Open Letter to Devil Dogs of the 3.1

A letter to Marines involved in the 2004 battle for Fallujah.

To Devil Dogs of the 3.1:

Since the shooting in the mosque, I've been haunted that I have not been able to tell you directly what I saw or explain the process by which the world came to see it. As you know, I'm not some war zone tourist with a camera who doesn't understand that ugly things happen in combat. I've spent most of the past five years covering global conflict. But I have never in my career been a "gotcha" reporter hoping for people to commit wrongdoings so that I can catch them.

This week I've been shocked to see myself even painted as some kind of anti-war activist. Anyone who has seen my reporting on television or read my dispatches is aware of the lengths to which I've gone to play it straight down the middle and not become tool of propaganda for the left or right. Yet I find myself a lightning rod for controversy in reporting what I saw, camera rolling.

It is time for you to have the facts from me, in my own words, about what I saw without imposing guilt or innocence or anything in between on that Marine. I want you to read my account and make up your own minds about whether you think what I did was right or wrong. All the other armchair analysts don't mean a damn to me.

Here it goes.

It's Saturday morning and we're still at our strong point from the night before, a clearing between a set of buildings on the southern edge of the city. The advance has been swift, but there are still pockets of resistance. We are taking sniper fire from both the front and rear.

Weapons Company uses 81s (mortars) where it spots muzzle flashes. The tanks do some blasting. By mid-morning we're told we are moving north again. We will be back-clearing some of the area we passed yesterday. There are reports that the mosque where 10 insurgents were killed and five were wounded on Friday may have been re-occupied overnight.

I decide to leave you guys and go with one of the infantry squads as it moves house to house back toward the mosque. (For their privacy and protection I will not identify those I was traveling with during this incident.)

Many structures are empty of people but full of weapons. Outside one residence a member of the squad lobs a frag grenade over a wall. Everyone piles in, including me.

While the Marines go into the house, I follow flames caused by the grenade into the courtyard. When the smoke clears, I can see through my viewfinder that the fire is burning beside a large pile of anti-aircraft rounds.

I yell to the lieutenant that we need to move. Almost immediately after clearing the house, small explosions begin as the rounds cook in the fire.

At that point, we hear the tanks firing their 240 machine guns into the mosque. There is radio chatter that says insurgents inside could be shooting back. The tanks cease fire and we file through a breach in the outer wall.

We hear gunshots coming from what seems to be inside the mosque. A Marine from my squad yells, "Are there Marines in here?"

When we arrive at the front entrance we see that another squad has entered before us.

The lieutenant asks them, "Are there people inside?"

One of the Marines raises his hand signaling five.

"Did you shoot them?" the lieutenant asks.

"Roger that, sir," the Marine responds.

"Were they armed?" The Marine just shrugs and we all move inside.

Immediately after entering the mosque, I see black plastic body bags spread around; they are the same dead from the day before. But more surprising, I also see the same five men who were wounded from Friday. It appears that one of them is now dead and three are bleeding to death from new gunshot wounds. The fifth is partially covered by a blanket near the same column and in the same condition as on Friday. He has not been shot again. I look closely at both the dead and the wounded. There don't appear to be any weapons anywhere.

"These were the same wounded from yesterday," I say to the lieutenant. He takes a look around and goes outside the mosque with his radio operator to call the situation in to Battalion Forward Headquarters.

I see an old man in a red kaffiyeh (a cloth headdress fastened by a band around the crown) lying against the back wall. Another man is face down next to him, his hand on the old man's lap as if he were trying to take cover. I squat beside them, inches away and begin to videotape them. Then I notice that the blood coming from the old man's nose is bubbling, a sign he is still breathing. So is the man next to him.

While I continue to tape, a Marine walks to the other two bodies about 15 feet away against the same back wall.

Then I hear him say this about one of the men:

"He's fucking faking he's dead. He's faking he's fucking dead."

Through my viewfinder I can see the Marine raise the muzzle of his rifle in the direction of the wounded Iraqi. There are no sudden movements, no reaching or lunging. However, the Marine could legitimately believe the man poses some kind of danger. Maybe he's going to cover him while another Marine searches for weapons.

Instead, he pulls the trigger. There is a small splatter against the back wall and the man's leg slumps down.

"Well he's dead now," says another Marine in the background.

I am still rolling. I feel the deep pit of my stomach. The Marine then abruptly turns and strides away, right past the fifth wounded insurgent lying next to a column. He is very much alive and peering from his blanket. He is moving, even trying to talk. But for some reason, it seems he did not pose the same apparent "danger" as the other man, even though he may have been more capable of hiding a weapon or explosive beneath his blanket.

Two other Marines in the room raise their weapons as the man tries to talk.

For a moment I'm paralyzed, still taping with the old man in the foreground. I get up after a beat and tell the Marines again what I had told the lieutenant: this man, and all of these wounded men, were the same ones from yesterday. They had been disarmed, treated and left here.

At this point the Marine who fired the shot becomes aware I was in the room. He comes up to me and says, "I didn't know sir, I didn't know." The anger that seemed present just moments before turned to fear and dread.

The wounded man tries again to speak to me in Arabic.

He says, "Yesterday I was shot ... please ... yesterday I was shot over there and talked to all of you on camera. I am one of the guys from this whole group. I gave you information. Do you speak Arabic? I want to give you information." (This man reportedly has been located by the Naval Criminal Investigation Service, which is handling the case.)

In the aftermath, the first question was why had these wounded men been left in the mosque?

It was answered by Staff Judge Advocate Lt. Col. Bob Miller, who interviewed the Marines after the incident. After being treated for their wounds on Friday by Navy corpsmen, the insurgents were going to be transported to the rear when time and circumstances allowed (I personally saw their bandages).

The area, however, was still hot and there were American casualties to be moved first.

Also, the squad that entered the mosque Saturday was different than the one that had led the attack Friday.

It is reasonable to presume the Saturday squad may not have known these insurgents had already been engaged and subdued a day earlier. Yet when this new squad engaged the wounded insurgents perhaps really believing they had been fighting or somehow posed a threat those Marines knew from training to check for weapons and explosives after disabling the insurgents instead of leaving them and waiting outside the mosque for the squad I was following to arrive.

During the course of the event, there were plenty of mitigating circumstances like the ones just mentioned that I reported in my story. The Marine who fired the shot reportedly had been shot in the face the day before.

I'm also well aware from many years as a war reporter that there have been times, especially in this conflict, when dead and wounded insurgents have been booby-trapped supposedly even an incident just a block away from the mosque in which one Marine was killed and five wounded. Again, that was a detail clearly stated in my television report.

No one, especially a person like me who has lived in a war zone with you, would deny that a solider or Marine could legitimately err on the side of caution under those circumstances. War is about killing your enemy before he kills you.

But it bothered me that the Marine didn't seem to consider the other insurgents a threat, neither the one very obviously moving under the blanket nor the two next to me who were still breathing.

I can't know what was in the mind of that Marine. He is the only one who does.

Observing all of this as an experienced war reporter who always bore in mind the dark perils of this conflict, even knowing the possibilities of mitigating circumstances, it appeared very plain to me that something was not right. According to Lt. Col. Miller, the rules of engagement in Fallujah required soldiers or Marines to determine hostile intent before using deadly force. I was not watching from 100 feet away. I was in the same room. Aside from breathing, I did not observe any movement at all.

Making sure you know the basis for my choices after the incident is as important to me as knowing how the incident went down. I did not feel in any way like I had captured some kind of "prize" video. In fact, I was heartsick. Immediately after the mosque incident, I told the unit's commanding officer what happened. I shared the video with him, and its impact rippled all the way up the chain of command. Marine commanders immediately pledged their cooperation.

We all knew it was a complicated story, and if not handled responsibly, it had the potential to further inflame the volatile region. I offered to hold the tape until the military had time to look into the incident and begin an investigation, providing me with information that would fill in some blanks.

For those who don't practice journalism as a profession, it may be difficult to understand why we must report stories like this at all, especially if they seem to be aberrations and not representative of the behavior or character of an organization as a whole.

The answer is not an easy one.

In war, as in life, there are plenty of opportunities to see the full spectrum of good and evil of which people are capable. As journalists our job is to report both, although neither may be fully representative of the people we are covering. For example, acts of selfless heroism are likely to be as unique to a group as darker deeds. But our coverage of these unique events, combined with a larger perspective, will allow the truth of that situation, in all its complexity, to begin to emerge. That doesn't make the decision to report events like this one any easier. It has, for me, led to an agonizing struggle the proverbial long, dark night of the soul.

I knew NBC would be responsible with the footage. But we were part of a video "pool" in Fallujah, and that obligated us to share all of our footage with other networks. I had no idea how our "pool" partners might use the footage. I considered not feeding the tape to the pool or even, for a moment, destroying it. But that thought created the same pit in my stomach that witnessing the shooting had. It felt wrong. Hiding this wouldn't make it go away. There were other people in that room. What happened in the mosque would eventually come out. I would be faced with the fact that I had betrayed truth as well as a life supposedly spent in pursuit of it.

When NBC aired the story 48 hours later, we attempted to highlight every possible mitigating issue for the Marine's actions. We wanted viewers to have a very clear understanding of the circumstances surrounding the fighting on that frontline. Many of our colleagues were just as responsible. Other foreign networks made different decisions, and because of that I have become the conflicted conduit who brought this to the world.

The Marines have built their proud reputation by fighting for freedoms such as the one that allows me to do my job, a job that in some cases may appear to discredit them. But both the leaders and the grunts in the field like you understand that if you lower your standards, if you accept less, then less is what you'll become.

There are people in our own country who would weaken your institution and our nation by telling you it's OK to betray our guiding principles by not making the tough decisions, by letting difficult circumstances turns us into victims or worse, villains.

I interviewed your commanding officer, Lt. Col. Willy Buhl, before the battle for Fallujah began. He said something very powerful, something that now seems prophetic:

"We're the good guys. We are Americans. We are fighting a gentleman's war here ... we don't behead people, we don't come down to the same level of the people we're combating. That's a very difficult thing for a young 18-year-old Marine who's been trained to locate, close with and destroy the enemy with fire and close combat. That's a very difficult thing for a 42-year-old lieutenant colonel with 23 years experience in the service who was trained to do the same thing once upon a time, and who now has 1,000-plus men to lead, guide, coach, mentor, and ensure we remain the good guys and keep the moral high ground."

I listened carefully when he said those words. I believed them.

So here, ultimately, is how it plays out: When the Iraqi man in the mosque posed a threat, he was your enemy; when he was subdued, he was your responsibility; when he was killed in front of my eyes and my camera, the story of his death became my responsibility.

The burdens of war, as you so well know, are unforgiving for all of us.

I pray for your soon and safe return.

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