Former Embed: Keeping 'The Short Chain on the Mad Dog' in Iraq

By: Dennis Anderson The trial is already convened in the media. The Marines are guilty. The trial and charges haven?t even been announced, yet they are all guilty. Maybe. And maybe not, but this much is true: None of us was there.

Just the idea of a massacre of Iraqis at a hell-and-gone place called Haditha is too sad. For everyone. For all the victims? families in Iraq, this is their memory of the Americans. For survivors, for the young grunts, 15 minutes of rage could send the rest of their lives to hell. And would Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas have wanted that? He was the blast victim from an Improvised Explosive Device that triggered the alleged killings.

His uncle, Andy Terrazas, a former Marine and Border Patrol agent, told the New York Times, ?I hope this is over soon so he can just rest in peace.? A hope, but not likely.

Recently, I attended a Knight Fellowship session at University of Maryland, a conference on military reporting. One of the briefers was Col. Larry Wilkerson (Ret.), former chief of staff for Colin Powell, worked for him in war and peace. Wilkerson shared the dais with a neo-con wonk who was going on about how we have to fight the terrorists on their own terms, and Wilkerson said words to the effect, ?With all due respect -- you?re full of malarkey.?

Then Wilkerson, with his own Vietnam combat time to draw on, basically said that the Geneva Convention ?is the lieutenant?s tool kit. It?s the tools we give him to exercise command, control and governance on his troops. And I am sorry as hell we seem to have thrown that out because when that lieutenant loses that tool kit, we lose our moral authority to wage war.?

That is quotation in paraphrase, but it is pretty close to how he put it. Later, I was on the phone with my son in Afghan land, and he essentially mirrored the comments of Col. Wilkerson to a tee -- that it?s the lieutenant on ground with platoon, the sergeants, the squad leaders who have to keep it frosty and not give in to war madness.

He added that the troops, the grunts, have an understandable impulse to take the fight in any last direction where the fire came from that killed their buddy. And keeping that in check is a razor?s edge, and that the lieutenant and small unit leaders are the ones who have to keep the short chain on the mad dog that lives within the heart of a fighting man who?s seen his buddy blown out of this world in hopelessly cruel fashion.

Wilkerson?s words have been on my mind and in my chest since Haditha broke, and reports surface about other potential atrocities by Americans. I reflect on how our best guys have been hung out to dry. Too few troops to manage too much countryside, with no one but their buddies having their backs. And not enough buddies.

How weary the American warrior becomes. Their rescue of children, the feeding, clothing and medical care given, all given short shrift in the media. They face terrorists who behead their helpless victims, and then they get cast as the villains. It?s crazy.

But as a nation, and as American warriors -- veteran or current service -- we will not be let off the hook. Because we are accountable to ourselves and because the terrorists are not our teachers.

At Memorial Day services at Lancaster Cemetery, my own words offered among other veterans was that those young grunts didn?t go to Iraq to commit atrocity. They went, under orders, to try to perform their mission. They went to try to provide a measure of peace and security in a land flooding with murderers who kill scores of innocent Iraqis every day.

And, if charges prove out at court-martial, then it will be proven by rules of evidence that these young fighting men lost their way. And in losing it, if a command chain cover-up is established by proof, then it becomes evident the officers also lost their way, gave into the fear of facing the truth of what happened. And facing the truth, however ugly, is always, in the end, better than trying to bury it. In a time of media immersion, you cannot bury ugly truths. Saddam did. We cannot.

I draw from this that out in the sandy wastes it is easier than any of the civilian bystanders and talking heads would suppose to lose one?s way, to lose one?s soul, if only for a few minutes. And it only takes a few minutes. And yet, and yet, we expect more. We had better expect more, or we become them. And I do not believe that in even the act of aggressively prosecuting war on terrorists that we ever want to become them.

So, the young men, and the older men, the juniors and the seniors, will have to be called to account. We do that because we are who we are.

Even the perpetrators of massacre, if proven, are still us. All the rest of us have to take this as the warning: not to become the thing we fight.

You know, my son and his friends? They drink too much. All the time. Too much beer and too much whiskey. Why? Because they are young studs on their own for the first time, but mostly because they are decompressing from the horror they have navigated in the heart of darkness. They have absorbed a lot for kids who were just skateboarding a couple of years ago. It makes you want to reach for a drink yourself.