reply to post by rainfall
I am a former U.S. Marine,
I will say that none of us did it for fun, and none of us engaged what we thought were civilians.
I will say we killed a lot more innocent civilians than we killed 'militants'. The 'official body count' was wrong... it had to be. It was in
the hundreds (for a 10 hour 'trip' through Baghdad in April), but you have to take into account our unit was the first to enter that part of
Baghdad.
We were in AAV's, Amphibious Assault Vehicles. Each one had a 50 caliber machine gun as well as a Mark 19 fully auto grenade launcher. The houses
that the Ssgt manning the turrents shot into... they were made from clay it looked like. None of the buildings had any structural fortitude...
compaired to cement... our 'bullets'/rounds went right through those buildings.
To the credit of the Infantry Marines that were in my AAV, we only shot at confirmed targets.
To the Ssgt that was not infantry, that was with the AAV crew... he shot at so many things, and I couldn't hardly find what he was shooting at 80% of
the time. The other part of the time there simply wasnt enough time to distinguish if it was a combatant. He was using the 50 caliber machine gun,
and he was going through ammo like crazy.
I asked the Ssgt later what he was shooting at... he said "everything". He said he couldnt think of anything but the Marines getting shot at... so
he was shooting first... he wasnt going to risk taking a chance. We had lost 2 people in combat so far... Lt. Childers and Gunny Bohr. Lt. Childers
was the first combatant to die in that invastion... he got hit 30 yards from me.
We did get pressed really hard, I even saw our LT throw a grenade at one guy that was hiding around the corner with RPG's. It got pretty
insane...
The first AAV in our formation ran out of ammo... our Infantry SSGT from my track had to carry crates of ammo up to them. We had a combat load... a
freaking combat load of ammo per vehicle. I cant stress that enough, we had a combat load inside of those AAV's. Thats how many rounds were going
down range, through houses...
It was a mess.
We shot vehicles to pieces if they crossed our 'boundaries'... and they only crossed them out of confusion/panic. The screams of a mother still
alive witnessing her van full of family shot to pieces. I will never get the horror of that scream out of my head. Its already been so many years
now... and I just cant get it out of my head.
We never found any WMD's by the way.
[edit on 22-1-2010 by WarloriousCreed]