Good God, What Have We Done to our Marines?
Thu Jun 01, 2006 at 08:00:20 AM PDT
Susie Madrack at
Suburban Guerilla has an incredible story from the Daily Telegraph about the living conditions previously observed by the Marines alleged to have committed the massacre at Haditha.
"Haditha was shockingly different - a feral place where the marines hardly washed; a number had abandoned the official living quarters to set up separate encampments with signs ordering outsiders to keep out; and a daily routine punctured by the emergency alarm of the dam itself with its antiquated and crumbling machinery."
"The reporter was there just before the first massacre reports came out in January.
"The day before my arrival one soldier had shot himself in the head with his M16. No one would discuss why."
I'm sure as the Corps and the nation learns the whole story it will become obvious that this horror was just waiting to happen.
"The washing facilities were at the top and the main lavatories at the base. With about 800 steps between them, many did not bother to use the official facilities.
Instead, a number had moved into small encampments around the dam's entrances that resembled something from Lord of the Flies. Entering one, a marine was pulling apart planks of wood with his dirt-encrusted hands to feed a fire."
"It is not yet known where exactly the men responsible for the killing of the 24 civilians in Haditha were based. There was a handful of small, forward-operating bases in the town and surrounding area, with two dozen or so in each. If they were in these, it is highly unlikely their conditions were any better.
They would certainly also have shared the recent history of the battalion. It had undergone three tours in Iraq in two and a half years.
More than 30 of its members had died in the previous one, the majority when the unit led the major attack on Fallujah, then at the heart of the insurgency. Now they were in Haditha, one of the most dangerous settlements in Iraq, after only seven months away."
Jesus Christ, these were the same men who had been thrown into that hell at Falluja! Now they're on their third tour in thirty months! That's hardly any time off from the combat at all, good Lord, 30 days of combat can seem like ten years.
Something went horribly, horribly wrong with the Marine Corps chain of command here. I have an incredible amount of difficulty believing American officers allowed this to happen---in fact, the only way I'm sure this degradation could have happened is that we broke our men with those tours and that service in Falluja.
Multiple horror stories of war crimes have come out of Falluja, snipers gunning down civilians and phosphorous being used indiscriminately as a chemical weapon. One wonders what other horrors are yet to surface.
Haditha, to this writer, isn't about a massacre from a small group of Marines. It's about putting the Corps to the breaking point, really doing it, and then looking at the results. A huge chunk of the Corps chain of command was broken along with it.
We know, to some extent, what those Marines are have alleged to have done. Too little is known about what they went through to get to that point. For the love of God, get all of our women and men home now before we get any more to that point of madness.
