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Whether that trust can be restored depends on what investigators uncover about the Haditha affair and how the military handles the matter going forward. A knowledgeable congressional source monitoring the Haditha probes says congressional aides are being told by Marine officers in the Pentagon that the number of Marines who may be charged with murder is small. But the source speculates that the total number who may be charged with crimes ranging from murder to aiding in the attack or trying to cover it up could be as high as 10, according to Marines who have talked to officials at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), which is conducting the inquiry into the killings. Partial findings from the other investigation, into how the Marines' chain of command dealt with the Haditha killings, conducted by Army Major General Eldon Bargewell, were delivered to Pentagon officials last week. Marine Corps officials expect Bargewell, a highly respected member of the Army's special-operations fraternity, to conclude that Marine commanders knew within a few days of the incident that the official account was inaccurate but neglected to investigate the matter further.
The criminal investigation, which will probably produce charges against Marines for committing slayings, is expected to extend into the summer. Three months after TIME published the first account of the incident, new details about the events leading up to the fateful morning in Haditha have shed light on why a small group of Marines apparently abandoned all semblance of self-restraint in a deadly burst of vengeance. But other questions are likely to remain--about who bears ultimate responsibility for the killings, about other possible incidents of military misconduct in Iraq and about whether the U.S. can do anything to stop Haditha from happening again.
HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?
One of the biggest miscalculations of the Iraq war--maybe the biggest--was that the U.S. invaded Iraq with a force large enough to topple a government in 21 days but too small to maintain order in a nation of 26 million with deep ethnic divisions. That strategic decision had tactical consequences, and they can be seen in the record of Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines. Late last year, U.S. commanders tried to hold Haditha, a town of 90,000 riddled with insurgents, at times with just one company of 160 men. The job fell to Kilo, which had already seen some of the ugliest fighting in the postinvasion period. According to Lucian Read--a freelance photographer who has spent 13 months in Iraq, five of them with Kilo Company--Kilo had drawn a short stick in the battle for Fallujah in 2004, enduring days of street-to-street and sometimes house-to-house fighting. During an operation that came to be known as Hell House, a Kilo unit was ambushed inside a house by half a dozen insurgents armed with machine guns and grenades; one Marine died, and several others were wounded. Trapped inside, with the enemy in the adjoining rooms, the Marines finally blew the house up in order to kill the insurgents and make their escape.