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| In this Sept. 13, 2006, file photo, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., meets with reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington. Murtha, an influential critic of the Iraq War whose congressional career was shadowed by questions about his ethics, died Feb. 8. He was 77. (AP) |
I have waited until the burial of Rep. John Murtha, D-PA, to allow an appropriate amount of time for the grieving of his family and the accolades of his accomplishments to subside before writing to put forth what is, in my opinion, a stain on his legacy that will never be cleared.
Since his death, I have heard not a word from the press or print media regarding his involvement in what had been labeled “The Hadithah Massacre.” While Murtha was clearly frustrated with the Iraq War and sought its end, his method to achieve that end was the blatant, unfounded defamation of eight young Marines involved in that incident.
His labeling of the young Marines as “cold-blooded killers,” and the officers as guilty of dereliction of duty in the reporting and investigating of the incident, without any substantive proof whatsoever, was shocking, irresponsible, and critical to the U.S. military’s obsessive pursuit of convictions of these eight young Marines.
Murtha was the catalyst in this tragedy, and the real guilty parties, the Marine Corps General Staff and Pentagon Officials, all caved in to his malicious, dare I say, delusional accusations, and soon the witch hunt for the sacrificial lambs was on.
As has hardly been reported by The Washington Post or other news outlets, six of the Marines have been exonerated, one was given immunity prior to the prosecutions (which I might add were extraordinary prosecutorial overreach), and one is still awaiting his fate.
What Murtha did to these young men, potentially ruining their promising military careers, hanging an albatross around their necks for the rest of their lives, causing undue emotional and financial stress to them and their families, is what I will always remember of him.
And despite the exonerations, this man could never bring himself to apologize for what he wrongfully did to them. He was not a man of honor.
I am reminded of the Starfish Story, wherein a young boy, in the process of throwing a few dying starfish, among thousands stranded on the beach, back into the ocean, is approached by an old wise man, who asks the boy, “ Why are you doing this? So many, so many are dying. Throwing a few back, it won’t make any difference.”
To which the young boy replies, while throwing one more back into the ocean, “ Well, it makes a difference to this one.” What John Murtha did to these young Marines might be seen as somewhat of a reverse of this story.
While he may have done much good for so many thousands, when it came to these eight young men he might as well have said, “I saved thousands, but these last eight, hell, let ‘em die, it won’t make any difference.”
Hemingway once wrote, “The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” Because of Murtha’s public pretrial, pre-evidence execution of these men, the Marine Corps proceeded to break them, or, as my son’s lawyer, Charles Gittins put it, they proceeded to eat their young.
It is my hope that these brave young men – Jeffrey Chessani, Lucas McConnell, Andrew Grayson, Frank Wuterich, Stephen Tatum, Justin Sharratt, Sannick Dela Cruz, and my son, Randy Stone, have grown stronger because of this and have moved on to productive and fruitful lives, despite Murtha’s and the Marine Corps’ politically driven efforts to publicly hang them.
My sympathies go out to the Murtha family.
Tom Stone is a U.S. Marine Corp veteran who served in Viet Nam for 13 months in 1967 and 1968. His son, Randy, was exonerated in August 2007 of all charges in connection with the Haditha Massacre.