Grim echoes of Vietnam in Iraq massacre

Covered bodies of civilians allegedly killed by US Marines in Haditha. Picture / Reuters

WASHINGTON - To Americans of a certain generation, the news this weekend must have seemed dreadfully familiar: an endless war, whose rationale is ever harder to understand, a group of soldiers enraged by the loss of a comrade to an invisible enemy, running amok and exacting revenge on civilians, whose only crime was to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Today, the name that threatens to besmirch an entire war is Haditha, northwest of Baghdad, deep in the Sunni triangle.

A generation and a half ago, the place was My Lai, a hamlet in South Vietnam.

At Haditha, it is US Marines from Kilo Company of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marine Division.

In Vietnam, the troops at My Lai were Charlie Company, of the 11th Brigade of the Americal Division. Similarities abound even though the events are separated by 37 years.

No one disputes that what happened at Haditha on November 19 last year, when as many as 24 civilians, including women and children, may have been shot by US soldiers, was provoked by the death of 20-year-old Marine Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, killed by a roadside bomb.

In Vietnam, dozens of members of Charlie Company had been killed and wounded by insurgents in the weeks before the atrocity in the hamlet of My Lai 4 (then known in military jargon as Pinkville).

A couple of days earlier, on March 14, a Vietnamese version of a roadside bomb had killed one C Company sergeant and wounded others. Military intelligence concluded that a crack unit of the Viet Cong was in My Lai, and C Company was ordered to destroy them.

Three platoons were assigned to the operation, one led by Lieutenant William Calley, an unemployed college drop-out who had been rushed through officer training.

Calley's platoon entered the hamlet with guns blazing around 8am on March 16. There was no hostile fire and the men found 700 old men, women, and children. "We never saw a male of military age," one participant later said.

Over the next three hours, the men ran amok. Villagers were bayoneted, women and children were shot in the head as they prayed, at least one girl was raped and murdered.

Calley himself is said to have forced dozens of villagers into a ditch and slaughtered them with a machine-gun.

The exact number of victims is unknown to this day, anywhere from 300 to more than 500. A monument at the site lists the names of 504, their ages ranging from 1 to 82.

Like Haditha now, My Lai was proof of the ghastly things that can happen in wars fought by young troops who have lost close friends to an enemy they cannot see, in another skirmish in a conflict seemingly with no end, where every victory is fleeting, which unfolds amid a civilian population whose language the young soldiers cannot speak, whose true sympathies they cannot fathom.

But should we be surprised that this group of Marines seems to have snapped? Can we all say that under such appalling stress, when a soldier's greatest loyalty is not to his country, but to his buddies in the heat and the dust and the carnage, we could not have done something similar?

Rarely, alas, do such considerations cross the minds of the leaders who send armies to war. Delivering the commencement speech at West Point military academy this weekend, George W. Bush invoked the Cold War as the comparison for the "war on terror", of which the White House has long proclaimed that Iraq is the central front. But more clearly with every passing day, the war that Iraq resembles is Vietnam.

In this electronic age, of course, everything in war is speeded up, including cover-ups. The first official version of My Lai spoke of a signal victory, in which the Americans had killed 128 insurgents and suffered only one casualty.

But, in March 1969, an ex-soldier who had heard witness accounts of what had really happened sent letters to President Nixon, the Pentagon and members of Congress.

Slowly the military was prodded into action, but only on September 5, 1969, 18 months after the massacre, was Calley charged with murder.

The public knew nothing until the story was broken by Seymour Hersh, the same journalist who, in April 2004, disclosed the prison abuse at Abu Ghraib - which was, at least until Haditha, the greatest single blot on America's reputation left by the Iraq war.

A cover-up was attempted at Haditha too, but it has unravelled far more quickly. Time published the first details in mid-March.

The criminal inquiry should be wrapped up next month; some Marines are likely to face murder charges that could carry the death penalty.

General Michael Hagee, commander of the US Marine Corps, is already in Iraq, impressing upon his men the overriding need to observe the rules of war. But it may already be too late.

Haditha could be devastating on three scores. It can only further erode the trust of ordinary Iraqis in the invaders who were supposed to bring them peace and democracy.

Second, it could eat into public affection for the troops - one of the most pernicious legacies of the Vietnam War. Today, no American will speak ill of soldiers in Iraq. But now, who knows?

Most important, Haditha could affect the US prosecution of the war. The incident has come to light when public opinion has already turned against it.

But not until after Hersh published his account of My Lai did polls reveal a majority against the Vietnam War.

Today, six out of 10 Americans already believe the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a mistake - a disillusion that even that peddler of illusions Bush had to acknowledge last week.

Conceivably, Haditha could be the stone than unleashes an avalanche of clamour for a speedy US exit from Iraq, not matter what.

It is no coincidence that the congressman who has spoken out most loudly about the affair is John Murtha, a normally hawkish Pennsylvania senator with close ties to the Pentagon. Last November, he created a sensation by demanding a swift US withdrawal from Iraq, arguing that the war was doing the US more harm than good.

Haditha has only strengthened that conviction. "This will be very, very bad for America," the former Marine Vietnam veteran said. "This is the kind of war when you have to win the hearts and minds of the people.

"And we're set back every time something like this happens. This is worse than Abu Ghraib."

For Murtha, what happened was murder. "This investigation should have been over two or three weeks afterwards, and it should have been made public and people should have been held responsible for it."

And that perhaps will be the final acid test of Haditha.

Who will be held responsible? Will it be like My Lai, where Calley was the only person of consequence to be convicted (and then released on parole a few years later)? Or will heads roll higher up?

The precedents of My Lai and Abu Ghraib, for which no senior officer has yet faced charges, is not encouraging. But My Lai helped destroy a country's faith in its military and the judgment of its leaders.

Thirty-seven years later, Haditha may do the same.

- INDEPENDENT