none of this was written by me, but by members of another military-oriented website. I'm presenting them here, because they a) give more info, or b) say what I feel better than I could.
- Marine's probably been up for 3 or 4 days, getting shot at, watched his buddies die or be wounded and the bad guy, while wounded, may conceal a grenade.
- He had also been shot in the face earlier in the day and was RTD. One of his platoon mates was KIA'd minutes before his squad entered the mosque by - you guessed it - a booby trapped enemy body.
-I think the most important aspect of this incident is that this young Marine was unaware of the 5 wounded Iraqis in the mosque who were left behind the day earlier. If he believed that he was still conducting ongoing combat operations, then he has some justification in removing a potential threat, especially if he was aware of the booby-trapped body nearby that had resulted in a Marine KIA from his unit. Maybe he thought this guy was trying to pull the same stunt. I have no qualms with what that Marine did. I can honestly tell from the video footage that he thought the enemy was a threat, wounded or not, unarmed or not. I think he acted in the interests of his fellow Marines, and his own life. I doubt one of those terrorists would have hesitated to shoot a Marine in the same situation.
- From CNN â “ â Å“Friday, the Marines were fired upon by snipers and insurgents armed with rocket-propelled grenades from a mosque and an adjacent building. The Marines returned fire with tank shells and machine guns. They eventually stormed the mosque, killing 10 insurgents and wounding five others, and showing off a cache of rifles and grenades for journalists. The Marines told the pool reporter that the wounded men would be left behind for others to pick up and move to the rear for treatment. But Saturday, another squad of Marines found that the mosque had been reoccupied by insurgents and attacked it again, only to find the same wounded men inside. Four of the men appeared to have been shot again in Saturday's fighting, and one of them appeared to be dead, according to the pool report. In the video, a Marine was seen noticing that one of the men appeared to be breathing. A Marine approached one of the men in the mosque saying, "He's [expletive] faking he's dead. He's faking he's [expletive] dead." The Marine raised his rifle and fired into the apparently wounded man's head, at which point a companion said, "Well, he's dead now."â ? - "reoccupied by insurgents" Sounds to me like the same assholes fired on Marines twice. Better to make sure they can't do it a third time.
- Context is everything. You have to put yourself in the headspace of that grunt, who after all, is very lucky to be alive. He had been wounded in the face the day before, seen his buddies killed, and had participated in close combat for no one knows how many days and hours before this incident. I myself doubt that the Marine deliberately engaged in an illegal killing. It just is not the Marine way. Yes, Marines kill. That is what they do. But they do it by the rules, in accordance with the rules of engagement, and the laws of land warfare. Laws of land warfare exist for a reason, and conventional units follow them regardless of whether our enemies do so or not. We have organizations that are authorized to act outside the laws of land warfare, and the USMC is not one of them. Those organizations are sanctioned to act by presidential findings, and the specific operations are themselves vetted by attorneys prior to execution. While such operations may be illegal under the law of those countries where they take place, they are generally crafted to avoid violating US statutes, or at least, to not shock the conscience, in the expectation that they will ultimately become known, as history has demonstrated is generally the case. That said, war crimes do occur. I do not think that this was a war crime. We all know what constitutes an illegal kill. I myself was taught, back in the day, that you double-tap assaulting through the kill-zone, and you make sure that you do not miss, and you make sure that your enemy is dead, because if the enemy is still breathing when you fall back to consolidate, you then have to render first aid, and you may even have to evacuate that enemy. There is nothing that Rangers loathe more than carrying wounded enemy combatants. It is bad enough that we have to evacuate our own wounded on our backs, or on improvised litters. Anyone who has had to carry someone any distance at all can tell you that it is an ultimate ass kicker. Bayonets, archaic as they may seem, may have a valid purpose in circumstances like these. In the nebulous, chaotic circumstances of Fallujah, where there are no lines of demarcation, and where battle can erupt without notice or expectation at any literal moment, it is, I believe, impossible to state with authority that hostilities have ended or begun at any given time. Particularly in situations where insurgents boobytrap bodies, and wounded insurgents detonate grenades as soldiers and Marines approach, no chances can be taken. I do not doubt that this Marine was just being safe. The transcript of his statements reinforces this interpretation. His words can be interpreted cynically, yes, or they can be interpreted as I believe that they were meant, which is to say that he believed that the insurgent was pretending to be dead, and could still represent a threat. When you consider that Marines, and Marines known to this Marine, had been killed by insurgents playing possum, this Marine was acting appropriately. When the Marine was informed by the cameraman that the insurgent had been wounded and left for recovery by other Marines previously, his reply did not evince any attempt at artifice or deception. "I did not know, sir," he said. He made no smart remark, and there was no contemptuousness in his words. When asked by his lieutenant whether the insurgent was armed, and he replied with a shrug, he was perhaps mutely testifying that it is impossible to detect a hand grenade tied off beneath a body. We are all taught to roll bodies, wounded or dead, for a very good reason, after all. Simply admitting that the insurgent had empty hands is meaningless. Certainly this Marine had encountered anecdotes of insurgents with grenades hidden on their person. He was certainly realizing that his actions had been caught on camera by this time, as well, and probably knew that his actions could be subject to interpretation. In the end analysis, it is impossible to explain the terror, the sheer fear, through which this Marine was functioning. While you may get used to it, to a degree, and you may learn to harness it to the immediate needs of survival and combat, this Marine was seeing this insurgent through very different lenses than that of the camera lense, his mindset was not the mindset that we enjoy, watching this video on television, with a beer in hand. Far from it. Like I said: in this case, context is everything.
- The 'insurgents' chose to obliterate those lines of demarcation. They must also accept the consequences.
