[Peace-discuss] Support our troops?

[C. G. Estabrook]

[From the right-wing British paper the Telegraph, an account of the 
background of the Haditha massacre.  See also "The Killing Factory" by 
Jeff Tietz, Rolling Stone Magazine issue 998 (20 April 2006). --CGE]


    'Marines are good at killing. Nothing else. They like it'
    By Oliver Poole (Filed: 01/06/2006)

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."

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