which private jungles grow. It has a market, mosques, schools, and a hospital with a morgue. Snipers permitting, you can walk it top to bottom in less than an hour, allowing time enough to stone the dogs. Before the American invasion, it was known as an idyllic spot, where families came from as far away as Baghdad to while away their summers splashing in the river and sipping tea in the shade of trees. No longer, of course. Now, all through Anbar, and indeed the Middle East, Haditha is known as a city of death, or more simply as a name, a war cry against the United States.

November 19, 2005, is the date people remember. Near the center of Haditha the U.S. Marines had established a forward operating base they called Sparta. It was manned by the roughly 200 Marines of Kilo Company of the Third Battalion, First Marine Division, out of Camp Pendleton, California. This was Kilo Company's third tour in Iraq. It had participated in the invasion, in the spring of 2003, and again in the hard-fought battle for Fallujah in the fall of 2004. Because of normal rotations, however, only about two-thirds of its current members had been to Iraq before. The average age was 21. The company commander was a captain, an Annapolis graduate named Lucas McConnell, who was 32 and, like all but one of his lieutenants, was on his first tour at war. McConnell was a can-do guy, more of a believer than a thinker, disciplined, moderately religious, somewhat moralistic, and deeply invested in his beloved Marine Corps.

Winter was coming. At dawn Haditha was cool and clear. McConnell dispatched a convoy of four armored Humvees on a routine mission to deliver hot breakfasts and a radio-coding card to an observation post, a fortified checkpoint about three miles away, on River Road south of town. Some of the Humvees were equipped with top-mounted machine guns; two were "high-back" vehicles with open rear beds like those of pickup trucks, designed to carry troops and supplies, and wrapped in high protective siding. Between them the four Humvees held a squad of 12 heavily armed Marines, which was considered to be the minimum desirable force even for such a milk run as this. The men carried grenades, 9-mm. pistols, and variations of the basic assault rifle, the M16. They were led by a sergeant named Frank Wuterich, aged 25, who of all the sergeants of Kilo Company was known to be the most unassuming and considerate, the slowest to anger. He was another first-timer at war.

They rolled south toward the outpost, rattling through sleeping neighborhoods in single file, spaced well apart. Any insurgents watching them from the houses—and there likely were some—would have perceived the men behind the top-mounted guns as robotic figures swaddled in protective armor and cloth, and would barely have glimpsed the others through the small panes of thick, dusty, bulletproof glass, or above the armored high-back sides. Over the years on the streets of Iraq, living outside the American protective bubbles, I have often imagined that killing Americans is easier for their anonymity, because it allows insurgents to take on the machines or the uniforms without dwelling on the individuals inside. This was the experience of Resistance fighters when slaughtering hapless German conscripts during World War II in France, and presumably also of the mujahideen when killing Russians in Afghanistan. But the men on the receiving end of an attack have a different view of the effects. They know one another as individuals and friends. Even the newcomers to Kilo Company, for instance, had spent at least six months together already, and had grown so close that they could identify one another on sight, from behind, when all geared up and walking on patrols at night.

It was a 15-minute drive from Sparta Base to the outpost south of town. Sergeant Wuterich's squad unloaded the hot breakfasts and other supplies, and picked up several Iraqi soldiers from the apprentice Iraqi Army—trainees attached to the company, who lived in their own compound adjoining that of the Marines. The Iraqis were armed with the ubiquitous Iraqi weapon, the banana-clip, Russian-designed AK-47. After a brief delay the squad headed up River Road for Sparta Base. It is possible to judge the mood. Because the conflict in Iraq is a guerrilla war without progressive front lines, and American combat troops operate from immobile forts with fixed zones of responsibility, most patrols consist of predictable out-and-returns. The pattern is well known to the insurgents. Routes can be varied, but the choices typically are limited, especially if the patrols must stick to the roads and the distances are short. As a result, one of the basic facts of life for those troops who are actually in the fight is that the return to base is the most dangerous trip in Iraq: if the mujahideen are going to hit you at all, the chances are they'll hit you then. Nonetheless, for individual soldiers even in places as threatening as Haditha, most days are quiet, and weeks can go by with little sign of the enemy. There is no reason to believe that Wuterich's men were pumped up for the drive home. Were they alert? Sure, why not, but another fact of life is that you cannot see much out of an armored Humvee, and even if you could, you have no chance of identifying the enemy until first you come under attack. You've got all these weapons, and you've been told that you're a mighty warrior, a Spartan, but what are you going to shoot—the dogs? You're a Marine without a beach. So you sit zipped into a filthy Humvee, trusting the guys up on the guns to watch the rooftops and the traffic on the road, trusting your driver to keep his eyes on the ground ahead, holding your M16 muzzle-up between your knees, calmly enduring the ride. The radio crackles. Your head bobs with the bumps. You don't talk much. There's not much to say. If you're dumb you trust your luck. If you're smart you're fatalistic. Either way it usually works out fine.

They turned west off River Road, onto a street known to them as Route Chestnut—a wide thoroughfare running through a district of clustered houses. It was 7:15 in the morning. Up ahead and unbeknownst to them, insurgents had planted a land mine, probably weeks before. In the bureaucratized language of this war, such mines are known as improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s. The ordinary ones are made from small artillery rounds, and rigged to detonate upon reception of an electronic signal from a short-range line-of-sight transmitter—a cordless telephone, a garage-door opener, a toy-car remote control. The insurgents of Haditha produced plenty of them; Kilo Company had discovered dozens in the previous weeks, and in the following weeks would discover many more. Most had been laid hastily and were poorly tucked into soft dirt or trash beside the roads, sometimes with wires showing. But the land mine this morning was different. It was a sizable propane tank stuffed with high explosives. More important, it had been buried directly in the road, and so lovingly paved over that apparently no surface disturbance was visible. The first Humvee rolled across it without incident. On board were three Marines, named Salinas, Rodriguez, and Sharratt. The second Humvee crossed, carrying Mendoza, De La Cruz, and Tatum. The third Humvee was the command vehicle. It crossed, with Wuterich, Graviss, and a medic named Whitt. Somewhere in these vehicles sat the Iraqi soldiers as well.

The fourth Humvee carried the final three Marines. It was a high-back model. At the steering wheel was a veteran of the Fallujah fight, a plump 20-year-old named Miguel Terrazas, from El Paso, Texas, who was one of the most popular soldiers in Kilo Company, known for certain kills he had made, and yet also for his irrepressible good humor. Sitting to his right was another Fallujah veteran, James Crossan, aged 20, from North Bend, Washington. Crossan was frustrated with the mission in Haditha, which he saw as an attempt to play policeman in the midst of an active war. In the open back was Salvador Guzman, aged 19, a first-timer to Iraq, who was known as a typically easygoing Marine. Guzman was from Crystal Lake, Illinois. He faced rearward in the Humvee pointing his weapon over the protective siding, watching the street behind.

As this trio passed unsuspectingly over the buried land mine, a spotter watching from nearby, probably in one of the houses, pushed a button. With a boom that shook the surrounding neighborhood, the device detonated directly under Terrazas in a fireball of violently expanding gases. The blast simultaneously lifted the Humvee and split it in two, separating the top half from the bottom. Guzman was blown clear and landed in the dirt behind the wreckage. He lay there bruised and stunned, with a broken foot but no serious injury. Crossan, in the right front seat, was not so fortunate. He was blown through the right door and then had part of the Humvee fall on him. He lay pinned under the heavy steel, suffering from multiple bone fractures and internal injuries. Others from the squad came running up. He heard someone shouting, "Get some morphine!" and he passed out.

The morphine can only have been meant for Crossan, because Guzman was not so badly hurt, and Terrazas was already beyond such needs. It is a requirement of understanding the events in Haditha—and the circumstances of this war—not to shy away from the physical realities here, or to soften the scene in the interest of politics or taste. Terrazas was torn in half. His bottom half remained under the steering wheel. His top half was blown into the road, where he landed spilling his entrails and organs. He probably did not suffer, at least. He must have lost consciousness instantly and have died soon after hitting the ground. He had a hole in his chin. His eyes were rolled back. He did not look peaceful at all. He looked bloody and grotesque.

Get morphine? No, not for Terrazas. For Wuterich and the nine intact members of the squad, Terrazas's fate was extremely disturbing. They were all of them professional soldiers who had willingly assumed the risk. But just a minute ago Terrazas had been driving home, relaxed and good-humored as usual, and now in a flash he was irretrievably gone. Such is the nature of death in Iraq: you are alive, and the streets seem calm and normal, until suddenly, inevitably, with no warning, you are dead or maimed for the rest of time. With no distant thunder to approach, the loss seems worse for the lack of any ability to prepare.

The wreckage smoked black. The air smelled of cordite, dust, and burned rubber. Wuterich called for backup, and for medical helicopters to evacuate the casualties. He did what a squad leader is supposed to do. A few Marines struggled to free Crossan. After a period of confusion the others crouched with weapons to their shoulders, scanning the nearby rooftops, walls, and windows in the hope of spotting the spotter, and alert to the possibility of further attack. They ordered the Iraqi soldiers to do the same. The Iraqis complied, but somewhat reluctantly, as if perhaps they thought this was not really their fight. In any case, though much remains confused about the immediate aftermath of the attack, and indeed about the hours that followed, what is nearly certain is that at first the squad took no fire. When reinforcements arrived from Sparta Base, after about 10 minutes, one of them was able to kneel gently over Terrazas's remains. He said, "You are my brother by another mother. I love you, man." He covered Terrazas with a poncho, closing him off from sight.

By that time the killing of Iraqis had already begun, though here again uncertainty reigns. From transcripts, conversations, documents, press reports, and above all a sense for the plausible in Iraq, it is possible to reconstruct a lot. Nonetheless, given the complexities of guerrilla war, and the confusion that exists in the minds of those closest to battle, only the barest facts are indisputable. After the land-mine explosion, Wuterich's Marines remained in the immediate vicinity throughout the morning and beyond. Over the next few hours, until maybe around lunchtime, they killed 24 Iraqis. To accomplish the job, they used a few grenades, and maybe a pistol, but primarily their assault rifles. They suffered not a single casualty during this time. Five of the dead were young men who had approached in a car. The remaining 19 were people from the neighborhood, found and killed in the rooms or yards of four family houses, two on the south side of the road, and two on the north. They included nine men, four women, and six children. Many had been sleeping, and were woken by the land-mine blast. Some were shot down in their pajamas. The oldest man was 76. He was blind and decrepit, and sat in a wheelchair. His elderly wife was killed, too. The dead children ranged in age from 15 to 3. They included boys and girls. The Marines later delivered the corpses to the morgue, where they were catalogued by the local coroner. Photographs and videos were taken independently by Americans and Iraqis in the neighborhood and at the morgue. The images showed blood-splattered rooms, as well as victims. The dead did not look peaceful. They looked bloody and grotesque. You are my brother by another mother, you are my daughter by my wife. The dead were buried by angry, grieving crowds.

On the second day, a Marine Corps press officer at the big base downriver in Ramadi issued a wildly misleading statement attributing the civilian deaths to the enemy's I.E.D., as if the families had crowded around the device before it exploded. That statement was later held out to be a deliberate lie, a cover-up, but in fairness it resulted from the isolation of the base, and was more self-delusional than underhanded. The press statement was not seen by Captain McConnell or his men, who had no chance therefore to correct it. Once it was issued, it became an official truth that the Marine Corps, even today, has rigidly refused to retract, despite the fact that within the Corps a more plausible official truth existed almost from the start: the day after the press statement was issued, McConnell visited the battalion headquarters at a dam five miles north of Haditha, where he gave his commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Chessani, a PowerPoint briefing on the action, explaining that some number of civilians had been killed by Wuterich's squad while they suppressed a "complex ambush" that had started with the explosion of the land mine and had continued with an attack by hidden gunmen. Most of the briefing concerned other small firefights that had erupted in Haditha the same day. Chessani authorized the maximum compensation payments of $2,500 to the families for each of the dead who could be certified not to have been insurgents. A Marine major was assigned to do at least that much of an investigation. McConnell's version was passed up the chain of command. McConnell returned to his fight for Haditha.

But one month later a reporter at Time magazine's Baghdad bureau, Tim McGirk, viewed a gruesome video of the aftermath, which suggested that people had been shot and killed inside the houses. Such is the nature of this war, with its routine collateral horrors, that had McGirk been privy to McConnell's report the video might not have surprised him. But with only the press statement about a land mine to go by, it was obvious that something about the official description was very wrong. McGirk's initial queries to the Marine Corps were rebuffed with an e-mail accusing him of buying into insurgent propaganda, and, implicitly, of aiding and abetting the enemy in a time of war. Whoever wrote the e-mail was out of his league. Negative publicity does indeed help the insurgency, but it's the killing of bystanders that really does the trick. Iraq is a small country with large family ties. After three years of war, the locals hardly needed Time to tell them the score. Rather, it was the Americans back home who needed help—any little insight into why the war kept getting worse. McGirk and others in the Baghdad bureau continued with their inquiry, focusing increasingly on the possibility that a massacre and cover-up had occurred. They did not draw conclusions, but laid out what was known and, in mid-March 2006, published the first of several carefully considered accounts.

Knowing that the articles were coming, the Marine Corps had been forced to accept two independent military investigations, one led by an Army general, concentrating on the responsibilities of command, and the other by the criminal investigative branch of the Navy, which focused on reconstructing events on the ground. News from the investigations occasionally emerged, and did not look good for the Marines. Pennsylvania congressman John Murtha, a former Marine and a powerful friend of the Pentagon, stated bluntly that his sources were telling him that a massacre had indeed occurred; he said that there had been no firefight, and that Wuterich's squad had simply gone berserk. Murtha's larger point was that impossible pressure was being placed on U.S. troops, and that they should be withdrawn from a self-destructive war. Following his statements, Haditha became yet another test in a polarized nation, and never mind the details: if you liked President George W. Bush, you believed that no massacre had taken place; if you disliked him, you believed the opposite. As part of the package, Time came in for Internet attacks, hate-filled attempts to find any small discrepancies in its reporting, and, again, never mind the underlying truth.

Amid the vitriol came allegations of other U.S. atrocities in Iraq, some of which turned out to be real. The Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who had enjoyed the strong support of the U.S. government, stated publicly what has long been obvious on the streets—that the abuse of Iraqi civilians by American soldiers is routine. He did not say what is equally obvious—that abuse of Iraqis by Iraqis is even more routine, and that, along with horrors inflicted by Sunni groups, much of the worst is done by Shiite militias, who constitute a significant portion of the government's own forces as Iraq slips into civil war. Al-Maliki vowed to launch his own independent investigation of the Haditha killings—wishful thinking for a government leader forced to hunker down in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone. But tempers were fraying in both Iraq and the United States.

Meanwhile, Kilo Company and the rest of the Third Battalion had returned to California on schedule in the early spring of 2006, and had been greeted with the usual fanfare. But one week later the division's top general relieved Captain McConnell and Lieutenant Colonel Chessani of their commands, stating that he had lost confidence in their abilities to lead. The two officers remained on duty in other roles, though straining against bitterness, and anxious about the future. McConnell hoped that by remaining silent he might prevail, standing against the assault as a Spartan would. Semper fi. Nonetheless, it seems eventually to have dawned on him that his own beloved Corps might not be at his side. Reluctantly, McConnell hired a private defense lawyer, as did Wuterich and others. The naval investigation dragged on, and in midsummer produced a 3,500-page report. The report has not been made public, but apparently suggests that some members of the squad had engaged in murder, and that afterward they and perhaps others had agreed on a narrative to hide the crime. The Marine Corps began to ready charges, and to prepare for military trials and lesser career-ending disciplinary actions. The trials will take place at Pendleton, probably sometime before spring. The penalties may include capital punishment and prison for life. In the most general terms the outcome is already known. A former officer close to McConnell said to me, "The Corps has this reflex when it feels threatened at home. It has a history of eating its young."

II: The Fallujah Legacy

Who among these young should be eaten, and how, are questions that Marine Corps justice will decide. But the story of Haditha is about more than the fate of just a few men, the loss of their friend, or the casualties they inflicted along the Euphrates River one cool November morning. More fully explored, it is about the observable realities of an expanding guerrilla war—about mistakes that have been made and, regrettably, about the inability to fix what is wrong. Those limitations appear to be inherent in the military, and though they certainly have much to do with the reactions and resentments of the least competent soldiers, they also, in a different way, apply to the very best. No matter how sophisticated or subtle our military thinkers may be, ultimately they have use of only this very blunt device—a heavy American force that is simply not up to suppressing a popular rebellion in a foreign land. Despite all the fine words and intentions, the U.S. military turns out to be a tool that is too large and too powerful to be sharpened. Our soldiers collectively did not want this war, and many have come to believe that it cannot be won, but they are not in positions to act on those thoughts, and have no choice but to perform their assignments as their capacities allow.

The starting point of the Haditha killings is early 2004, when the occupation was nearly a year old, and the Marines were brought back to Iraq to take over from the U.S. Army west of Baghdad, in the Sunni strongholds of Anbar Province. Anbar was said to be restive, but it was already dangerous as hell. The Army had blundered there. Soon after the invasion, in April 2003, soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division had gone into the center of Fallujah, where they set up an observation post in a schoolhouse. The best account yet of the consequences, and indeed of the entire war, is contained in the recent book Fiasco, written by Thomas E. Ricks of The Washington Post. Ricks quotes the Army colonel in command, who said, "We came in to show presence just so the average citizen would feel safe." But it didn't work out that way, as it has not worked out for all the iterations of "presence" ever since.

This is an aspect of the war still poorly accepted by the military, and by critics who believe that by sending more troops the U.S. might have done a better job, or could do so today. The view from the street has always been different. Iraq steps aside to let soldiers pass by, and then immediately fills in the void behind them. The soldiers are targets as hapless as any German conscript ever was. Reduced to giving candy to children, and cut off by language and ignorance from the culture around them, they work in such isolation that the potentially positive effects of their presence usually amount to nil. The potentially negative effects, however, are significant. Back in April 2003, the U.S. colonel's average Iraqi citizen might have told him, "You don't know what you don't know, and, sir, you don't know a lot."

The colonel's soldiers had set up the observation post high in the schoolhouse, from which they could see over the tops of garden walls and into family compounds where unveiled women did housework and hung laundry to dry. The soldiers did not understand that this amounted to a violation of the local women, and a serious insult to their men. An angry crowd gathered in front of the school to demand the soldiers' withdrawal. From their positions in the building, the soldiers eyed the demonstrators warily for a while, but then rifle rounds began to hit the walls, fired perhaps from both a rooftop and the street, and the soldiers responded by firing directly into the crowd. Massive response had been the norm during the recent invasion, when the opponents were enemy troops, but times had changed and these were mostly noncombatants on the street. As many as 71 people were wounded, and between 5 and 17 died, depending on the truth of the American or Iraqi versions. The commander of the 82nd Airborne, General Charles Swannack Jr., later claimed that his men's marksmanship had been precise—and indeed so accurate that every one of the casualties (he counted five or six) was an identifiable instigator who deserved what he got. In other words, within the Army there was no question of disciplinary action. But the schoolhouse shootings had given the insurgency a cause, and the guerrilla war had begun.

By the time the Marines arrived in early 2004, nearly two years before the killings in Haditha, the war was out of hand. This was true not just in Anbar but all through central Iraq, where it was obvious that the crude tactics of the Army were failing, and playing into the insurgents' plans. Individual soldiers were brave, but the Army as an institution was averse to risk, and it was making a show of its fear by living on overprotected bases, running patrols only in armored vehicles, and overdoing its responses to the pinprick attacks by the insurgents—arresting far too many men, and answering rifle fire with tanks, rockets, artillery, and air strikes. It became so common to call down precision bombs against even individual suspected insurgents (for instance, someone spotted by drone, walking with a shovel along a road at night) that a new term was coined, based on the physical effects that could sometimes be observed on video. "Pink misting," some soldiers called it, and in their growing frustration they said it with glee.

Excessive force was employed not merely because the weapons were available but also because high technology had led Americans to expect low-casualty wars. Especially in the context of a conflict that had never been adequately explained, the U.S. military for political reasons could not afford any implication that it was squandering its soldiers' lives in Iraq. It is difficult to argue publicly that the military's caution was not a good thing. Strictly in gaming terms, however, there was a problem: by squandering innocent Iraqi lives instead, in order to save American soldiers, the Army in particular was spawning untold numbers of new enemies who would mount more frequent attacks against those same soldiers in the future. This was happening, and fast. The Army was locked into a self-defeating cycle by the very need to keep its casualties down. Meanwhile, the insurgent campaign was expanding in proportion to the number of noncombatants dishonored, brutalized, or killed. It was expanding in proportion to outrage.

Perhaps because of their history in irregular wars, the Marines seem to have a special sense for such cycles of violence. Despite their public image as leathernecks and fighters, they possess a contemplative strain, and their organization, because it is relatively small, is also relatively amenable to change. When they returned to Iraq in 2004, they knew that the fight had grown much trickier than before, and they announced that in Anbar they would demonstrate a new approach to winning the war. They would shed the excess of armor, use military precision rather than power, get out of their vehicles and walk through the towns, knock on doors rather than break them down, and go out of their way to accommodate the Iraqi culture. They would base their tactics on good intelligence. They would not over-react when provoked. They would shoot insurgents, and even enjoy the kills, but they would be careful not to hurt innocent bystanders. They would provide the necessary stability to allow a civil Iraqi society to grow. They would be understood, and they would make friends.

It was to be a textbook counter-insurgency campaign. In abstraction the strategy made sense, and it was the obvious choice—indeed, the only potentially productive one remaining. In practice, however, it quickly encountered an uncooperative Iraq. With its population of 250,000, Fallujah was particularly tough. In addition to all the native insurgents there, it contained foreign fighters from elsewhere in the Middle East, who had arrived to do battle under the banners of God. Within a couple of weeks the Marines were being forced by hostile fire back into their armored vehicles, and were encountering the same frustrations that the Army had, of not speaking Arabic, not having reliable translators, not knowing whose advice to trust, and not being able to distinguish between the enemy and ordinary people on the streets. As for the Iraqis in Anbar, the distinction so dear to the American forces, between the Army and the Marines, meant little to them. The view from the rooftops was that all these guys wore the same stars and stripes, and were crusaders for Zionists and oilmen, if not necessarily for Christ. Recently on Capitol Hill, John Murtha, the congressman and former Marine who has been so vocal about the killings in Haditha, mentioned those early encounters with reality to me. He said, "The Marines came over here to my office and said, 'Jesus, they're shooting at us!' And I said, 'Well, where did you think you were going?'"

The Marines did not formally abandon their strategy, but they saw it torn from their grasp. On March 31, 2004, precisely two years before Captain McConnell and his Kilo Company came home from their momentous tour in Haditha, four American employees of a security firm called Blackwater were ambushed and killed in Fallujah. Their corpses were hacked apart and burned, and two of them were hung from a bridge amid celebrations on the street. Images were beamed around the world. Judging correctly that it could not leave the insult unanswered, the Bush administration, after brief consideration of the options, decided on an all-out assault against the city. That decision continues to stand as one of the worst of the war, ranking only below the decision to disband the Iraqi Army and the initial decision to invade. At the time, for those of us living independently in Iraq outside of the American security zones, and with some sense therefore of the mood on the streets, it demonstrated once again the inability of officials to imagine the trouble that the United States was in, and the astonishing insularity of Washington, D.C.

The Marines knew better. They wanted to respond to the Blackwater ambush by going after the individual killers, and then following through with a well-crafted counter-insurgency campaign to stabilize and mollify the city. But when they were overruled and ordered to do the opposite—to mount an immediate full-frontal offensive—they set aside their theories, and as professional soldiers they dutifully complied. It was a disaster. Backed up by tanks and combat aircraft, the Marines went into Fallujah dealing destruction, and quickly bogged down in house-to-house fighting against a competent and determined foe. To make matters worse, the showcase battalion of the new Iraqi Army mutinied and refused to join the fight. The battle cost several dozen American dead and many more wounded, and did immeasurable damage to the prospects for American success. It turned into a humiliation for the United States when, after four days of struggle, the Marines were ordered by a nervous Washington to withdraw. Again they dutifully complied. Afterward, the jubilant insurgents took full public control of the city, and with the help of the foreign fighters turned it into a fortified haven which U.S. forces did not dare to enter.

To get a feeling for Kilo Company and the killings in Haditha, it is necessary to remember this. After the spring battle was lost, Fallujah became an open challenge to the American presence in Iraq. There were plenty of other challenges, and to speak only of Fallujah is grossly to simplify the war. Still, Fallujah was the most obvious one, and the United States, unless it was to quit and go home, had no choice but to take the city back. Everyone knew it, on all sides, and for months the antagonists prepared. Because of the fortifications and the expectation of active resistance, there was no question this time of a patient counter-insurgency campaign: the Marines were going to have to go in and simply smash the city down. In November of 2004, they did just that, with a force about 10,000 strong. Before attacking they gave the city warning, and allowed an exodus to occur. Nearly the entire population fled, including most of the insurgents, who spread into Baghdad or up the Euphrates to carry on the rebellion, leaving behind, however, a rear guard of perhaps 1,000 gunmen who, exceptionally, wanted to make a stand. This was their mistake. The Marines attacked with high explosives and heavy weapons. Over the 10 days it took to move through Fallujah, and the following weeks of methodical house-to-house clearing, they wrecked the city's infrastructure, damaged or destroyed 20,000 houses or more, and did the same to dozens of schools and mosques. They were not crusaders. They did not Christianize the place. They turned Fallujah into Stalingrad.

Many insurgents survived the initial assaults and emerged to contest the Marines at close quarters, room to room and in the rubble. It is said to have been the most intense battle by American forces since Vietnam. The insurgents were trapped inside cordon upon cordon of American troops, and they fought until death. For the Marines the rules of engagement were necessarily loose. Rules of engagement are standing orders that limit the targets of soldiers, defining the difference between appropriate and inappropriate killing according to strategic and tactical goals, and between legal and illegal killing according to interpretations of international law. In Fallujah the rules allowed Marines to kill anyone they believed to be dangerous, and others who got in the way. In addition to those seen carrying weapons, in practice this meant everyone in every structure from which hostile fire came, and any military-age male seen moving toward the Marines or running away. Obviously, the Marines were not allowed to kill wounded prisoners, but in a televised case one of them did, and Marine Corps justice averted its gaze.

The men of Kilo Company fought through the thick of Fallujah. Lance Corporals Terrazas and Crossan, and most of the other men of future Haditha note, ran the course from start to finish. Kilo Company lost four Marines killed and at least 20 seriously wounded, and was involved in the best-known close-quarters combat of the battle—a desperate attempt to clear insurgents from the rooms of a house, which came to be known as the Hell House fight. Toward the end of it, a New York–based photographer named Lucian Read snapped an iconic picture of a blood-drenched sergeant who had been shot seven times and blasted with an enemy grenade, but who nonetheless was emerging on foot from the house, holding a pistol in one hand, supported by a Marine on each side. The photograph showed the Marines as they like to be seen, and as some like to see themselves. There's a lot to be said for going to war with a photographer in tow, until something happens that you would rather forget.

Fallujah was a victory for the Marine Corps, but a victory narrowly defined. The reality is that a quarter-million people were forced from their homes and, when they returned, were faced with a city in ruins, surrounded by concertina wire and watched over by armed men in towers. Marine general John Sattler, who had led the assault, claimed that the insurgency had been broken. But as the seasons slid by in 2005, guerrillas slipped back into Fallujah, or sprang up from its ruins, and they surged forward through all the other towns of Anbar, including Haditha. Sattler was wrong, and embarrassingly so. Within more contemplative circles of Marines, the battle of Fallujah became less of a triumph than a warning. The consequences were not difficult to discern. A hard-pressed combat officer once put it this way to me: "Yeah, we won Fallujah. But before that we made Fallujah. And we definitely can't afford to make another."

The hell of it was that the reasonable alternative—a nuanced counter-insurgency campaign—was not showing much promise either. At its core, the counter-insurgency campaign asked a lot. On the Iraqi side, it required the people of Anbar to place their faith in a United States government that had repeatedly blundered over the previous few years, and that was unable to protect collaborators from the insurgents' knives. On the American side, it required young Marines with little worldly experience to show trust in a foreign population on alien streets where they were being shot at and blown up. Indeed, the formula asked so much from everyone involved that it was becoming difficult to know when it was realistic anymore. Specialists in Washington advocated patience and wisdom, and said the standard thing about our instant-gratification society. Officials in the Green Zone highlighted the slightest positive signs. But on the ground in Anbar the trends were all wrong.

III: First, Do No Harm

After Fallujah and the Hell House fight, Kilo Company flew home to California, spent a half-year retraining under its new captain, Lucas McConnell, and then returned to Iraq in September 2005, with Haditha in its sights. Haditha at that point had been largely ignored by the Marines for nearly a year. It was being ruled by an uncompromising group of insurgents who had instituted Islamic law and done some good deeds, but had also carried out public floggings and beheadings, and were using Haditha as a base from which to launch attacks in the region. In April of 2005 they had taken 19 Shia fishermen to a soccer field and slaughtered them all. The few policemen in town had resigned or fled to avoid similar fates. Then, on August 1, roughly two months before Kilo Company returned to Iraq, six Marine snipers from an Ohio-based company of reservists had been ambushed and killed on the outskirts of the city, in a scene that was videotaped by the insurgents and made available on DVDs in the market. Two days later another 14 Marines from the same reserve company were killed when their armored personnel carrier was destroyed by an improvised mine. By the end of its tour, primarily around Haditha, that company had suffered 23 dead and 36 wounded, earning it the unfortunate distinction of having been the most badly mauled of any company in the war thus far. Upon returning to Ohio, one of the sergeants described his rage after the destruction of the personnel carrier. He had busted into a nearby house and had barely restrained himself from shooting two women and a teenage boy whom he found inside. He said he realized then that he had been too long in Iraq. He had been there seven months. He left in September 2005, when Kilo Company arrived.

The Marines decided to clean out Haditha once and for all. At the start of October they positioned about 3,000 troops in an arc to the south, west, and north, around the town. Roughly 700 of the troops were from Pendleton's Third Battalion under its new commander, Lieutenant Colonel Chessani. The men of Kilo Company were assigned the lead. They waited in the desert west of the city center. Before the offensive began, they knelt with their helmets off and prayed. They expected intense resistance in the form of rifle fire and rocket-propelled grenades. The plan called for them to advance on foot on a broad front, and to push the insurgents through the city until they were backed against the Euphrates, where they would surrender or die. The strategy was odd—as if the Marines had forgotten exactly which war they were in. Before dawn three bridges that crossed the river were bombed to cut off the enemy's escape. Later, at a Baghdad press briefing, Major General Rick Lynch said, "We took out a portion of each of those bridges to deny the terrorists and foreign fighters—the insurgency—the ability to come from north to south, or south to north, across the Euphrates River. It was a precision strike so that when we indeed defeat the insurgency in these areas—and we're on a glide path to do that—we can go back and replace those segments of the bridges so that the people in that area can regain their own freedom of movement." It was a tidy plan for an orderly war, everything in its place. Lynch continued, "Put that original chart up, please, the one that I just took down."

When the Marines advanced into Haditha, on the first day of Ramadan, October 4, 2005, they encountered a town so peaceful that at first it seemed deserted. They knew that it was not—that they were being watched from behind the compound walls, and that the residents were playing it safe by staying off the streets. The frustration was that the insurgents were lying equally low, and not standing to fight or run away, as conventional combatants would. They could do this because of a reality soon evident to ordinary grunts but stubbornly denied by the U.S. command, which was that in Haditha the insurgency enjoyed widespread public support, and all the more so now with American soldiers suddenly walking around. The insurgents did not need to consult with experts to understand guerrilla war. Why bother to confront these Americans immediately, when you could let them pass by and later hunt them down? Why bother to go north to south or south to north when you could simply stay at home?

Within hours the Marines had walked all the way through Haditha and had reached the Euphrates with little to show. Over the next two weeks Chessani's battalion remained in town, searching house to house and encountering hardly any opposition. Evidence of the insurgency was all around. By the time the offensive was formally called off, the Marines had netted 119 improvised mines, several facilities for making them, two car bombs, 14 weapons caches, and a propaganda shop equipped with computers, copiers, and several thousand blank CDs and audiotapes. They had found a note pinned to the door of a mosque, on which a former policeman renounced his collaboration with the invaders and begged the insurgents for their forgiveness. Finally, they had detained about 130 suspects, of whom they released about half and shipped off the others for interrogation. Against the scale of the rebellion, these were illusory accomplishments.

When Chessani's battalion withdrew in mid-October, it shifted a few miles to the north and settled into its comfortable quarters at the dam above Haditha. McConnell and his Kilo Company were left behind to maintain a full-time presence in the center of town. They set up Sparta Base in a former school administration building, in a walled compound that could accommodate their generators and Humvees. The perimeter was reinforced with coils of concertina wire, sandbagged machine-gun emplacements, and blast walls made of HESCO barriers—large dirt-filled cubes heavy enough to limit the effects of mortars and rockets. The administration building was H-shaped and low-slung. It contained about 15 rooms of various sizes, all with linoleum floors and painted concrete walls. One of the rooms was made into the company's office and called the Combat Operations Center. Two others were made into a chow hall and a kitchen. The kitchen once burned because the cooks were not paying attention, but the food that was served was surprisingly good, and later sometimes included crab. Most of the building was made into general living quarters, where the men slept on cots and kept their personal gear, including an abundance of iPods, video games, and DVD players. As a final special touch there was even a makeshift photography studio where Lucian Read, who had rejoined the company, shot individual portraits of the men. Despite all that is said about difficulties endured by American forces in Iraq, as time passed the Marines at Sparta Base tended to feel that, if anything, they were not roughing it enough.

A sign on the wall read:

Habits of Thought
1. Sturdy Professionalism
2. Make yourself hard to kill.
3. No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy
4. First, Do No Harm
5. The Iraqi People are not our enemy, but our enemy hides amongst them.Corollary 1: You have to look at these people as if they are trying to kill you, but you can't treat them that way.

Corollary 2: Be polite, be professional, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.

This was standard Marine Corps stuff, passed down from above. It was meant as a guide to the war in Iraq, but it was unclear and overwrought. The men of Kilo Company had a culture of being assertive and tough, partly because of the Hell House fight and the publicity that had followed. But now that this latest offensive had fizzled, they were being asked to do exactly what? They were wandering around Haditha just waiting to get hit. Lieutenant Colonel Chessani, up at the dam, was a strange guy to them. He had a reputation of being standoffish, intensely religious, and uncommunicative; he seemed to know the enlisted men only by the nametags on their chests, and they felt he offered them little guidance at best. Captain McConnell was a different story. He was seen as an accessible and straightforward guy, but also as a military lifer, whose talks to his men, though intended to be inspirational, were dulled by Marine Corps clichés and pre-fabricated thoughts. He was always talking about responsibility and honor. He seemed sincerely to believe that in Haditha they were fighting the global war on terror—oh yes, and winning it, too. He insisted that the insurgents were cowards who lacked values, when the opposite was evidently true. He made Wagnerian vows like "We will not falter in the clashing of spears." At Sparta Base sometimes it got a little thick, especially for a place with no enemy in sight. In fairness, however, officers who can inspire enlisted Marines are rare, and McConnell, because he was new, was perhaps just trying too hard.

Meanwhile, the Marines mounted patrols every day, often for no better reason than to spot something unusual on streets that to them remained strange. This was said to be an intelligence-based war, but the intelligence was poor. Sometimes the Marines detained men whose names appeared on their lists; more often they went into houses, asked a few questions, and walked away empty-handed. Officially their rules of engagement were only slightly more restrictive than those that had applied to the free hunting in Fallujah, with their tolerance for the killing of people who got in the way. In Haditha, however, there were civilians all around. Reflexively the city was known as a battle space, and perhaps it was one, but if so it was barely recognizable. Simply put, though Haditha was still largely controlled by the insurgents, during all the weeks prior to the killings of November 19, the Marines of Kilo Company saw very little action there. Battle space? They killed one man—a town idiot who insisted on crossing their perimeter wire. They found some munitions caches in sandy soil along the riverbanks. They talked to some tribal leaders. But the largest measure of their success was a circular one—the continuing discovery of improvised land mines, which were laid each night, but which would not have been planted in the first place were it not for the presence of American troops in town. Indeed, the whole war had become a chicken-or-egg question, around and around with no answer possible.

The enlisted men of Kilo Company rarely philosophized. Many had joined the Corps in response to the September 11 attacks, now four years past, but the emotions that once had motivated them had been reduced by their participation in an enormously bureaucratic enterprise, and by the tedium of war. Fine—they were probably better soldiers for it. These were not the taut warriors portrayed in action movies. As they shed their helmets and body armor, they emerged as ordinary five-foot-nine-inch, 150-pound middle-class Americans, sometimes pimple-faced, and often sort of scrawny. Some of them were mentally agile, and some quite obviously were not. By the stringent standards of the U.S. military, they were not always well behaved. At Sparta Base there was a bit of illicit drinking, a touch of pornography. There are rumors about the use of narcotics as well. But the unit's morale was good enough, largely because the men had become close friends. They liked motorcycles, they liked cars, they liked guns. They especially liked girls a lot. Some could not speak without fuck. For instance, they fucking did not want to be in Iraq. Not anymore, if they ever did. Those who were returning felt they had come back way too fucking soon. And no, they did not respect the Iraqi culture—who the fuck would? Iraqi men wear man-dresses. Iraqi men think everyone wants to eye-fuck their precious wives. Iraqi men kill their own people, then turn around and kill Marines. It's fucking bullshit. God should paintball the genuine bastards so the Marines could then blow them away. Sometimes on the streets of Haditha it seemed like every man would get splattered.

But the Marines did not sit around Sparta Base and worry this to death. They talked about other things, their exploits, their party binges, the really dumb moves of their friends. They laughed and gave each other hard times. They gave each other names. When they mounted their patrols, they went up and down the designated streets and did their jobs as they were told. Be polite and have a plan to kill everyone you meet? Yes, sir, roger that, and on streets like these that would mean shooting the guy from up close, sir, at any false move on his part—is that what you mean by a plan? If the counter-insurgency mission in Haditha seemed half-cocked, so did any real chance for success in Iraq, but that was for others to decide—not for the soldiers who had to carry out the fights. The Marines of Kilo Company were well-intentioned guys who took pride in their conventional battlefield skills and, partly as a result, now just wanted to go home. As a group they were not like people who join the police for the satisfaction of hurting others. They were more like people who join Outward Bound. Until the killings of November 19, there is no evidence that in Haditha they abused the fucking Iraqis even once.

Then suddenly on Route Chestnut Guzman and Crossan were wounded, Terrazas was torn in two, and Sergeant Wuterich was calling for backup. The events that followed will never be reconstructed completely, no matter what the courts may find. Through the dust and noise on that Haditha street, they played out in a jumble of semi-autonomous actions, complicated by perceptions that had been narrowed by the attack and further confused by the ambiguities associated with fighting a guerrilla war on foreign ground. Some of the Marines may have suspected that a line had been crossed, and that crimes might have been committed, but in the urgency of the moment it would have seemed less likely then than it seems now, and even today the principal view of those involved is anger that the accusations are cheap, and that Kilo Company has been unfairly singled out. There is probably a feeling of remorse as well, but, to generalize, it is regret that the killing of noncombatants had so little to do with the intentions of the men, and that the story cannot somehow be taken back and run all over again.

IV: From House to House

The boom of the land mine exploding was heard throughout Haditha. Immediately afterward the city went quiet, except near the convoy, from which the Marines piled out shouting. Some ran back to the shattered Humvee to render aid as they could; the others quickly settled down, and indeed milled around uncertainly until Wuterich ordered them to spread out into defensive positions. It was still barely 7:15 in the morning, the Humvee boiled with black smoke, and the possibility existed that its destruction marked the start of an ambush that would now expand into overlapping attacks with automatic fire and rocket-propelled grenades. All through Iraq the insurgents were laying such lethal traps. For the moment, the houses on both sides of the street showed no sign of activity, though certainly they contained people lying low, if only out of fear.

Again it is important to face the realities here. According to counter-insurgency doctrine, these people were not necessarily the enemy, but Terrazas was nonetheless spilling his guts into their street. Among these very houses was one where the Marines had discovered a bomb factory just a few days before. Moreover, even if the neighbors were not directly involved, they must have known the location of this land mine, which could not have been planted without the locals taking notice. Surely some residents could have found a way to warn the patrol; if they were not the enemy, surely some could have acknowledged that Kilo Company during its stay in Haditha had been showing goodwill and restraint. But no, it was apparent that to these people Terrazas was just another dead American, like roadkill, and good riddance to him. For Wuterich's squad the silence of the neighborhood was therefore less reassuring than ominous. It was the quiet before the storm, the prelude to an attack. The Marines were angry and tense. They sighted their rifles at the walls and rooftops, thinking every variation of fuck and waiting for the incoming rounds.

Instead, a white Opel sedan came driving up the street. It was an unmarked taxi carrying five young men, four of them college students bound for school in Baghdad, the fifth their driver. They were only about a hundred yards away from the blast site when they happened upon the scene. Through their windshield—dirty, bug-splattered, against the sun—they would have seen one of the most dangerous sights in Iraq: smoke rising from a shattered Humvee, a stopped convoy, and American soldiers in full fighting mettle coming at them down the street. The Marines halted the car from a distance. When soldiers do this in Iraq, they are supposed to follow a progressive escalation of force, with hand signals first, followed by raised weapons, then warning shots with tracers visible, then shots to the engine block, and finally, if the car keeps coming, shots directly into the driver. Because of the risk of car bombs, however, the procedure is typically shortened: weapons go up, and if the car doesn't stop, the driver and other occupants are liberally sprayed with fire. Those are the rules of the road, and so be it; given the circumstances, they are well enough understood to seem fair.

This time the driver stopped, as most drivers do. Some witnesses in the nearby houses later said that he tried to back away but then desisted. The Marines came running up, shouting and cursing. Presumably they told the occupants to get out of the car and to kneel on the street with their hands on their heads. What the Marines thought of them is not clear. Later they said they believed the men were associated with the land-mine explosion, and were perhaps the spotters who had pushed the button, or were following up now with a car-bomb attack. This strains credulity for several reasons, not the least of which is that five people in a car are about four too many for either purpose. Equally unlikely was another explanation sometimes mentioned, that these were insurgents driving up to do battle. But the truth is that the Marines neither knew nor needed to know why they stopped the car. The stop was legitimate. It was a necessary act to limit the risks to the squad, and to keep the confusion from growing.

The problem is what happened next, after a quick search revealed that the car contained no weapons or explosives, or any other evidence that linked the men to the insurgency. The Iraqis perhaps should have been held for a while or, better yet, allowed to take their car and leave. Instead, all five of them were shot dead by the Marines. Later, the Marines reported that they killed them because they had started to run away. Even if true, by normal standards this raises the question of what threat these men could have posed when they were fleeing unarmed—or at least what threat could have justified shooting them down. But in Iraq the question was moot, and for reasons that give significance to the Haditha story beyond mere crime and punishment. The first and simplest reason is that, because of reluctance to second-guess soldiers in a fight, the rules of engagement allow for such liberal interpretations of threat that in practice they authorize the killing of even unarmed military-age males who are running away. The second reason derives from the first. It is that the killing of civilians has become so commonplace that the report of these particular ones barely aroused notice as it moved up the chain of command in Iraq. War is fog, civilians die, and these fools should not have tried to escape.

The incident re-emerged only because of the insistent inquiries of Time magazine. During the subsequent military investigations that were forced onto the Marine Corps in the spring and summer of 2006, grainy images from an aerial drone were found that appeared to show the five bodies lying clustered together beside the sedan, with one sprawled partly atop another. Perhaps they had been dragged back and placed there, but this was not part of the original story. Certainly the pattern as seen from overhead was not one of men killed while trying to scatter. Equally troubling were the statements of one of the Iraqi soldiers who was with the convoy, and who four months later was questioned by a naval investigator. The questioning was incomplete, full of opportunities never pursued, and further weakened by an incompetent interpreter. A lawyer in court could tear such testimony apart. Nonetheless, what emerged was a picture of murder. The Iraqi soldier said he had been only about 25 yards away from the Opel sedan, and had watched the entire scene. It was obvious to him that the Iraqis were noncombatants—otherwise, why would they have driven up like this? He said the Marines had yanked open the Opel's doors, taken the men out, forced them to kneel with their hands on their heads, and, without bothering to search them, had quickly gunned them down. The investigator said, "Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang." Well yeah, well no, well actually the Iraqis were sprayed with rifle rounds. The M16 is a light, clip-fed weapon with a plastic stock and a metal barrel. It fires a three-round burst when it is switched to automatic. It does not bang then, but ripples sharply. The Iraqi soldier said he saw a head come apart and a face split in two. He also said that one of the Marines used a pistol, and he called that man a captain, but he did not appear to know any of the squad members' names, and this element he seems to have gotten wrong. By my calculation, there were no officers yet on the scene.

Errors are too easy to make when assigning individual blame. Sergeant Wuterich, for instance, has been repeatedly singled out. If the five Iraqi civilians from the car were summarily slain, Wuterich was probably elsewhere, closer to the center of concern, placing his men into defensive positions and watching the houses for hostile fire. Indeed, it is wrong to brand any of the Marines of his squad without knowing what each was doing, and where each one was. I do not know those details, though by now the military prosecutors must. It appears that only a few of the Marines handled the people from the car, and that, while all of them were angry, only two let loose with their guns. The killing was not agreed upon or planned. It started without warning and finished too fast to stop. Claims have been made of an extensive conspiracy to cover up murders and protect the Marine Corps from embarrassment—but no such conspiracy was necessary, and it is unlikely that any occurred. As for the killings of the car's occupants, all that would have been required was a shift at the outset contained in two simple words. They ran. It would not matter who first uttered the words, or if these were the ones actually spoken. Among the men of Wuterich's squad the elegance would immediately have been understood. We are brothers by other mothers. The dead do not return to life, but some mistakes can be undone. Killing is not wrong in Iraq, if you can say the rules allowed it.

Within minutes the force from Sparta Base arrived. It was a squad of about the same size as Wuterich's, led by the only officer present on Route Chestnut the entire morning, a young lieutenant named William Kallop. Like other lieutenants in Kilo Company, Kallop was junior in all but rank to the senior enlisted men, to whom he naturally deferred. He had a reputation of being a little soft, a little lost. He was the pleasant son of a wealthy New York family, who had joined the Marine Corps, it was believed in Kilo Company, to prove something to himself before returning to a life of comfort. As a soldier he was said to be average. When the allegations against Kilo Company surfaced in the spring of 2006, his parents vigorously reacted. They hired a New York public-relations firm that specializes in legal cases, and then engaged a defense attorney who is a former Marine general and was once one of the top lawyers in the Corps. The implicit warning may have had some effect. While McConnell and Chessani were humiliated and relieved of their commands, and Wuterich was fingered in public, Kallop was left untouched, though technically upon his arrival at Route Chestnut on November 19 he had become the commander on the scene.

Apparently his command didn't amount to much. For the most part he remained on the street by the Humvees with the rest of his squad and allowed Wuterich and his men to work their way through the four houses where, to repeat the number, they killed the additional 19 Iraqis—children, women, and men. It is virtually certain that none of the dead were combatants, but little else about the case is so straightforward. Strange though it seems at first glance, the military courts will probably have a very difficult time deciding if war crimes were committed inside the houses. The difficulty will not be due to a Marine Corps agenda. Indeed, the expedient solution for the entire U.S. military would be to treat Wuterich and his men as criminals, and to destroy McConnell and Chessani as well, thereby avoiding the alternative conclusion, that the debacle in Haditha is related to normal operations in the war. But it just does not seem plausible, as John Murtha and others have claimed, that these particular Marines, who had enjoyed a relatively low-key tour, went so berserk after Terrazas's death that, having already slaughtered the five Iraqis by the car, they proceeded without specific reason or provocation to enter people's houses and execute even the children at point-blank range in a feverish rampage sustained for several hours, even while Lieutenant Kallop and the other recent arrivals listened to the rippling of gunfire and the screams of the soon dead. The killings in the houses on November 19 were probably nothing so simple as that.

Wuterich may have explained it best, because he has insisted that his Marines came under AK-47 attack, and defended themselves as they had been trained to do, by returning fire and surging forward to suppress the aggressors. Critics have expressed skepticism, pointing out that there was little evidence of exterior damage to the houses, and that certain neighborhood witnesses heard no firefight before the first house was stormed. Other witnesses, however, did hear firing, and the same Iraqi soldier who gave the damning description of executions by the car, and who was certainly no friend of the Marines, repeatedly described coming under attack from the south side of the street.

When the naval investigator asked for details, the interpreter summarized the soldier's answers. He said, "Fire open at them. Shots were shooting at them. Fighting between them and forces are fighting at us, shooting at us. The Americans spread through the houses, and they stayed. They were going to take care of this. So they went where the fire was coming, receiving fire, in that direction.… Somebody's shooting at us, we're shooting at them, but they are just shooting at us and we're shooting back."

The investigator said, "Okay. And how many Marines did that?"

Translating directly now, the interpreter said, "It was all mixed up. Even I was a little shake.… I didn't see who's shooting at us."

"Did you shoot your weapon at all?"

"I shot in the air. Yeah, we shot, but we shot in the air."

"Why did you shoot in the air?"

"He says, Who am I going to shoot? I got to see somebody I'm shooting."

"Okay. So why shoot at all?"

"When they start firing, the Marines were like, 'Oh come on, you shoot too.' Everybody shot five, six rounds."

Maybe this investigator had not been around the Iraqi Army before. He said, "In the air?"

"In the air, yes, sir.… I mean, we have no effect when we go out there. We have no effect on anything because they take orders from whatever they tell us." The Iraqi soldier obviously wanted to make it clear that he had not killed any of the dead.

"So you shot in the air?"

"Yes, I did."

"Who told you to shoot in the air?"

"They told."

"But who told you?"

"Not all, not everybody, sir."

Evidently the investigator tried to recover his balance. He said, "Did you ever see anybody—you said that you were taking shots from the neighborhood. Did you ever see anybody shooting at you or the Marines?"

"No, I haven't seen. I know the fires were coming at us, but from where, I don't know."

"But you're sure that you were being shot at?"

"Yes, yes. They want to kill us."

"Was it a lot of shots or just here and there?"

"Spray. It was spray continuous."

"Spray continuous. For about how long?"

"When we first received spray, and then after that, hell break loose. All Americans were firing and everything. I couldn't tell which one's which."

"Okay. And you shot in the air?"

"Yes, sir."

The testimony rings all too true, with compensation for some light twisting of facts. It is very likely that the Marines did indeed begin taking fire on Route Chestnut, a short while after the occupants of the car were killed, and possibly in angry response. Someone is bomb me, I am shoot him, but he is just shoot at me, and I am just shoot him back. This is the kind of fight that Donald Rumsfeld could not imagine.

It was now perhaps 7:30 in the morning. Kallop had arrived with his reinforcements. The fire seemed to come from a house on the south side of the street. In hindsight we know that no insurgents were discovered there, but chances are they were present nonetheless, if not in that house, then in others nearby. The evidence remains uncertain, but Wuterich, for one, insists that his men believed the house contained aggressors, and that they proceeded with a by-the-book operation to clear them out, exactly as the rules of engagement allowed. This may very well be. If you assume it is true, you can watch Haditha play out from there, largely within the legal definition of justified killing—a baseline narrative that becomes the happiest possible version of the morning's events.

With Kallop in place among the Humvees, Wuterich led his men from the front. They got to the house, kicked through the door, and in the entranceway came upon the owner, a middle-aged man, whom one of them shot at close range, probably with a three-round burst to the chest. The Marine's M16 would barely have kicked in his hands. Beyond the sound of the shots, he might have heard the double pops of the rounds entering and exiting the man, the heavier snap of bullets against bone, perhaps the metallic clatter of spent cartridges hitting the ground. The Iraqi was not thrown by the rounds as people are thrown in the movies. If no bones were broken, he may not have felt much pain, except for some stinging where his skin was torn. Unless he was struck in the heart, he did not die immediately, but soon succumbed to massive hemorrhaging. Chances are his blood first splattered against the wall, then flowed into a dark-scarlet puddle beneath him until his heart stopped pumping.

The power was out in the house, and the light inside was dim, all the more so for the Marines, who were piling in from the sunshine of the street. Inside a hostile house, survival requires fast reactions. The Marines fired on a figure down the hall, who turned out too late to be an old woman. There could have been a message there, but guerrilla wars are tricky, and the Marines were not about to slow down. She screamed when she was hit, apparently in the back, and then she died. The Marines were shouting excitedly to one another. They worked down the hallway until, busting open a door, they came upon a room full of people. Later some of the squad said they had heard AK-47s being racked, though whatever they heard turned out not to be that. The room was dim, and the people were glimpsed rather than clearly seen. The Marines rolled in a grenade, hugged the hallway for the blast, and then charged into the dust and smoke to mop up with their rifles as they had been trained to do. This is my weapon, this is my gun. It was the Hell House fight all over again, though, as it happened, without the opposition. Nine people had sheltered in that room, three generations of the same family, from an ancient man paralyzed by a stroke to an infant girl just three months old. When the grenade exploded, it blew some of them apart, wounded others with penetrating shrapnel, and littered the room with evil-smelling body parts. In the urgency of the moment the old man forgot that he was paralyzed and tried to stand up. He took rounds to the chest, vomited blood as he fell, and then lay on the floor twitching as he died. In that room four residents survived. A young woman left her husband behind, grabbed the infant girl, and managed to run away; a 10-year-old girl and her younger brother lay wounded beside their dead mother and remained conscious enough to be terrified.

The Marines went on to the neighboring house, still seeking insurgents, as they believed. What happened there was a repeat of what had just happened next door, only this time the Americans knocked before they shot the man at the gate, and a grenade tossed into an empty bathroom ignited a washing machine, and a grenade tossed into the room where the family was sheltering failed to go off, and perhaps only one American came in and sprayed the room with automatic fire. This time there was just a single survivor, a girl of about 13, who later was able to provide some details of her family's death. There was a lot of smoke, but:

Daddy was shot through the heart. He was 43.

Mommy was shot in the head and chest. She was 41.

Aunt Huda was shot in the chest. She was 27.

My sister Nour was shot in the right side of her head. She was 15.

My sister Saba was shot through the ear. She was 11.

My brother Muhammad was shot in the hand and I don't know where else. He was 10.

My sister Zainab was shot in the hand and the head. She was five.

My sister Aysha was shot in the leg and I don't know where else. She was three.

The brains of at least one of the little girls were shoved through fractures in her skull by the impact of a bullet. This is a standard effect of high-velocity rounds fired into the closed cavity of a head. Later that day, when a replacement Marine came in to carry out the bodies, the girl's brains would fall onto his boot.

Wuterich's men pursued the search to the north side of Route Chestnut, where they put the women and children under guard and killed four men of another family. There on the north side they found the only AK-47 that was discovered that day—apparently a household defensive weapon, of the type that is legal and common in Iraq. No one has claimed that the rifle had been fired.

On Route Chestnut the killing was over, and the cleanup began. Nearly a year later, the Marines who were involved unanimously insist that it was just another shitty Anbar morning. By narrow application of military law, the upcoming trials may indeed leave it as such. If so, however, those trials will have to justify the shootings around the car and, furthermore, will have to account for certain statements by witnesses that call into question the scenes inside houses as I have described them in the happiest possible version of the events. Those statements, which again are full of contradictions and uncertainties, raise the possibility that, behind the privacy of the walls, Wuterich's men were carrying out deliberate executions and laughing about it, that one aimed and said "You! You!" before he shot the old man down, that they made return trips to the killing rooms to finish people off, and that on the north side of the road they herded their victims into a wardrobe before shooting them through the door. Unless the Marines of Wuterich's squad suddenly start confessing to war crimes, these are questions only the courts will be able to decide.

V: A Thanksgiving Prayer

On the afternoon of November 19, when the reports of civilian casualties reached Captain Lucas McConnell, it did not cross his mind that anything unusual had occurred: the killing by American forces of noncombatants in Iraq is simply so commonplace. Sergeant Wuterich reported on the fight as he defined it. Lieutenant Kallop acquiesced. An intelligence sergeant who surveyed the carnage said much the same thing. Captain McConnell scarcely reacted, because this slaughter seemed to lie within the rules of engagement, and in that sense was little different from any other. McConnell inhabited a military world, full of acronyms and equipment, and peopled by identifiable combatants—a place where spears clashed and civilians unfortunately sometimes came to harm. For him it had been a very active day. Soon after the land-mine explosion that had killed Terrazas, ambushes and firefights erupted elsewhere in Haditha, and all four of his platoons were engaged.

The main thread started at 8:35 in the morning, when an explosives-and-ordnance squad heading to Route Chestnut for a post-blast analysis came under fire from a palm grove. The squad returned fire and drove on. Twenty-five minutes later, and slightly to the south, an aerial drone observed 10 men meeting on a palm-grove trail between River Road and the Euphrates. The men appeared to be MAMs, or military-age males, and clearly were not just farmers. Two came on foot, one by motorcycle, and seven by car. They loaded gear into the car and, leaving three men behind, drove slowly south along the trail. McConnell called this "egressing." The drone circled lazily overhead, performing well in the global war on terror. The time was approximately 9:12. At 9:48, about a kilometer away, a Kilo Company patrol was attacked by small-arms fire, and the Marines shot back, resulting, they believed, in three enemy wounded in action, or E.W.I.A., though all of them got away.

The men in the car on the palm-grove trail were in no particular hurry. They stopped beside other cars on the trail, presumably to coordinate future attacks. Eventually they came to River Road, not far south of Route Chestnut, where they parked the car and entered two houses. McConnell called the houses "safe houses," perhaps because the men calmly entered them. There was little doubt that all seven men were insurgents, but it was impossible to tell who else was in the houses, and specifically whether families were sheltering inside. Force-protection standards precluded the possibility of checking, and since the rules of engagement sanctioned collateral casualties with the enemy so near, a flight of Cobra helicopters arrived and fired two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, one into each house, to soften things up. Kilo Company Marines then rushed forward to clear the rooms as required. The first house was empty, but as they approached the second one they were greeted by small-arms fire and grenades. The Marines pulled back—way back—and called in an AV-8B Harrier jet to drop a guided 500-pound GBU-12 Paveway bomb. The bomb crashed into the house with impressive precision, but did not explode.

At this point the drone saw two MAMs leave through the back door and run into a little palm-grove patch to hide. The Marines brought the Harrier around to pink-mist these guys with a second 500-pound bomb—this one guided into the patch—but it, too, turned out to be a dud. Undaunted, the troops switched weapons and hit the patch with a $180,000 air-launched AGM-65 Maverick missile. The strike resulted in one E.K.I.A. The surviving MAM egressed the patch and ingressed the house again. It was ridiculous. The Harrier came back around and dropped a third 500-pound bomb directly through the roof, blowing the whole house and everyone in it to bloody shreds.

This was McConnell's reality as Haditha settled down for the night. He gave a talk at Sparta Base, in which for once he did not overstretch. He said: Men, we've had a tough day, it's sad about Terrazas, but everyone functioned pretty well, so good job and keep at it. He did not mention—and apparently did not much think about—all the noncombatants who had died. Look, this was Iraq. The clearing operations on Route Chestnut did not stand out as being significantly different from the other main act of the day, the use of missiles and bombs against a house that may well have contained a family. God knows there were enough body parts now scattered through the ruins. Killing face-to-face with an M16 allows you at least some chance to desist from slaughtering women and children, which is not true once a bomb is called down on a house. But there is no evidence that McConnell was even thinking about these matters. The photographer Lucian Read, who had been traveling elsewhere in Anbar, returned the day after the killings and later snapped digital pictures of shrouded corpses in the houses by Route Chestnut. Read believes McConnell was aware of the pictures; if so, he did not try to suppress them or to limit their distribution. McConnell was such a company man, such a by-the-book Marine, that, like the entire chain of command above him, he was numb to the killings of noncombatants so long as the rules of engagement made the killings legal. If there was a failure here, it was not that of McConnell but of the most basic conduct of this war.

Five days after the killings, Kilo Company celebrated Thanksgiving with a turkey dinner, including stuffing and potatoes. The occasion was recorded on video. Before the meal McConnell led the men in prayer. He said, "Father, we thank you for this food which you have prepared for us. Please bless this food with your great grace, and please let us take the sustenance that you provide for us, and go forth and do great things in your name. We are very grateful here in Kilo Company for many things. We thank you for the mission that you have provided for us, to leave America and go into foreign lands and try to do good things for the world and for our country. It's our greatest honor, and we thank you for that. We thank you for our families, who support us back in the States, and the brotherhood that we have here. It is our greatest strength, and we thank you for that as well. We also want to thank you for the veterans and those who have gone before us, because without them there would be no Marine Corps legacy, and there wouldn't be that great standard to uphold. So we thank you for that because it guides us, it keeps us on the right track, and it's that steering factor that helps us go forth and do great things. We thank you for the memory and the life of Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, who did great things in his life, did great things for all of us, was a great friend and a great Marine. We just ask that you help us take this food that you've provided us here today, help it maintain, sustain our bodies so we can uphold that legacy that our fallen comrades have provided for us. We say all these things in your great name. Amen."

The men answered with Marine Corps Hoo-rahs and Amens.

McConnell said, "Hey, please enjoy the meal. Make sure you pat the cooks on the back. They work hard. And if you see someone from the Four shop here in the near future that you know, pat them on the back, because they get all that stuff out here, and it's not the most safest place to be pushing food around But I appreciate you all being here, and first and foremost Happy Thanksgiving. Go forth and do great things. Hoo-rah!"

Hoo-rah. Iraqis live in an honor-bound society, built of tight family ties. When noncombatants are killed, it matters little to the survivors whether the American rules allowed it, or what the U.S. military courts decide. The survivors go to war in return, which provokes more of the same in a circular dive that spirals beyond recovery. Haditha is just a small example. By now, nearly one year later, hatred of the American forces in the city has turned so fierce that military investigators for the trials at Pendleton have given up on going there. That hatred is blood hatred. It is the kind of hatred people are willing to die for, with no expectation but revenge. This was immediately apparent on a video that was taken the day after the killings by an Iraqi from the neighborhood—the same video that was later passed along to Time. The Marine Corps was wrong to dismiss the video as propaganda and fiction. It is an authentic Iraqi artifact. It should be shown to the grunts in training. It should be shown to the generals in command. The scenes it depicts are raw. People move among the hideous corpses, wailing their grief and vowing vengeance before God. "This is my brother! My brother! My brother!" In one of the killing rooms, a hard-looking boy insists that the camera show the body of his father. Sobbing angrily, he shouts, "I want to say this is my father! God will punish you Americans! Show me on the camera! This is my father! He just bought a car showroom! He did not pay all the money to the owner yet, and he got killed!"

A man cries, "This is an act denied by God. What did he do? To be executed in the closet? Those bastards! Even the Jews would not do such an act! Why? Why did they kill him this way? Look, this is his brain on the ground!"

The boy continues to sob over the corpse on the floor. He shouts, "Father! I want my father!"

Another man cries, "This is democracy?"

Well yeah, well no, well actually this is Haditha. For the United States, it is what defeat looks like in this war.