WASHINGTON, June 8 (UPI) -- Allegations that 24 Iraqi civilians were gunned down in cold blood by Marines on a rampage in the town of Haditha have unlocked the demons of Vietnam's My Lai massacre, and other nameless atrocities that exist only in the darkest corners of the minds of former combatants.
In the aftermath, observers have been quick to point out that it is shallow to compare Haditha to My Lai, where U.S. soldiers slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese in 1968. Military officials note today's troops are all-volunteer forces, not draftees, better trained and more disciplined, with structured course work in conflict ethics to boot.
When Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki charged this week that military violence against civilians has become a "daily phenomenon," Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, commander of multinational forces, rushed to their defense, saying that "out of... 150,000 soldiers, I'd dare say that 99.9 percent of them are doing the right thing.
"I'd like to get it to 100 percent our soldiers doing the right thing every single day," he said. "But you've got to be a realist and understand that those kind of things do happen."
As truth-seeking journalists -- limited in their capacity to relay a complex on-the-ground reality -- hound an insular military that again appears to have attempted a cover-up, it is worthwhile to revisit a story that reads between the lines of the tragedies that occur behind enemy lines.
Philip Caputo's "A Rumor of War" is a disarmingly honest account of his experiences as a Marine unraveled by violence. Arriving in Vietnam March 1965 with the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, the first U.S. combat unit in Indochina, Lt. Caputo returned home after 16 months spent knee-deep in a brutal war that drove him from reasonable to the unthinkable, earning a court-martial that nearly ended in a murder conviction.
Unlike many war veterans who lapsed into drink and dissolution, Caputo went back to Vietnam in 1975 as a Chicago Tribune correspondent and covered the fall of Saigon. His motive in writing the book was to show that evil is not inherent in certain men as some people are quick to conclude, "except in the sense that the devil dwells in us all."
Rather than describe the ill deeds of others, Caputo lays bare his own descent into murderousness.
Mentally and physically depleted after 10 months in the bush, mired in hostile territory, he orders some of his men to go to a nearby village to seize a pair of suspected VC and kill them if they resist.
Half-mad, the GIs execute the pair without provocation, and Caputo finds himself laughing at the sight of one of the victims' head's blown out, only to realize their innocence in a case of mistaken identity -- and his own bottomless guilt. His cavalier emphasis to "kill," in effect, was the green-light that sealed their deaths.
Caputo's story is, in the most fundamental sense, cut from the same cloth as My Lai and Haditha: Death tolls may vary, along with the equipment and expertise of the fighting men involved, but the constant is that "war, by its nature, can arouse a psychopathic violence in men of seemingly normal impulses."
Questions linger as to what prompted members of Kilo Company to embark on an alleged killing spree after an improvised-explosive device killed Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas on the morning of last Nov. 19. Those within the military insist that Marines are trained to kill, not to carry out humanitarian or police actions as has often been the case in Iraq. The situation is made worse in war without frontlines where it is difficult to separate civilians from insurgents.
Prior to conducting patrols in Anbar province, a Sunni stronghold, Kilo Company had weathered the fiercest combat in Iraq thus far, losing 17 men in 10 days of house-to-house fighting to secure Fallujah. Some troops in the unit had already done two tours in three years, before coming to the hotbed of resistance where insurgents were said to behead anyone found to even cooperate with the Americans.
Flashing back to Vietnam, Caputo writes that the soldiers in his brigade were not innately cruel, but those "who do not expect to receive mercy eventually lose their inclination to grant it." He then offers a timeless distillation of what moves men to press on fighting a war despite antipathy back home and on the ground -- circa Vietnam 1965, and Iraq 2006 -- with no end in sight. Or on occasion, go too far.
"At times, the comradeship that was the war's only redeeming quality caused some of its worst crimes -- acts of retribution for friends who had been killed," Caputo continues. "Some men could not withstand the stress of guerilla fighting: the hair-trigger alertness constantly demanded of them, the feeling that the enemy was everywhere, the inability to distinguish civilians from combatants created emotional pressures which built to such a point that a trivial provocation could make these men explode with the blind destructiveness of a mortar shell."
Asked by a Seattle TV interviewer what had driven members of his company to commit alleged war crimes, one soldier wounded by the roadside bomb that killed Terrazas said that mounting pressures set off by the incident might have caused others to be "blinded by hate... and they just lost control."
Additional investigations are now under way into other possible attacks against civilians elsewhere in Iraq: Marines are said to have shot up to 11 people, including women and children, during a March 15 raid on a home in Ishaqi, and another company is said to have abducted an Iraqi from his home in Hamandiya and killed him. Like Haditha, cover-ups are alleged in both cases.
Caputo testifies in his memoir that "atrocities were as common to the Vietnamese battlefields as shell craters and barbed wire." If a raft of such incidents has already surfaced in Iraq, it is not a stretch to imagine that others remain buried.
Marine Corps commandant, Gen. Michael Hagee, Wednesday vowed to assist in ongoing investigations, saying that anyone found guilty of violating Corps standards would be held accountable. He added that the Marine Corps would address actions "taken or not taken" by the chain of command and affirmed violators would be punished "regardless of grade or position." The troops, meanwhile, will undergo a refresher course in combat ethics.
Similarly, a chink in the chain of command was cited in the My Lai massacre. But Capt. Ernest Medina, the man who ordered U.S. Army troops to round-up villagers and "waste them" if they refused, and later admitted to suppressing evidence, was acquitted of murdering 102 Vietnamese; platoon leader William Calley, the lowest-ranking officer charged, was convicted of premeditated murder in 1971 and sentenced to life in prison before President Nixon granted him house arrest. Three years later, he was released.
Thirty-eight years after My Lai, it still comes as a shock to some that the finest military in the world is capable of such breakdowns. On the heels of past transgressions, with a public soured by the current war, less sympathy can be expected in the rush to judgment. Blame is sure to fall on the shoulders of a few 20-somethings, minted into sad memory by the media.
Caputo, a soldier-turned-Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, but always a soldier, saw the ugly truth of it all after his failure in the field. Vietnam left him "physically whole but emotionally wasted." In the end, he was spared from the gallows, though his punishment persists.
"I could not conceive of the act as one of premeditated murder," he writes. "It had not been committed in a vacuum. It was a direct result of the war. The thing we had done was a result of what the war had done to us."
