By DR. LARRY MOSES

No one asked me but… The trial of Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, USMC, ended in a plea agreement. He was convicted of negligent dereliction of duty, whatever that is.

The Judge Advocate says it is telling your Marines “To shoot first and ask questions later.” After six years that is all of which they could convict Staff Sgt. Wuterich.

If you recall twenty-four Iraqis died there, fifteen confirmed to be civilians, nine possible insurgents. In a land where insurgents use women and children for cover, this was not an unusual occurrence, but one that was politically charged.

Keep in mind in that very same town later in the day a 500 lb. bomb was dropped on a house where two suspected insurgents were holding up. No one checked to see if civilians were also in the house and the bomb vaporized all evidence one way or the other. No charges were filed against the officer calling for the strike or the pilot who delivered the bomb.

If one is to understand what happened in Haditha that November day, one has to understand Haditha and the Marine’s previous experiences there. Haditha was ruled by Ansar al-Sunna guerillas who instituted Islamic law carrying out public floggings and beheadings. They were using Haditha as a base from which to launch attacks on Marines. In April of 2005, the insurgents took 19 Shia fishermen to a soccer field and slaughtered them. On the morning of August 1, 2005, a six-man Marine sniper unit on the outskirts of Haditha was overrun by a large contingent of these insurgents. Five of the Marines were killed outright and the other wounded and taken prisoner.

A few days later, a video of the attack was posted on the Internet. The insurgent’s web site posted still photographs showing a wounded Marine guarded by two hooded gunmen. The insurgents stated they had slit the throats of the other Marines. Masked gunmen displayed helmets, flak jackets, and other equipment taken from the bodies of the dead Marines in the Haditha public market.

The Marines conducted a raid on the site where the Marines were overrun finding a large weapons cache of small arms and explosives buried behind the house.

Later in the month, the bodies of the six Marines were found mutilated. Two days after the discovery, another 14 Marines were killed when their armored personnel carrier was destroyed by an I.E.D. This set off a heavy house-to-house fight in September 2005, as the Marines surrounded and assaulted the city.

The Marines took the entire city in four days. The Marines found over 1,000 caches, detained over 400 known insurgents, and lost four Marines during this action.

That brings us to the morning of November 19, 2005, when an I.E.D. exploded killing one Marine and wounding two others. Staff Sgt. Wuterich took charge ordering his Marines to spread out into defensive positions. It was 7:15 in the morning, a real possibility existed that this was the start of a major ambush.

It was 7:30 in the morning when the first officer came on the scene. Lieutenant Kallop arrived with reinforcements. He testified he observed fire coming from houses on the south side of the street. One was a house where the Marines had discovered a bomb factory just a few days before. He ordered Wuterich to clear the houses.

Wuterich has insisted that his Marines came under AK-47 attack, and defended themselves as they had been trained to do, by returning fire and surging forward to suppress the aggressors.

Critics have expressed skepticism pointing out that certain neighborhood witnesses heard no firefight before the first house was stormed. Other witnesses, however, did hear firing, and the Iraqi soldier who gave the damning description of a deadly encounter with five Iraqi college students, and who was certainly no friend of the Marines, repeatedly described coming under attack from the south side of the street. He said, “Fire open at them. Shots were shooting at them. Fighting between them and forces are fighting at us, shooting at us. …So they went where the fire was coming…”

While the Lieutenant stayed with the Humvees, Wuterich led his men from the front. When they got to the house, he kicked through the door, and in the entranceway came upon the owner, a middle-aged man, whom he shot in the chest.

The power was out in the house, and the light inside was dim; the Marines were entering from the sunshine into a dark house. Inside a Marine fired on a figure down the hall who turned out to be an old woman.

They worked down the hallway until they came upon a room full of people. The room was dim and a Marine rolled in a grenade; after the blast, he charged into the dust and smoke to mop up with his rifle as he had been trained to do. Nine people had sheltered in that room, including an old man paralyzed by a stroke and an infant girl just three months old.

During the trial before a jury of combat Marines who served in Iraq, prosecutors argued Wuterich lost control after seeing his friend blown apart by the bomb and led his men on a rampage, blasting their way in with gunfire and grenades.

Wuterich’s attorney said the deal was reached last week when prosecutors recognized their case was falling apart due to contradictory testimony from witnesses who had lied to investigators.

Many of the squad members had their cases dropped in exchange for testifying against Wuterich; so much for Semper Fi.

Six years later and no longer threatened with prison; squad members were now prepared to testify they do not believe they did anything wrong because they were under fire from insurgents inside the houses.

Wuterich said his plea shouldn’t be seen as a statement that he believes his squad dishonored their country.

“When my Marines and I cleared those houses that day, I responded to what I perceived as a threat, and my intention was to eliminate that threat in order to keep the rest of my Marines alive,” he said. “So when I told my team to shoot first and ask questions later, the intent wasn’t that they would shoot civilians, it was that they would not hesitate in the face of the enemy.”

No matter what the Judge Advocate says, had Staff Sgt. Wuterich done anything less it would have been negligent dereliction of duty.

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