Battle For Haditha/On That Day

This was simply extraordinary. Probably the most harrowing, disturbing, annoying and emotionally numbing three hours I have spent in front of a television since I watched Shoah or Band of Brothers.

Nick Broomfield's dramatic reconstruction of the events that took place at Haditha on 19th November 2005 was unbelievably powerful. I could feel my sense of anger getting more intense as the film progressed, firstly it was directed at the involvement of Al Qaeda, then the planting of the roadside bomb by the Iraq insurgents and then, when under normal circumstances you should be feeling sympathy for the American troops, I sat watching it in utter disbelief as the U.S Marines began to search for the people responsible for the bomb and ended up killing twenty four Iraqi civilians, mostly women and children. It would be difficult to place gradations of horror on the way the Marines sought retribution, but the scene where the three soldiers on a roof top overlooking the road took it in turns to use a fleeing, innocent, Iraqi who had just lost his father, mother and half a dozen children, as shooting practice, showed how dehumanising war is.

You could, if you wanted to go through a brief period of self-denial, console yourself with the fact that this was a drama and that war couldn't really be this bad. But then following the film you turned over to More4 and watched Nick Broomfield's son Barney's documentary about the events and you realised that reality was certainly worse than the fiction. You have to take your hat off to Time magazine and say that but for some good old fashioned investigative journalism by them to begin with neither the slaughtering of Iraqi civilians nor the drama and the documentary would have come to light.

The story is that a roadside bomb (known as an IED) was planted by insurgents, exploded in the town on the morning of the 19th November 2005, killing 20-year-old Lance Corp Miguel (‘TJ’) Terrazas, who was driving a Humvee in a convoy of four. An initial US military statement stated simply but outrageously that 15 Iraqi civilians also died from the blast of the bomb and that eight additional Iraqi insurgents were killed during an immediate gunfight with US soldiers. But a very different version of these events came into play when an amateur video, shot the day after the deaths, was passed to an Iraqi human-rights organisation and, in turn, Time magazine at the beginning of 2006. This film clearly showed the bodies of women and children who had been shot in their homes. When questioned, Iraqi eyewitnesses suggested that US soldiers had gone on an armed rampage in the town in revenge for their colleague’s death and that was how most of the 24 Iraqi civilians had died – at least six of them children aged between two and 14. Subsequently, the US army launched a criminal investigation last March, several officers have resigned, and four marines are now on trial facing charges of unpremeditated murder.

What I found particularly disturbing was George Bush's reaction when he was questioned by the media about the incident. Whilst his mouth was saying one thing, his eyes were saying another, it reminded me of the vile attitude that was prevalent in Britain in the 70's and 80's when everybody with an Irish accent was deemed to be fair game for a punch-up on the basis that all Irish were terrorists. I was also pleased to see how quickly and thoroughly NCIS carried out their investigation and produced a 6,000 page report on the incident within days - made you realise how slow the British wheels of justice moved in relation to Bloody Sunday.

I'm not a soldier, never have been, never will be and I hope that I'm never involved in a war on British soil but it doesn't make it any easier to have any sympathy for the Marines involved. It was interesting to see the reaction, in the documentary, of the Marines involved, particularly the Corporal who was promoted to Sergeant on the back of his 15 'kills'. To begin with his attitude was summed up in the sentence "You shoot first and ask questions later," something that every soldier under fire from the Crimea to the West Bank believes, later however was a sense of remorse, of knowing that the men under his command had gone way beyond the call of duty, that killing women and children as they lay in their beds was beyond normal rules of engagement and that no amount of thinking, "if we don't kill them, they'll kill us," was going to make things right.