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With the Haditha revelations threatening to fuel antipathy toward U.S. troops, military officials have fanned out across Iraq to rerun all the old drills about rules of engagement for Marine Corps and Army units. Marine Corps rules of engagement require personnel on patrol to follow a four-step procedure to distinguish friend from foe. It's an easy mnemonic: Shout. Show. Shove. Shoot. Marines are trained to stop a suspicious Iraqi at a safe distance of about 400 meters with a shout or a gesture. If that does not work, they should make a show of force with a rifle. If that fails, they should fire a warning shot across the suspect's path. Then they should shoot to kill, if all else fails. That works when there is time for such a deliberate response. But sometimes emotions take over. An Army officer in Iraq put it this way: "We have been here for nearly six months, no days off, 24 hours a day and getting shot at or blown up every day. And when you go to a house where you are pretty certain the people [there] know [where the bad guys are]--it is their neighbor or brother--and they say they don't know anything ... it upsets you. Especially when you have just lost someone. I had it happen to me this morning--went to a house and asked about the guy who I know lives next door. Never heard of him. Makes you want to punch his lights out. But that doesn't help either."
Pentagon officials hinted to reporters that they were braced for a rash of other reports of hostile fire by American units on Iraqi civilians. Marine officials tell TIME that they receive on average one complaint a day from Iraqis about U.S. missions that have gone awry. Most don't check out; the military concluded last week that as many as 13 civilians in Ishaqi had not been deliberately killed by U.S. forces in March but rather had died accidentally when a house harboring an insurgent had been demolished. But other accusations do hold up. According to a military source, charges will probably be brought against seven Marines and one Navy sailor for killing an Iraqi civilian in April in the town of Hamandiyah and trying to make the death look like the result of a roadside bomb.
The killings in Haditha and elsewhere have rocked the tightly knit 180,000-member Marine Corps. The Marines are by far the smallest uniformed service and think of themselves as an élite apart from the others. Former Marines across the country took the news of Haditha particularly hard, suggesting on radio call-in shows that if the allegations are true, the men are simply not real Marines. The Marines went into Iraq with deliberate plans to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis, telling the locals they would find "no better friend" if they cooperated but "no worse enemy" if they did not. Seth Jones, a Rand counterinsurgency analyst, finds the involvement of the Marines in the scandal disturbing. "They have tended to be better able to understand counterinsurgency tactics and the importance of winning popular support--and not just kinetic operations," he says.