Iraq War: "The burdens of war ... are unforgiving for all of us."

This is my third post about the Marine shooting incident in the Fallujah mosque.  In the first of them, I linked to some other material on the legal context in which the incident has to be viewed, at least by those of us who try to stay "reality-based."

In the second, I talked about a blowhard cowardly white guy who gushed with enthusiasm at the killing.

Kevin Sites, the reporter who made the footage of the Marine shooting the wounded prisoner, has his own blog.  And in this post he talks about what he saw and experienced in the incident: Open Letter to Devil Dogs of the 3.1 11/21/04.  The post is fairly lengthy and worth reading in its entirety.  But here is his description of the incident, narrating in present-time:

We hear gunshots from what seems to be coming from 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 already 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 same Marine responds.

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

And he describes the scene he saw inside (my emphasis):

Immediately after going in, I see the same black plastic body bags spread around the mosque. The dead from the day before. But more surprising, I see the same five men that were wounded from Friday as well. 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 and is in the same place and condition he was in on Friday, near a column. 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 in the situation to Battalion Forward HQ.

Sites then was filming two wounded Iraqis, when the now-infamous incident occurred:

While I continue to tape, a Marine walks up to the other two bodies about fifteen feet away, but also lying 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 him 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 away 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 -- though he may have been more capable of hiding a weapon or explosive beneath his blanket.

But then 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 -- that this man -- all of these wounded men -- were the same ones from yesterday. That they had been disarmed treated and left here.

The next part of Sites' account is particularly striking, reading it not long after seeing that ridiculous Chuckie's unrestrained praise and admiration for the killing.  Here's what Chuckie said:

You did what you had to do ...

No matter what they say you are a United States Marine and there are millions of people who would love to shake your hand and tell you how very much they appreciate you. Without you and young people like you there would be no United States of America.

... You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of young man.

I only hope that someday I can meet you and tell you in person how much I admire you and all your brothers and sisters who risk their lives on a daily basis to keep America free and safe.

Here's how Sites describes the actual human being who did the shooting, who bears no resemblance to the sentimental fantasy figure in the passage I just quoted.  Sites:

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

Sites states that, unlike the war-worshipping fools of the Chuckie type, the Marine Corps got a staff judge advocate on the scene "who interviewed the Marines involved following the incident."  Sites is careful to put the incident into the context of the actual fighting that was taking place in Fallujah:

During the course of these events, there was plenty of mitigating circumstances like the ones just mentioned and which I reported in my story. The Marine who fired the shot had reportedly been shot in the face himself 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, even supposedly including an incident that happened just a block away from the mosque in which one Marine was killed and five others wounded. Again, a detail that was clearly stated in my television report.

But, despite his evident identification with the Marines with whom he was imbedded, Sites says:

But 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 to me very plainly that something was not right. According to Lt. Col Bob Miller, the rules of engagement in Falluja required soldiers or Marines to determine hostile intent before using deadly force. I was not watching from a hundred 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 theincident went down. I did not in any way feel 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 had 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.

Again, we should note in the real world - not the Oxycontin fantasy world of hate radio - in this instance the Marine Corps showed every sign of taking the laws of war and the rules of engagement very seriously.  It's not a abstract thing for them.  Regardless of the legal outcome of this case, the incident is already feeding the hatred and distrust that provides recruits for the guerrillas and the jihadists.

And Sites gives us a glimpse into the real world where real men and women experience the ugly realities of war, a place quite different from the comic-book world of nobly murderous Marines and Evil Media depicted by Chuckie and those with similarly demented ideas:

I knew NBC would be responsible with the footage. But there were complications. We were part of a video "pool" in Falluja, and that obligated us to share all of our footage with other networks. I had no idea how our other "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 that 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.

And this also comes from the world of the reality-based:

The Marines have built their proud reputation on fighting for freedoms like 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, than less is what you'll become.

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

Yes, there are indeed such people in our country.

So here, ultimately, is how it all 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 read once about the Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel praying at a ceremony at Auschwitz many years later.  In his prayer, he asked that God not forgive those who had murdered innocent Jewish children.

This is a non-Christian idea.  Christianity teaches that God can and will forgive even such crimes if the perpetrators sincerely repent.

But I wonder if we Christians have it wrong.  I wonder if God is willing to forgive those who start a war like this based on lies, a war that leaves tens of thousands of stories of horror in its wake.  How many people will be haunted for the rest of their lives by just this one incident?  And, of course, at least one human being in this case died for no good reason, even if it turns out in the end that his killing was a tragedy rather than a crime.

"The burdens of war ... are unforgiving for all of us."