‘Marines Are Good At Killing’
Jun 1st, 2006 at 9:35 am by Susie
I remember we used to hear stories like this from Vietnam; the officers were actually afraid of the enlisted men and stopped even trying to enforce discipline, for fear of being fragged.
Looks like we’re right back where we started from. From the Daily Telegraph:
In January, shortly before the first published reports emerged about US marines methodically gunning down men, women and children in the Iraqi town of Haditha, The Daily Telegraph spent time at the main camp of the battalion under investigation.
Rumours had spread that what happened on Nov 19 diverged from the official line that locals were killed by a roadside bomb.
None of the troops wanted to talk, but even a short stay with the men of the 3rd Bn 1st Marine Division in their camp located in Haditha Dam on the town’s outskirts, made clear it was a place where institutional discipline had frayed and was even approaching breakdown.
Normally, American camps in Iraq are almost suburban, with their coffee shops and polite soldiers who idle away their rest hours playing computer games and discussing girls back home.
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 dam is one of Iraq’s largest hydroelectric stations. A US special operations unit had secured it during the invasion and American troops had been there ever since. Now they were spread across the dozen or so levels where Iraqi engineers once lived.
The lifts were smashed, the lighting provided only a half gloom. Inside, the grinding of the dam machinery made talking difficult. The place routinely stank of rotten eggs, a by-product apparently of the grease to keep the turbines running.
The day before my arrival one soldier had shot himself in the head with his M16. No one would discuss why.
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.
A skull and crossbones symbol had been etched on the entrance to the shack.
I was never allowed to interview a senior officer properly, unlike during every other stint with American forces. The only soldiers willing to speak at length were those from the small Azerbaijani contingent whose role was to marshal the band of Iraqi engineers who kept the machinery going into and out of the facility.
The US troops liked them. “They have looser rules of engagement,” one said admiringly in a rare, snatched conversation.
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.
It is a place where six marines died in three days during the previous August and where in nearby Parwana 14 died shortly afterwards in the most deadly roadside bomb attack of the war.
At the dam there was one American civilian, an engineer sent out by the US government with instructions to keep the facility operational.
It was a difficult task. Each time there was a power cut the turbines stopped working, the water against the dam would start to build up and everybody knew that if the local engineers could not get the generators started in time it would collapse.
The American’s job was not helped by the marines viewing his Iraqi workers as potential saboteurs. The troops he was quartered with terrified him, so much so that he would not let his name be quoted for fear of reprisal.
He was keeping a secret dossier of breaches he said he had witnessed, or learned of. He planned to present it to the authorities when he returned to the US.
“Marines are good at killing,” he said. “Nothing else. They like it.”
This all sounds like the reporter went out with a set notion that Marines are bad and the American led counterinsurgency effort is wrong or evil and wrote about the first thing he/she saw that confirmed it. It also sounds like the author watched too many Vietnam War movies growing up. Bases in Iraq that look “suburban” are usually large camps where thousands of servicemembers live, work and operate out of. They have well maintained infrastructure and require hundreds of support personnel just to keep the facilities that were so conspicuously absent, like head facilities, showers and kitchens, up and running. It is impossible given the constraints of resources and manpower placed on the military to provide that standard of living everywhere in Iraq. In addition, a dam, which is a lucrative target for an insurgent to begin with is far too dangerous a place to have that sort of built up presence with the myriad support troops required. It falls into the category of an unneccesary risk. The article does give a sense of what a truly dirty, ugly and difficult businesses war, combat, and counter insurgency work are. Marines are renowned the world over for their discipline, attention to detail and near fanatical appraoch to cleanliness and military appearance. For a Marine camp to look like this, if it really did, should give you an idea of the difficulty and comlexity of the situation there. As for Marines being good at killing, they are. In the final analysis, after all is said and done, killing the enemies of America is what Marines are trained and paid to do. No one wants to fight a dirty, dangerous and confusing battle like the ones being fought every day in Iraq. No one wants to live like animals in the dirt and filth, but someone has to do it.
First of all, Chris, the Telegraph is a very conservative paper. Secondly, I don’t think the article missed any of the points you raised; I think they were trying to show how badly the situation has deteriorated - which it has.
First let me be clear. 99.99% of the people who join up are great people. It gives meaning, pays for school ,or gives direction or its a job. But some people are bad, some people are killers, Sometimes they join up so they can do what they like to do best. And if you like to kill, and get paid for it, then the armed services could be a perfect fit. But some go beyond killing the bad guys, the target of the mission, and the crazy comes out to play. Or something happens to a “normal” person, and they lose it. Why? I don’t know. Why do I have a co-worker who couldn’t tell the truth if her life depended on it? I don’t know. Born bad or just bad? But there is still no justification for the behavior. And it has to be stopped.
No one wants to live like animals in the dirt and filth, but someone has to do it.
Nope. These marines didn’t have to be living in this filth killing these people and getting killed by them. That’s why BushCo must be impeached for lying the country into a war of choice. He owns every hardship these marines are suffering and every crime they commit.
eRobin,
Good point.
I wonder how many of you have even seen any of Iraq except the news clips? I have been here in the Anbar province for 18 months and I will tell you that reporter flat lied about many things. The Marines here do not live like animals, nor do the soldiers, airmen or sailors.
Semperfi!