Collateral damage and the "incident" at Haditha

Abstract

First news stories about the My Lai massacre (picked up from an army publicity release), March 1968: The New York Times labeled the operation a significant success: "American troops caught a North Vietnamese force in a pincer movement on the central coastal plain yesterday, killing 128 enemy soldiers in day-long fighting" ("G.I.'s"). United Press International called it an "impressive victory," and added a bit of patriotic color: "The Vietcong broke and ran for their hide-out tunnels. Sixand- a-half hours later, 'Pink Village' had become a 'Red, White and Blue Village'" (qtd. in Braestrup 251-52); The New York Times, 21 November 2005: "The Marine Corps said Sunday that 15 Iraqi civilians and a Marine were killed Saturday when a roadside bomb exploded in Haditha, 140 miles northwest of Baghdad. The bombing on Saturday in Haditha, on the Euphrates in the Sunni-dominated province of Anbar, was aimed at a convoy of American Marines and Iraqi Army soldiers, said Capt. Jeffrey S. Pool, a Marine spokesman. After the explosion, gunmen opened fire on the convoy. At least eight insurgents were killed in the firefight, the captain said" (Wong, qtd. in Dreyfuss); Knight Ridder, 21 March 2006: "Questions about the incident [at Ishaqi] focus on diverging US military and Iraqi police accounts of the raid, which happened around 2:30 a.m. on March 15 on a house about 60 miles north of Baghdad. Both sides and neighbors agree that US troops were involved in a firefight with a suspected member of al-Qaida in Iraq. But the US account gave the death toll as four and said the house collapsed from the heavy fire it took during the fighting. The al-Qaida suspect was found alive in the rubble and arrested, the U.S report on the incident said. Iraqi police, however, contend that US troops gathered 11 people in the house into a single room and executed them, before destroying the house as they left the area" ("Multiple Wounds"). Charlie Company, which had suffered 28 casualties in its first months in the area without ever seeing the Vietnamese enemy, was bent on revenge when, on 16 March 1968, it entered the sub-hamlet of My Lai 4, known to the soldiers as "Pinkville," on the Battambang Peninsula in Quangnai Province. Looking for the reputed "headquarters" of the 48th Vietcong Battalion, they found only women, children, infants, and old men, none resistant, many finishing breakfast. Almost all were slaughtered, upwards of 500 human beings. At Haditha, we know that, in the phrase of the soldier who first reported the My Lai massacre, "something rather dark and bloody"-and, it seems, criminal- happened. It started with Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, a "feral" unit, living in a "Lord of the Flies" encampment (as described by British journalist Oliver Poole who paid it a frightening visit), on its third tour of duty in Iraq (Poole). It had already been in some of the darkest, bloodiest, most feral fighting of the counterinsurgency war-the destruction of much of the city of Fallujah (see Engelhardt, "Tomgram: Michael Schwartz") in November 2004. After watching a company member die from a roadside bomb that November day a year later, some of the unit's soldiers evidently massacred 24 Iraqi civilians who happened to be living nearby in the town of 90,000 in the heartland of the Sunni insurgency. A My Lai-style cover-up followed. Other than revealing just how overstretched the American military is in Iraq, such an "incident" (as American officials liked to call such horrors back in the Vietnam era and still do today) is also a kind of confession-of failure. If, as a soldier, you feel you are protecting anyone in an area, you do not simply slaughter random civilians, no matter how you may "snap." To commit such acts, these Marines must have concluded in the most visceral way that there simply were no Iraqis to protect in Haditha, perhaps in the Sunni provinces of Iraq altogether, perhaps in the whole country. You only slaughter the helpless face-to-face when even small children have become aliens, the enemy, so tainted by evil, by the killing of your people, that there's no hope for them. Think of it as on-the-ground military democracy, the grimmest sort of popular vote on whether you or the insurgents are winning the war. It's a small enough step in such circumstances from the knowledge that the enemy might be anywhere to the thought that the enemy is everywhere, and then to the feeling that every Vietnamese/Iraqi is an enemy-or, as the slaughtered were termed in the initial military indictment of My Lai's Lieutenant William Calley, every "Oriental human being" a "VC." Even a baby sucking at its mother's breast might, as one My Lai defendant claimed, be helping to conceal a hidden grenade. The process by which all human beings in a region transmogrify into the hated and feared enemy works in reverse as well. As in the case of My Lai, the dead by some strange process can change back into aunts, grandfathers, children, babies. It can happen on the spot. As Ryan Briones, the first Marine from Kilo Company to speak out (though evidently not one of the killers), described the scene: "They ranged from little babies to adult males and females. I'll never be able to get that out of my head. I can still smell the blood. This left something in my head and heart" ("Marines Will Be Punished"). Such "incidents" were far more common than we care to imagine in Vietnam and are undoubtedly more common in Iraq as well. Think of this as an endless feedback loop, the ultimate self-fulfilling prophesy ("Special Report: Tiger Force"). Scholar Juan Cole, at his Informed Comment blog, speculates "that the number of Iraqis in Anbar Province who said it was all right to attack US troops doubled to 80 percent in 2006 from 40-odd percent in January of 2004. Doubled. And Ishaqi and Haditha and lots of similar such incidents are the reason for this doubling." Just this week, the US military concluded a rather hurried investigation of the "rather dark and bloody" events in the town of Ishaqi, also in the Sunni heartland- and despite protests from the Iraqi government that this represented an unreasonable "rush to judgment"-described the "incident" ("Iraqi PM") in the following way: "The [American] forces, upon arrival, began taking direct fire from the building. As the enemy fire persisted, the ground force commander appropriately reacted by incrementally escalating the use of force from small arms fire to rotary wing aviation, and then to close air support, ultimately eliminating the threats: "The investigating officer concluded that possibly up to nine collateral deaths resulted from this engagement but could not determine the precise number due to collapsed walls and heavy debris. Allegations that the troops executed a family living in this safe house, and then hid the alleged crimes by directing an air strike, are absolutely false" ("MNF-I Spokesman; emphasis added). Note that, under challenge, the al-Qaeda member and three "terrorist" associates in the initial Ishaqi report multiplied. There are now nine extra "collateral deaths," just as those "insurgents" in the initial military report from Haditha, according to the Time magazine piece that broke the story, had already turned into civilian "collateral damage" in the first Marine probe of what happened there. "The deaths were the result of 'collateral damage' rather than malicious intent by the Marines" (McGirk). The Iraqi police, who identified the deaths in Ishaqi as execution-style murders beg to disagree with the American conclusions, but let's leave aside the issue of criminal intent. What else do the "incidents" at Ishaqi, Haditha, and My Lai have in common? © 2010 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.