Los Angeles Time
July 2, 2007
HADITHA, IRAQ — The day
that would produce the biggest case of alleged atrocities by U.S. troops in Iraq
began simply.
On Nov. 19, 2005, a squad of Marines moved out before dawn
to take hot chow and a code-changing device to an outpost a few miles away. They
planned to get back while the sun was barely rising over the Euphrates
River.
The Marines from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Regiment, had
arrived in Haditha six weeks earlier from Camp Pendleton. In that time, there
had been few signs of insurgents — and Marines had searched dozens of houses
without a firefight or casualty.
Still, nearly 50 Marines from the
battalion that preceded them had been killed or severely wounded in the area
that the U.S. calls the Triad — Haditha, Barwanah, Haqlaniya. The year before,
insurgents in Haditha had massacred dozens of Iraqis accused of collaborating
with U.S. troops.
Two days before the Nov. 19 convoy, intelligence
officers had warned that foreign fighters who entered from Syria were waiting to
ambush Marines in Haditha, 80 miles from the border, and would probably hide
behind civilians.
Some of the 12 Marines on that morning's mission had
never been in combat. Others were veterans of bloody house-to-house fighting the
year before in Fallouja.
Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, the squad leader, had
never seen combat, but had impressed his superiors as a mature, natural leader.
He was a seeming contradiction: a 25-year-old with a boyish face and an
understated manner — and menacing-looking tattoos on both forearms.
After
a lengthy briefing about the route, the dangers and the tactics to use in case
of attack, Wuterich said simply, "Let's get it done, Marines."
With that
classic order, the four-vehicle convoy left Firm Base Sparta about 6 a.m.,
rolling down a wide road the Marines had named Route Chestnut.
Before the
sun rose high, one Marine and 24 Iraqi civilians would be dead. Nineteen months
later, three enlisted Marines face charges of murder and four officers are
charged with dereliction of duty.
At Camp Pendleton, preliminary hearings
are underway on whether the cases should be sent to courts-martial. Those
hearings, and interviews in Haditha and in the U.S., have put many new details
of that day onto the public record.
'I'm not seeing 4'
The
terrain of Haditha is ideally suited for guerrilla warfare. Its terraced streets
sloping down to the Euphrates provide good vantage points for snipers. Many
homes have solid masonry walls in the front and back, perfect for sneaking a
look at passing convoys and then ducking to avoid detection, a tactic Marines
call "turkey-peeking."
As the Marines set off, they scanned the road for
explosives and nearby yards for snipers. They saw no one.
The drop-off
went smoothly, and the Marines began the return trip about 7 a.m., shortly after
sunrise. Riding with them were several Iraqi soldiers who were to take part in
joint patrols.
Slowly the convoy went down River Road and then took a
left onto Route Chestnut. Near the intersection of Route Chestnut and the road
the Marines call Route Viper, an enormous explosion erupted beneath the convoy's
last vehicle, a Humvee.
"I'm not seeing 4, I'm not seeing 4," yelled
Lance Cpl. Justin L. Sharratt, a Fallouja veteran who was manning the gun turret
in the first vehicle.
"Fourth vehicle is hit, T.J.'s dead," yelled Lance
Cpl. Rene Rodriguez.
T.J. was Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, 20, a popular Marine
with a cheerful, blustery manner. He was from El Paso, but buddies called him
T.J. in reference to rowdy times they had shared in Tijuana.
The blast
killed him instantly. Parts of his torso were strewn 100 yards from the burning
Humvee. His severed legs remained in the driver's seat.
Lance Cpl. James
Crossan, 20, and Lance Cpl. Salvador Guzman, 19, were wounded — Crossan blown
out the right door and pinned under metal debris. Brian Whitt, a Navy corpsman,
rushed to him with morphine.
"Help me, Doc," said Crossan, barely
conscious. Both Guzman and Crossan would survive.
Wuterich took charge.
He called Sparta to report that Marines were "in contact" with the
enemy.
At Sparta, another group, called a quick-reaction force, was
standing by, prepared to race to the aid of the squad that had left. First Lt.
William Kallop, the platoon commander, was part of that unit. It was the
24-year-old Kallop's first combat experience.
Meanwhile, a white Opel
sedan approached the scene of the blast, with five young Iraqi men
inside.
Marines shouted for the car to halt and pointed their M-16s at
the windshield. The car stopped, and the five men got out.
To this point,
no details of the day are in dispute. From this point on, there would be much to
question.
The five Iraqis were quickly riddled with bullets by the
Marines. Wuterich told his superiors that night that the five had begun to run
away. Under Marine rules of engagement, if suspected bombers run from the scene
of an attack, they can be shot, even in the back.
Wuterich said that he
and Sgt. Sanick P. Dela Cruz, 23, shot the five because they suspected them of
being spotters or triggermen.
For months, Dela Cruz backed Wuterich. But
then he was charged with murder. Prosecutors offered to drop the charge in
exchange for his testimony. At a hearing at Camp Pendleton in early May, he gave
a new account.
The five were standing still, with their fingers locked
behind their necks, when Wuterich began firing, he said. "They were just
standing, looking around, had hands up," he testified.
Dela Cruz admitted
that he "sprayed" the bodies while they were on the ground and then, in a show
of anger, urinated on one of them. He said Wuterich told him to lie and say that
the Iraqi soldiers the squad was transporting had killed the
five.
Minutes after the five men had been killed, Kallop arrived. He did
not ask why the Marines had opened fire.
"We had stuff going on, and I
wasn't going to say, 'Stop the presses. Take me step by step,' " Kallop said,
testifying this month in exchange for immunity from prosecution.
Kallop
said that Wuterich told him gunshots had been coming from the south and that he
gave the order to search a row of houses about 100 yards across a vacant
lot.
"I decided that the houses were most likely where fire was coming
from, and I told Sgt. Wuterich to 'clear south,' " Kallop said.
Whether
Wuterich's squad was under fire after the bomb blast remains uncertain. Some
Marines told investigators they heard shots, others said they did
not.
Kallop remained crouched behind a Humvee for protection. Wuterich
and two veterans of Fallouja — Sharratt, 21, and Lance Cpl. Stephen B. Tatum, 24
— headed for the houses.
"They did not have grief in their eyes," Kallop
said. "They were operating as we trained them."
'Where are the bad
guys?'
Wuterich and Tatum later told superiors that when they entered
the first house, they heard the "racking" sound of an AK-47 being cocked for
firing and responded by lobbing grenades and firing their M-16s. They said they
saw an insurgent fleeing from the first house to the second, and followed him
with more grenades and gunfire.
Within minutes, 15 civilians inside were
dead, including three women and seven children.
An old man's legs were
severed by a grenade. Another man was shot in the eye. A child was decapitated
by gunfire or grenade blasts. Several victims apparently were sitting with their
backs to a wall when shot, investigators later determined.
Some of the
dead children, ranging in age from 2 to 13, were on a bed. The women appeared to
have been trying to shield them. A teenage girl was shot in the
head.
Only after the gunfire was over did Kallop approach the houses,
accompanied by Cpl. Hector Salinas, a member of Wuterich's squad. Kallop
testified that he was shocked when he found no weapons inside the houses and
that none of the males wore the kind of military garb associated with
insurgents.
"I looked at Cpl. Salinas and said, 'What the crap? Where are
the bad guys?' " Kallop said. "He looked as surprised as I was."
Still,
Kallop asked few questions of Wuterich and the others. "Maybe because I wanted
to keep on pushing on what I was doing and come back when I had a chance," he
said.
Wuterich, Sharratt and Salinas then decided to "clear" houses on
the north side of the crossroads.
Sharratt said that men had been spotted
turkey-peeking over a wall. That, he said, was enough to indicate hostile
intent.
In the first house, they were greeted by women and children,
Sharratt said. But in the second, he said, he heard the sound of AK-47 racking
and saw a man with an AK-47 in a doorway.
"I jumped back and bumped into
Sgt. Wuterich," he said. "After that my training took over, and everything that
my first sergeants and squad leaders had ever taught me came into
play."
He said his machine gun jammed so he pulled out his 9-millimeter
handgun and began blasting.
"After I ran out of ammo, I yelled, 'I'm
out,' and Sgt. Wuterich entered the room and fired his M-16 at the men too,"
Sharratt said.
Four Iraqi brothers lay dead — three on the floor, one in
a closet. The three had each been shot in the head. The brother in the closet
was killed by M-16 fire.
Sharratt said he took two AK-47s from the dead
men and gave them to Tatum.
Although there are records of two AK-47s
being seized that day near Chestnut and Viper, the Marine assigned to collect
captured weapons testified that he did not know whether they were seized as
Sharratt said, or came from somewhere else.
Relatives of the dead
brothers told investigators they witnessed Marines herding the four into a back
bedroom and then heard shots being fired. Wuterich and Sharratt have denied
their account; Sharratt passed a lie detector test on the issue, according to
documents presented at his preliminary hearing.
Commander
arrives
Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, the commander of the 3rd
Battalion, was in his command center at the 10-story-tall Haditha Dam, 12 miles
away, listening to radio reports from the scene.
His actions, and those
of his fellow officers over the next few hours, would bring into question the
attitude of Marine commanders toward the killings. Were they covering up for
their men or simply trying to survive a violent, chaotic day?
Chessani
was on his third tour in Iraq. He had served as a battalion executive officer
during the April 2004 fight in Fallouja and then as a regimental operations
officer during the November 2004 fight in that city, both times earning high
ratings from his bosses.
Now Chessani had his own battalion and his
troops were "in contact" for the first time in Haditha. Chessani ordered the
launch of an unmanned aerial surveillance vehicle called Scan-Eagle.
By
the time the craft was airborne, the action at Chestnut and Viper was largely
over. As Chessani and other officers watched on large screens, Scan-Eagle beamed
back video of another engagement, an intense gun battle at a palm grove about
1,000 yards from the intersection.
The battle seesawed. Marines sent as
reinforcements were ambushed. The insurgents were well armed, firing AK-47s and
rocket-propelled grenades.
Insurgents were seen running from one place to
another. One was spotted going into a house, then emerging in different clothes
and carrying a baby.
The Marines nodded: typical insurgent ploy, hiding
behind women and children. They assumed the same tactic had been used by the
insurgents who they believed had fired at the Marines at Chestnut and Viper
after the bombing that killed Terrazas.
That blast "was the cataclysmic
event that started the day's events," said Maj. Sam Carrasco, the battalion
operations officer. The Marines ended it with a blast of their own — a 500-pound
bomb on a house in the palm grove.
Chessani arrived at the grove in the
afternoon. Nine of his Marines had been wounded there, none fatally. He
inspected the rubble and looked at the spots where the Marines had been
hit.
But when he suggested driving to the houses where Wuterich and his
squad had killed the civilians, Sgt. Maj. Edward Sax, the battalion's senior
enlisted man, noted that it was getting late and warned against remaining
"outside the wire" after dark.
Besides, everything they needed to know
about the Chestnut-and-Viper skirmish was already known, Sax said. Insurgents
attacked and Marines responded. The pair went to Sparta and then back to
battalion headquarters at the dam.
By nightfall, Chessani's analysis was
set. His Marines, he decided, had been subjected to a "complex, coordinated
attack" starting with the bombing that killed Terrazas, the kind of ambush they
had been warned by intelligence officers to expect.
What he was hearing
from the Marines fit the scenario: The Iraqi men in the Opel had attempted to
flee, shots were coming from the houses, weapons were found in the car and the
houses, Marines clearing the houses were confronted by insurgents with
AK-47s.
"Investigation was not in our lexicon," said 1st Lt. Adam Mathes,
Kilo Company executive officer. "Our understanding is that we were set up in a
situation where it was kill or be killed."
Investigators and prosecutors
would eventually label as false each of the assertions that Chessani had
accepted uncritically as fact. No weapons were found near the car, no AK-47
shell casings could be confirmed as being in the houses, and no signs existed
that insurgents had been firing from them, according to
testimony.
Reliving the day
In the nighttime hours, as
Marines reassembled at Sparta, officers and senior enlisted men concentrated on
trying to help the young Marines cope with the violence that had been done to
their own. Some Marines had tears in their eyes. Others were writing letters to
their families or sitting silently.
"We had to get ready the next day to
go outside the wire again," Kallop said.
Late that night, Kallop wondered
aloud about whether his order to Wuterich to "clear south" had been interpreted
to mean the Marines could employ the tactics used in Fallouja.
"He said
he didn't know if when he said, 'Clear the houses,' … he'd given an order to
kill everyone," Mathes testified.
Officers ordered Marines to take the
bodies from the three houses near Chestnut and Viper to the city morgue.
Previous battalions had always just left the bodies of Iraqis they had killed
where they had fallen.
"We're better than that; we clean up after
ourselves," Mathes said.
Marines who balked at removing the bodies were
told to shut up and go back to work. Iraqis at the morgue vomited when they saw
the dead children.
Even before the bodies were removed, officers were
filing required reports with their superiors at the regimental and division
headquarters about the civilian deaths. None presented a full
picture.
One report, over Chessani's signature, indicated incorrectly
that Chessani had inspected the scene of the civilian deaths. The report, sent
about midnight, did not mention that the civilians had been family members
killed inside their homes, nor did it mention any doubts Kallop may have
expressed.
On Nov. 22, Maj. Gen. Richard Huck, then commander of the 2nd
Marine Division, came to Haditha. He left satisfied that the civilian deaths
were combat-related, and that a briefing he received provided a "plausible
sequence of events."
But by late January, the official version was being
challenged, first by the Haditha town council, which asserted that Marines had
"executed" the civilians, and then by a Time magazine reporter who interviewed
Iraqi survivors.
Army Col. Gregory Watt was assigned to do a quick look.
Carrasco, the battalion operations officer, went to Chessani and suggested that
the Marine Corps might consider doing its own investigation.
Chessani,
who was seated at his desk, whirled around and reacted with uncharacteristic
anger. "My men are not murderers!" he shouted. Later he apologized for his
outburst, but his view did not change.
In early March, Watt recommended
that the Naval Criminal Investigative Service be called in.
'He loved
his Marines'
The NCIS agents took the simple investigative steps that
Marines had failed to take: interview Iraqi witnesses, examine bullet holes,
review autopsy records and pictures of the bodies. They challenged the accounts
of the enlisted Marines who said they had fired the fatal shots in
self-defense.
When the battalion returned to Camp Pendleton a month
later, Chessani, who had been nominated for a Bronze Star and seemed on track to
become a general, was relieved of command along with one of his subordinates,
Capt. Lucas M. McConnell, the Kilo Company commander.
In December, the
Marine Corps charged Wuterich, Sharratt, Tatum and Dela Cruz with murder.
Chessani; McConnell; 1st Lt. Andrew A. Grayson, an intelligence officer; and
Capt. Randy W. Stone, a battalion lawyer, were charged with dereliction of duty
for not investigating whether a war crime had been committed.
Charges
against Dela Cruz were dropped in exchange for his testimony. Article 32
hearings, akin to preliminary hearings, are underway in the remaining cases. In
each, a hearing officer will recommend to Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis, commander of
Marine Forces Central Command, whether the case should go to court-martial, be
dropped or be handled through administrative punishment.
Last month,
prosecutors urged that Chessani's case go to trial to prove that "the Marine
Corps can investigate itself." They allege that Chessani, now 43, had reacted
like a father unable to believe his sons could do wrong.
Said Lt. Col.
Sean Sullivan, the lead prosecutor: "The battalion commander had such a mind-set
that he loved his Marines so much, had so much faith in them, that he could not
believe that they could murder civilians."