War logs show how marines gave cleaned up accounts of incident in which they killed 19 civilians
Brevity is the hallmark of military reporting, but even by those standards the description of one especially disastrous event is remarkably short: "The patrol return to base".
It started with a suicide bomb. On 4 March 2007 a convoy of US marines, who had arrived in Afghanistan three weeks earlier, were hit by an explosives-rigged minivan outside the southeastern city of Jalalabad.
The marines made a frenzied escape, opening fire with automatic weapons as they tore down a six-mile stretch of highway, hitting almost anyone in their way – teenage girls in the fields, motorists in their cars, old men as they walked along the road. Nineteen unarmed civilians were killed and 50 wounded.
None of this, however, was captured in the initial military account, written by the marines themselves. It simply says that, simultaneous with the suicide explosion, "the patrol received small arms fire from three directions".
And the subsequent rampage as they drove away – which would later be the subject of a 17-day military inquiry and a 12,000 page report – is captured in five words: "The patrol returned to JAF [Jalalabad Air Field]".
The soldiers' initial concern, it appears, was a slightly wounded marine – their only casualty. Forty-nine minutes after the initial bombing, they requested a "routine Medevac" for a private with "shrapnel wounds to the arm". He was evacuated to safety.
An hour later came the first news of the trail of blood they had left behind. A local government official told the marines there were "28 LN WIA", which in layman's terms means that 28 Afghan civilians had been wounded. This later transpired to be a gross under-estimate. It was not the last one.
Two hours later Americans returned to the scene of the bombing to conduct an "exploitation of the blast site with pictures/grid cords as well as debriefing ANP leadership on scene". Journalists on the spot gave a more detail account.
The Guardian
