Another SAS defends marine

The Guardian | 17/11/04 | odd john

[Odd John]

Rules of engagement

Dramatic news footage from Falluja which appears to show an American marine shooting a prone Iraqi has caused outrage here and in the US. But Falklands veteran Quintin Wright says that this is just what soldiers are trained to do

Quintin Wright

The Guardian Wednesday November 17, 2004

Hearing about a US marine apparently shooting a wounded Iraqi insurgent in Falluja, I felt a familiar disillusion settle on me that events were going to unfold in one particular way. Here, the two poles of the civilian world and the military divide. You have one group whose job is to fight and the other who are always spectators - all the more so, now, because of the speed and immediacy of modern war reporting. It is likely that the non-military public will immediately label this incident a "war crime", but these shocking images, however real, are only one element of the story.

A soldier sees things in very black-and-white, clear-cut terms. If his orders are to clear an area, he has to use his initiative, but he is also trained in certain drills which help do the job quickly and without loss to friendly forces. According to reports, the marines in Falluja had been told that an area including a mosque they had previously fought through, with a number of insurgents killed, may have been reoccupied. In my experience as a soldier, if you were tasked to go back and check that area, which was still subject to hostilities, you would approach it in a purely pragmatic, soldier-like way. There is a standard operating procedure for doing that, as there is for everything else in the army.

I joined the Parachute Regiment because I had got the idea that they were the creme de la creme of the British army. In most respects, it is a simple infantry regiment - with the difference that we usually arrive by air. The Paras had the reputation for being very professional, and I was more interested in doing real soldiering rather than guard duty. There are people who join up to be a guard, for the nice uniform and all that - and that's fine, but I wanted to belong to a regiment that was more likely to see combat duty.

I joined as a recruit in 1980, when I was 20 years old. After six months of training, we passed out of depot [the training base] and were posted to one of the Parachute Regiment battalions. In late 1981 it looked as if we were going to Northern Ireland, so we started training specifically for that type of action. There, the job was really done by the junior ranks, and we learned to deal with stress - there was not much gunfire, but you lived under the constant threat. The British army has become very good at operations to control urban areas - policing, really - and Northern Ireland could be seen as on-the-job training for that.

As it turned out, shortly before we were to be sent to Northern Ireland, the Falklands war broke out. We didn't even know where the Falkland Islands were - I remember trying to find them on a map of Scotland. We were shipped out on the six-week voyage to the south Atlantic. All the way down, we maintained our training. The point of training is to drill you to do the small things, the simple things, so that when it gets difficult, you can still function.

In all that time of training, no one ever sat me down and read me the Geneva convention. I may have been given a copy, but I don't recall. Of course, for Northern Ireland, we were given complex rules of engagement - we had the yellow card, according to which you had to stop and shout a warning - even after you'd been fired upon - before returning fire. And, of course, we had our standard operating procedures (Sops).

There is a drill, for instance, for "clearing ground". This is a combat tactic, now used by every army in the world, for securing an area that has just been captured. The context is this: there's just been a battle; there will be bodies and weapons lying around. Your unit will go past the area that was the target (it might be just a courtyard or a building). Once everyone and everything has been checked - which takes a matter of seconds, two minutes at most - the section commander will order a couple of soldiers, working as a pair, to go back and "clear the ground".

The main purpose is to gather intelligence - paperwork, maps, radios. When you know that there have very recently been people in that area trying to kill you, do you go up to a body and start to rummage through pockets without knowing for sure that the guy isn't actually still alive and about to stick a 10-inch knife in you? So where there are bodies, you don't go near them. Not until you have put two bullets into each, fired usually from a range of several yards. Then one soldier holds back to provide cover while the other runs up, and first lies on top of the body to immobilise it and make it difficult for the enemy to use a firearm if he's lying doggo. Next the soldier rolls the body over towards his partner so that the covering man can check for any sign of a booby-trap. The idea of this is that, if there is an explosive device, the body itself will afford the first soldier some protection, while the other soldier will be out of range.

This is one of hundreds of Sops used by troops. It'll be in any army field manual. It's absolutely standard practice for securing captured ground - learned through bitter experience of losing men through having enemy combatants get up and run away or start shooting at you again.

At the time of the Falklands, I was a 22-year-old private - and I was old. Most were 18 or 19. We "tabbed" - marched - across the Falklands, sometimes going for 36 hours in the cold and wet, without a pause. At one point I had the ludicrous job of having to carry two large jerry cans filled with drinking water, along with all my other equipment.

I was posted to a heavy machine-gun "fire team" that took part in the assault on Argentinian positions on Mount Longdon, behind Port Stanley, on June 11-14. After the first attack was repulsed, leaving less than 20 standing out of a company of 80 Paras, my unit raced up the back of the hill and took a position where we could fire down on the Argentinians. At one point, they started firing back at us with a 100mm anti-tank gun. I felt a shell come past my ear. It hit one of our guns behind me, killing two guys I knew. They were blown to pieces.

There were bodies all over the place, theirs and ours. I saw a medic put five ampoules of morphine into a guy who had lost both legs, really to kill him mercifully. It didn't work. It was a very frightening place to be.

We were being shot at all the time by a panic-stricken and unpredictable enemy. At one point, the Argentinians were shelling our position for two and a half hours. The next day, my mate was blown up and killed. I didn't know about it at the time, and I merged into another unit.

Small pockets of Argentinians were still wandering around all over the place after the main attack. There was no question as to what to do if you saw an Argentinian with a weapon: you shot him. There had been no surrender - hostilities were not over. I know there were allegations that Paras shot surrendering Argentinian prisoners, but I never saw or heard of anything of that nature. During my service, I never saw a soldier "lose it".

I really don't believe anyone is ever prepared for the reality of warfare, but all your training is about breaking down soldiering into little pieces, the drills that you do again and again. Then those elements are put back together to build you into an effective soldier. You learn a skill like stripping a rifle, putting on a field dressing, or "clearing ground", so that you can still do it under fire. You learn to concentrate on the little things so that you don't think about what might happen if you get shot. You learn just to do your job without worrying about the big stuff.

You are fighting for your mates. It's not a question of Queen and country at that moment; it's about the bloke next to you. Almost all the soldiers I ever knew were highly professional and very well trained. You train and train. You don't sleep. You get cold. You get exhausted. You have other guys firing live rounds at you. That's stress - but at the end of an exercise like that, it doesn't make you want to murder someone. The US marines in Falluja will also have trained in those environments - and for the environment they are in right now.

Every nation brings its own character to the task of fighting wars. My training in the Paras instilled in me the need to use aggression coldly, without the need for anger. The kind of group revving-up that can often be observed in the US military always has the potential to allow anger to cause collateral damage.

I believe that, essentially, what you get in the army is the same variety of people, and qualities in people, that you get in any walk of life. In that respect, an army is purely representative of the society from which it draws its personnel; in fact, if anything, an army perhaps is better than its society because the training will weed out almost all abject weirdos.

You don't have to know much about the history of warfare to know that bad things happen. In every war, discipline can break down. At the most basic level, people turn round and run away. There will always be events where something snaps in someone. If you get soldiers who will run away or just try to dig a hole and hide, then you will also get soldiers who shoot prisoners.

Urban warfare is particularly gritty. I mentioned "clearing ground" but house clearing, which is what these marines are doing in Falluja, is really nasty. You have to realise that this is a fighting technique, evolved through painful experience and designed to reduce your own casualties.

War is a cold-blooded business, and I think people need to wrap their heads around that concept. If you are there, you simply have to grasp the nettle and do an effective job. You have to deal with the situation, and then get out. © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

[ijcr]

Sorry, I had a senior moment and intended the post for Odd John.

The other article was by Andy McNab,who's books are like the famous milk-cream mixture...half and half.

[MEG33]

"Rules of engagement" is the proper title..please always post the exact title with and comment in parentheses.

[Odd John]

thank you

[MEG33]

Your welcome..I saw the disgusting cartoon"He's dead now"..more like the Guardian's usual bias..

[uncbob]

Dramatic news footage from Falluja which appears to show an American marine shooting a prone Iraqi has caused outrage here and in the US

So who the hell are these outraged people NOT MEm

I doubt that most Americans could care less about terrorists

[Jackknife]

bump

[Conspiracy Guy]

Admit it! Now!

[mware]

Perhaps they saw the video tape of the murder of the worker from CARE. Fox and Friends reported that before she was shot she was tortured, and apparently it is on the tape.

[MEG33]

Never!...;)

[Conspiracy Guy]

Still trying to blame Odd John for your dirty work eh? You are clever and diabolical.

[niobe527]

I admit to being naive, but I've always thought that you DON'T turn your back on an enemy. I'd rather see our soldier come home in one piece than that terrorist say "I got one!"

[MEG33]

I am that..I admit.

[Conspiracy Guy]

I'm skeeeeeert of you.

[MEG33]

You are a very smart Guy...;)

[highlandbreeze]

It was an accident. They'll fix it tomorrow.

[Conspiracy Guy]

I heard that!

[rahbert]

They actually lie on a body?? Gross and disgusting...

Not to mention, these jihadis might have wired themselves for demolition. I like the USMC SOP better.

[RebelTex]

Let's see, the situation was:

1. other terrorists had retaken the Mosque and had to be cleaned out again
2. many terrorists are suicide bombers
3. terrorists hide and disguise Improvised Explosive Devices
4. terrorists set up booby traps everywhere they can
5. terrorists booby trap their dead and wounded
6. terrorists fake surrendering then attack when our troops are drawn out to take the prisoners into custody
7. terrorists fake surrendering then blow themselves up when our troops are attempt to take the prisoners into custody
8. other terrorists had retaken the Mosque and had to be cleaned out again
9. no intel provided that enemy wounded had already been subdued
10. other terrorists had retaken the Mosque and had to be cleaned out again
11. after our troops successfully storm the Mosque, they go room to room to secure each, and discover some wounded and dead enemy in the room.  They start to secure the wounded to render them harmless and an assumed dead terrorist makes a sudden move

WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

1. ask him if he wants a cigarette?
2. apologize for thinking he was dead?
3. call up the chain of command for orders?
4. ask the reporter for his recommendations?
5. blow the #(*&^%@* terrorist's head off.

If you answered A, B, C or D:

YOU'RE DEAD!!!

MOST OF YOUR TEAM IS DEAD!!!

because if you believe in any other possible outcome, then YOU WILL FAIL TO ACT IN TIME when it really counts.  This is the way our troops are trained AND SHOULD BE trained.

JMHO