A man named Don Dinsmore forwarded me a letter today from his son, dated 19 December 2006.
Don is retired Navy. His career as a PAO began in Vietnam and ended with Operation Iraqi Freedom. He has two sons were are Marines. One is a sergeant in Camp Pendleton. The other is currently deployed with the 3/1 in Iraq. He is Capt. Jeffrey Dinsmore.
Please find a letter addressed to me from my son, Jeff Dinsmore, who was proudly serving as the Intelligence Officer of the U.S. Marine Corps' 3/1. They are the proud and "Thundering Third" who were deployed in Haditha, Iraq from September 2005 to March 2006.
Jeff is a conscientious Marine who has advanced from Private to Captain, has been highly decorated throughout his career, and was awarded the Bronze Star for his accomplishments in Haditha, Iraq.
Some of Jeff's unit have been erroneously charged. What a pitiful thing for our Marine Corps and American leadership. We as veterans of foreign wars, retired military, and active defenders of our America hang our heads, ashamed of our countries leadership.
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The Haditha Marines: A Leadership Failure
As I write this, I am sitting in my unit's Combat Operations Center in the desert training area of 29 Palms, California. We are concluding a month-long training exercise called "Mojave Viper." Developed by the Quantico, VA-headquartered Marine Corps Training and Education Command, Mojave Viper is the Marine Corps premier pre-Iraq exercise. It consists of training for a range of unit conventional and counter-insurgency skills, from controlling air and artillery support to handling local tribal leaders and government officials in a small faux-Iraqi town.
Why is this context important? It is important because last week, as part of a required package of Rules of Engagement, Law of War, and counterinsurgency classes, we were given an hour-long class on the topic "The My Lai Massacre and the Haditha Massacre: Common Lessons Learned." The instructor, a LtCol and a Marine Corps lawyer, taught this case study, and between occasional obligatory emphases on the word "alleged" when referencing the "crimes of Haditha", made it clear that both had similar "leadership failures" as their root cause. His class left the students with the clear impression that Haditha would live in infamy as a black mark on the history of the future Corps, much as My Lai haunts the Army's history books today.
Indeed, in the months since the Haditha allegations first surfaced, I have witnessed instructors in classrooms throughout the Marine Corps make remorseful references to the "Haditha Massacre," their remarks usually laden with presupposition of guilt regarding the Marines involved. The discussion itself is not unusual; any accusation carried in the media, as this one has been, is bound to cause conjecture at the water cooler. What makes Haditha different is the speculation has consistently lacked the back and forth, two-sided debate of a typical unresolved issue. More alarming is the fact that combat-experienced Marines, with only media reports as their evidence, have participated fully in this damning conjecture.
Why is Haditha different? How does it come to be that an assumption of Haditha guilt has moved from the water cooler, to formal Marine Corps classrooms, to being a part of the headquarters-approved pre-deployment curricula of every unit in the Marine Corps? After 13 months of little more than rumor, let alone a judicial review of the evidence, why does the average Marine, let alone a Lt Colonel teaching a class of Marines, feel comfortable assuming the guilt of his brothers-in-arms before hearing their side of the story? The answer lies in their leaders' actions.
The first Marine Corps response to the accusations came not from its leadership's words, but by its lack thereof. Despite having completed an independent Army investigation into the incident, the Marine Corps reacted to increased media interest with more - and more vigorous - investigation. No one stood up to the press and explained the findings and recommendations of the first investigation. Marine Corps leaders uttered no words in support of their Marines.
Marine Corps leadership made its position clear by April 7th. 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines left Iraq at the end of March, its Marines naively believing the accolades heaped upon them by their in-country Regimental and Division commanders. Their combat accomplishments, according to the most senior officers in Iraq, were the envy of many other battalions in country. The battalion returned to the states unsuspecting, but rudely awakened by the relief of its battalion commander and one of its most respected company commanders. Those commanders were relieved of duty not by their combat superior, but by the division commander who had remained stateside throughout their deployment, and who had little more than a few weeks of direct observation of their performance. The press release was immediate, and the implication was as clear as their faces on the cover of the Marine Corps Times.
Next: as if reinforcement of the Corps unspoken belief were necessary, Marine Corps Commandant General Hagee went on a May whirlwind tour of Iraq. Nothing proclaims an admission of guilt more than frantic and immediate damage control. The Marines in Iraq now had the commandant's personal stamp of approval to assume the worst. After this tour through Iraq, the Marine Corps commandant gave his official trip report to the press. Couched cautiously between refusals to comment on the ongoing investigation were his stories of talking to Marines in Iraq, and their reassurances that "...that's not what we're about, sir!" The unspoken subtext between the commandant and the media was that whatever those criminals in Haditha did, the rest of the Marine Corps disassociates itself with them.
In late May, the groundwork was laid for a subtle presupposition of guilt, since the first investigations were being questioned and revisited, the commandant had personally conducted "values" training with Marines in Iraq, and the suspected commanders had been relieved of duty. Congressman John Murtha, however, put the Corps leadership in a difficult position. After a briefing by the commandant on the available evidence, Congressman Murtha proclaimed that the Marines killed civilians "in cold blood." The Marine Corps, still in the precarious position of image self-preservation, should have now been expected to defend its Marines against an overt accusation of atrocities. Its leaders did not do so.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff responded with statements such as: "Fortunately, this type of thing doesn't happen very often...", and: "Regardless of the outcome of these investigations, 99.9 percent of the servicemen and service women are doing what we expect them to do." While this last is a carefully public-affairs crafted statement that allows him to simultaneously defend our good Marines and leave open the possibility that some bad apples exist, it is not a Marine leader's statement of support for his beleaguered subordinates before their guilt is proven. Fortunately, no one asked who exactly are the .1%, and with what unit they serve. Another example of a politically generated position that leaves the media to infer guilt by what is purposely left unsaid.
All this is not to say that the consistent drumbeat of press coverage and politically opportune leaks from anonymous Pentagon staffers have not contributed to the pre-judgment of the Haditha Marines. Those factors, though, are common to every question of guilt or innocence in accusations of military misconduct, and do not usually produce such unanimity of opinion among the Marines rank and file of their fellow Marines' probable guilt. The willingness of Marine Corps Training and Education Command to base its Rules of Engagement training for every battalion going to Iraq on an outcome that has yet to be determined is a clear indicator of what the Corps' leadership believes. Again: Every Marine going to Iraq is receiving this training, and is imbued with the idea that their fellow Marines are guilty of a gruesome massacre on par with the famed My Lai.
The Marine Corps senior leadership, through its initial inaction, and eventually its action to impugn the reputations of serving Marines, has demonstrated its willingness to betray the trust of its most junior Marines serving in combat. One of the secrets to the Marine Corps' success is that while most decision-making centrally resides in one authority figure, that authority is dependent on the absolute trust of his subordinates. Junior Marines trust their leaders to make decisions on their behalf, not clouded by considerations of self-preservation, career enhancement, media scrutiny, or political expediency. Marines in combat are making life and death decisions that they trust their leaders to defend when questioned. When those leaders fail to publicly defend those decisions and in fact enable and participate in the public doubt, that trust will inevitably erode, and the unit will suffer in the long run. Marines will usually forgive a wide range of mistakes and missteps in their officers, but never a betrayal of their trust.
It is now 9 months since the first of several investigations was completed, and over a year since the incident itself. No charges have yet been proven, and evidence has yet to be reviewed by a military judge. Some of the Marines involved now languish in obscure administrative duties, their careers as Marines already ended. Many are, like me, preparing to return, or have already returned, to combat duty in Iraq. All continue to serve faithfully, awaiting further action by a duly appointed judge or jury. While I continue to firmly believe that all will be acquitted, none of them will ever be truly exonerated. Their Marine Corps leaders have seen to that.
A Haditha Survivor
19 December 2006
Sent to Dad,
By your Son,
Jeff.
