Tell It To The Marines (A Soldier's Update)

I’ve heard smart people say ignorant things for the past few days about the incident in Haditha.

None actually knows much but are quite eager and willing to conjecture or pass judgments.

Mary Katherine Ham provides a concise chronology of the partial information available. It’s not much about the incident, but is much about the care of the investigation and the carelessness of the commentary.

Anyone who doesn’t wait or reserve judgment until the very careful military investigations are complete is jumping the gun as much as Murtha.

The only thing that seems pretty clear at this point is that it is definitely not, either by MSM imagination or reality, analogous to My Lai. There is no officer leadership of the Marines in the engagement, there is no command cover-up, there is no hint of purposeful rather than reactive action, the scale is far smaller.

Useful to remember in all this is that our Marines are the finest, and most disciplined, fighting force, made up of our finest men and women. Statistics during the Vietnam era showed Marine recruits actually subpar to the Army’s draftees in intelligence and physically, but the product of Marine training was superior. Today, the Marines retain the best of its volunteers, as this study by the Center for Naval Analysis affirms.

If anything untoward happened at Haditha, it was at worst a small exception. If anything untoward did not happen at Haditha, it is not an exception to the typical coverage provided by our major hysterical media. (UPDATE: Here's an untypical report by an embedded CNN reporter, who saw these Marines' restraint again and again.) In either case, tell it to the Marines who bravely and honorably serve that you don't have the guts and patience to hear the facts, and would rather allow premature ignorance to besmirch their reputation and morale.

UPDATE: A Soldier in Iraq Weighs In
Post # 1: O.J. Simpson, arguably the most guilty innocent man in recent history, was treated with
more respect during his circus of a trial than these Marines are being given now. They are men in uniform, men who have sacrificed more than most ever will in the name of the United States. They deserve our respect until such time as a verdict is reached which calls that respect into question.
So that's my position on the Haditha investigation. If the Marines are found guilty, I believe they will be punished accordingly. If they are found innocent, I believe they will be outcast by the media as benefactors of a cover up. Unfortunately, all of these men's careers are basically over no matter what the findings. The anti-war, anti-Bush journalists have seen to that.

Post # 2: I was in Iraq when the Abu Ghraib story broke in 2004 (side note: I drove
past that very prison just last night) and I don't think the American
military has really recovered from the scandal. I remember the backlash it caused, the increased attacks and IEDs. When I began to read into this Haditha story, I suddenly realized why attacks have spiked in recent days.
One major disadvantage of the media blitzes these reporters perpetrate is that they cause more discontent and violence in a country where you can buy a Soviet-produced rocket propelled grenade launcher with two rounds for the price of an iPod. For a moment set aside whether these Marines are innocent or guilty and think about what kind of backlash this story is going to produce. More IEDs will be placed, more weapons will appear on the streets, and more soldiers are going to die. . I'm a major supporter of the First Amendment, but I have a vested interest in this incident being kept low-profile. If it's true, it's an atrocity, and the men responsible from bottom to top should swing from the yardarm. If it turns out to be yet another case of the media attacking the Bush administration, an as-yet
unknown number of U.S. servicemen will have been killed as a result of a media circus. If the latter is true, can we hang the reporters for negligent manslaughter?