When it comes to war, you were either there or not there. When it comes to Iraq, I wasn’t there. I’ve had friends, coworkers, and even a couple vets who ride the same bus as me who all served in the military and fought in Iraq. Some of them can’t stop talking about what they’ve seen, like a friend of mine who was a sniper who can’t stop talking about the grisly details of shooting an insurgent through the head while he’s drunk.
So the deaths in Haditha in 2005 deserved to have their case approached with that much sensitivity. That being said, their staff sergeant told them to “shoot first and ask questions later,” and examination of the wounds on the bodies clearly showed signs that some of these people were straight up executed. And the best justification the military witnesses and spokesmen could give at trial and publicly was that those who have never seen combat can’t understand what it really does to your psyche.
If everyone in the Marine Corp was cutting down civilians at such a brisk pace, I would be a little more accepting of that reason. They don’t though, so I don’t feel we as Americans should accept that reason either.
The Haditha tragedy weakened our fragile diplomatic relationship with Baghdad and reinforced our negative image in the region. And now the leader of the squad, Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, has made a plea deal which requires him to serve a maximum 90 days in the brig. One of the other seven Marines had been acquitted. The other six had their cases dismissed. Wuterich was the last one and it is the heaviest sentence out of all of them. Many reports, like the LA Times article published about the plea deal, have speculated why the sentence was so minor. According to the report, it might have had something to do with a majority of the military jurors having served in Iraq themselves. Maybe it was the military paying out $2,500 condolences to the families of the victims and then claiming that money tampered witness statements. One can only guess, right?
Wuterich admitted to his role in the killings and publicly took responsibility for his part in what happened. Those Marines are only accountable to themselves and the families of the 24 dead at Haditha. Let them live with that. This is about how their bosses spin things for the sake of catastrophic a– covering.
While we wait for America’s international critics to rip us a new one, let us remember that they are soldiers in service to the U.S. When they screw up as big as this, the military ought to try a little bit harder to account for itself rather than simply telling people it’s beyond their comprehension.
Whether we fought in Iraq or not is irrelevant. If the military wants to rationalize bad decision-making that leads to this kind of tragedy, they had better keep a lot of the facts from the public first.
Josh Steinberg is a senior journalism major and contributing writer for the Daily 49er.
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