To Understand Haditha, Think Like A G.I.
By John Crawford
New York Daily News
June 18, 2006
There was a game we used to play in Iraq called Bang! You’re Dead. The rules were simple. First, select a person. A woman on the way to a bakery, a child walking to school or any one of a thousand bearded faces that glare at you over a steaming cup of chai.
Then you swivel your weapon, put the cross hairs on their chest or head. Breathe, proper sight alignment; you put pressure on the trigger. There’s no shot of course because the safety is on. Maybe you make the sound of a rifle cracking.
“Bang! You’re dead,” you say, and move to another target. The killing of civilians is a big joke; something you laugh about, think about and sometimes consider. But you never do it.
For a few Marines in Haditha, it would appear that joking wasn’t enough. Witnesses have said the Marines there opened fire on Iraqi civilians on Nov. 19, killing 24 men, women and children in three homes and a car to retaliate for the death of their comrade in a roadside bomb.
Since the military does not systematically target civilians, what went wrong?
Some describe a unit on the very cusp of mutiny, rife with drug use. It’s a believable enough description. Alcohol and hashish can be bought from street kids. Valium runs about 200 pills for $2, half the price of a 14-year-old Iraqi prostitute. Steroids, so useful for smashing home runs back home, also are widely abused since they are available legally in Iraqi pharmacies.
But these drugs aren’t catalysts for the type of slaughter that may have happened in Haditha. They are symptoms of a much larger problem.
Imagine a 19-year-old kid from AnyTown, U.S.A., who joined the Marines for college money, or because his grandfather fought in Iwo Jima. Now he is taking part in the longest overland invasion in Marine Corps history. Back in America he lives about 14% below the poverty level, but President Bush thinks a 2.7% pay raise is too much. He doesn’t do it for the money though, and when he’s sent back to Iraq, to Fallujah, he goes without question and loses another 17 or so friends in some of the bloodiest urban combat anyone has seen in years.
He goes home for a few months and struggles to adjust, which doesn’t matter because before long, he becomes part of the first batch of Marines sent back to Iraq, to Haditha, for an unprecedented third combat tour. His wife no longer answers his calls and letters.
He wants to go home. Maybe if he were wounded, he’d go home like Spec. Brandon Bare from Fort Lewis, Washington, who returned to the U.S. a hero with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. Two months later, he allegedly killed his wife, stabbing her at least 71 times with knives and a meat cleaver.
War isn’t like the recruiting posters.
But he doesn’t get wounded; he just keeps on in Iraq, 8,000 miles from home. He has seen his friends die while Iraqi civilians dance. Kids throw rocks at him, and 9-year-old girls mark down how many Marines go out on patrol, reporting to insurgents.
He has seen how a crowded street turns into a ghost town right before an attack. Maybe they’re not setting the homemade booby traps known as Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs, or firing the shots, but they know who is. One morning, his best friend, a lance corporal from Texas, gets gutted by an IED in front of him and he loses control.
Right or wrong, what happened in Haditha is a reminder that regardless of what we hear on television, war is never clean or just or pretty. It’s just killing and dying and insanity.
Crawford, who served in Iraq with the National Guard, is author of “The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell.”
New York Daily News
June 18, 2006
There was a game we used to play in Iraq called Bang! You’re Dead. The rules were simple. First, select a person. A woman on the way to a bakery, a child walking to school or any one of a thousand bearded faces that glare at you over a steaming cup of chai.
Then you swivel your weapon, put the cross hairs on their chest or head. Breathe, proper sight alignment; you put pressure on the trigger. There’s no shot of course because the safety is on. Maybe you make the sound of a rifle cracking.
“Bang! You’re dead,” you say, and move to another target. The killing of civilians is a big joke; something you laugh about, think about and sometimes consider. But you never do it.
For a few Marines in Haditha, it would appear that joking wasn’t enough. Witnesses have said the Marines there opened fire on Iraqi civilians on Nov. 19, killing 24 men, women and children in three homes and a car to retaliate for the death of their comrade in a roadside bomb.
Since the military does not systematically target civilians, what went wrong?
Some describe a unit on the very cusp of mutiny, rife with drug use. It’s a believable enough description. Alcohol and hashish can be bought from street kids. Valium runs about 200 pills for $2, half the price of a 14-year-old Iraqi prostitute. Steroids, so useful for smashing home runs back home, also are widely abused since they are available legally in Iraqi pharmacies.
But these drugs aren’t catalysts for the type of slaughter that may have happened in Haditha. They are symptoms of a much larger problem.
Imagine a 19-year-old kid from AnyTown, U.S.A., who joined the Marines for college money, or because his grandfather fought in Iwo Jima. Now he is taking part in the longest overland invasion in Marine Corps history. Back in America he lives about 14% below the poverty level, but President Bush thinks a 2.7% pay raise is too much. He doesn’t do it for the money though, and when he’s sent back to Iraq, to Fallujah, he goes without question and loses another 17 or so friends in some of the bloodiest urban combat anyone has seen in years.
He goes home for a few months and struggles to adjust, which doesn’t matter because before long, he becomes part of the first batch of Marines sent back to Iraq, to Haditha, for an unprecedented third combat tour. His wife no longer answers his calls and letters.
He wants to go home. Maybe if he were wounded, he’d go home like Spec. Brandon Bare from Fort Lewis, Washington, who returned to the U.S. a hero with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. Two months later, he allegedly killed his wife, stabbing her at least 71 times with knives and a meat cleaver.
War isn’t like the recruiting posters.
But he doesn’t get wounded; he just keeps on in Iraq, 8,000 miles from home. He has seen his friends die while Iraqi civilians dance. Kids throw rocks at him, and 9-year-old girls mark down how many Marines go out on patrol, reporting to insurgents.
He has seen how a crowded street turns into a ghost town right before an attack. Maybe they’re not setting the homemade booby traps known as Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs, or firing the shots, but they know who is. One morning, his best friend, a lance corporal from Texas, gets gutted by an IED in front of him and he loses control.
Right or wrong, what happened in Haditha is a reminder that regardless of what we hear on television, war is never clean or just or pretty. It’s just killing and dying and insanity.
Crawford, who served in Iraq with the National Guard, is author of “The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell.”
posted by Hanan Elbadry at 4:17 PM
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