In the case against me, Number Two begins with this question: “Are you going to videotape me if I shoot him?” It’s November 2004. I’m following two Marines through the streets of Fallujah during the first day of the ground offensive to take back the city from insurgents. It’s called Operation Phantom Fury, but so far, with the exception of a few bodies here and there, there don’t seem to be many insurgents left. But as we come into an opening between buildings, I see an older Iraqi man lying on the ground, a close-cropped white beard in stark contrast to the maroon stream of blood running in a little channel from his head to the curb. His shirt is open, exposing a white T-shirt underneath and a chest that is rising and falling in what seem to be agonal breaths, likely his last. His right hand rests on his chest, while the left arm is bent at the elbow and pointing up, the hand cupped open, weirdly reminiscent of the queen of England’s wave. I move closer to see the extent of his injuries but reel back when I see that the right side of his head is missing. While he looked complete from a distance, a Marine sniper had fired a round through his eyeball, taking much of his skull and brain through the exit wound in the back. Yet, it seems so oddly clean, almost surgical. After I walk back over to the Marines, one of them asks me the question, “Are you going to videotape me if I shoot him?” I don’t think there’s any malice behind the question. It’s a mercy killing, I’m nearly certain. I respond almost automatically: “Of course I am, that’s my job,” I say, but as the words come out of my mouth, I’m wondering why I can’t just let the Marine finish the job without videotaping it. Doubtless, the man is going to die. Why not let it be without more suffering? The Marine shrugs, tells the other something along the lines of it’s not worth the risk of getting into trouble—“The guy’s going to die anyway.” The two of them walk on and leave me alone with the Iraqi man with half a head missing. I look at him. He’s still breathing, still bleeding. What’s left of his life is in my hands now. I wonder if this is the worst way to die, alone with no one who can even understand your last words, if you have any. I wonder if I should’ve let the Marine shoot him. I don’t know if he’s suffering terribly or if that sniper’s bullet removed any sense of pain or awareness along with that part of his head. I wonder how I became the final arbiter of the last moments of his existence. I look at him again and realize we are alone in this place together. The Marines are gone; there’s no one else around. This Iraqi man, dressed in civilian clothes, most likely in his mid to late fifties, has no weapon by his side and perhaps never did. He is almost certainly someone’s father, maybe even a grandfather, but there’s no one around him now, only me. He will die lying on the ground as a stranger holding a video camera looks over him. But I can’t let that happen. It’s just not right. So here is what I do instead: I walk away. I follow the path of the Marines and let him breathe his last breath alone in the street. The twinge of guilt I felt disappeared once the shooting started again, just around the corner. I left the half-headed man behind… or so I thought.
That should be enough, but it’s not. Number Three is the most egregious thing I have ever done in my life: I walked away again, but this time from a man very much alive and pleading with me to help him. When I left the room he was murdered.
Taleb Salem Nidal was one of five wounded Iraqi insurgents who had been captured by U.S. Marines after a confused engagement in a Fallujah mosque. The fighting took place during one of the biggest and bloodiest American-led military operations since the Vietnam War, Operation Phantom Fury. In November 2004, more than thirteen thousand American, British and Iraqi government troops took up positions north of the city, poised to push south, flushing out and killing the insurgents who had controlled Fallujah for months. Nidal was holed up with more than a dozen other fighters inside a mosque in south Fallujah. A week into the battle, Marines reached the mosque and after taking fire, hit back hard. (The early stages of this engagement are detailed in chapter 1.) When the smoke finally cleared, ten of the insurgents were dead and five injured.
Nidal was one of the lucky ones. He had been only slightly wounded in the leg. He was captured after the Marines took the mosque and was given medical treatment from Navy corpsmen along with the other insurgents. The Marine battalion commander assured me the wounded Iraqi prisoners were going to be transported back to field headquarters for further treatment and interrogation. But whether it was a lie or just an oversight in the heat of a furious battle, it never happened. Nidal and the other four survivors were left in the mosque overnight disarmed, untended and unguarded along with the stinking corpses of their ten dead comrades partially stuffed into American body bags. The next day a Marine lance corporal from the same battalion went back into the mosque and shot all of the wounded men again,
According to his own deposition in a Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) report, the Marine says he began shooting the injured Iraqis first with his M16 rifle, but when it jammed, he used his Beretta M9 pistol. I remember hearing the rounds while I waited outside the mosque. They were unhurried, with several-second intervals in between, the methodical nature of someone taking aim and shooting targets, rather than shots fired in fear or anger. Stranger and even more disturbing was what happened next. I entered the mosque with another Marine fireteam shortly after hearing the shots inside. I was surprised to see the bodies still in the mosque and even more surprised to see that four of the five wounded and captured insurgents who were supposed to be transported back to battalion headquarters were now either dead or dying from fresh gunshot wounds. Automatically, I began to document the scene, videotaping the dying men lying against the mosque’s far wall. As I did, I saw in the corner of my frame a Marine (the same Marine, I would learn later from the NCIS reports, who had shot the captured insurgents). I tilted up slightly as I heard him say of one of the wounded men he had just shot before I entered the mosque, “
Then I watched through my viewfinder as he raised his M16 and fired one final round into the man. It was an execution shot from point-blank range, blowing his brains out against the back wall of the mosque in which he had been slumped. I saw the proverbial pink mist that anyone who’s ever witnessed a headshot claims to have seen. For a moment it mingled with the particles of dust riding the sunbeam from a mosque window to the rubble-strewn floor.
“He’s dead now,” another Marine said, uttering a statement so profoundly redundant that it seemed simply an exclamation point to the act. Then the Marine spun on his heel and walked away, as if he had done nothing more than dispatch a rabid dog. In a killing such as this, there’s a temporary vacuum in the air that sucks the breath out of anyone watching. I could feel my stomach rise to my throat. I knew that in this moment everything had changed. I had stumbled into a moral limbo where there existed the slippery concept that even in the mayhem of war, there were rules about killing. As technology was my witness, I had unwittingly become part of this unresolved conversation simply by pushing the red button on my camera.
When I confronted the Marine and asked him why he shot the man who had been wounded yesterday, he simply said, “I didn’t know, sir, I didn’t know.” He walked out with the other Marines and left me alone with Taleb Salem Nidal, who had pulled his blanket down and revealed his leg wound and the underpants he was wearing, his only clothing besides his shirt. He began talking to me in Arabic, asking me to help him. I watched him through my viewfinder, as I had the Iraqi who had been executed just moments before. Nidal’s arms were outstretched, pleading. I told him I didn’t speak Arabic, though the look on his face was clearly that of a man who knew he was in great danger, having just witnessed his wounded friends all being shot a second or third time. He fell back on his elbows, resigned, noting by my lack of expression that I would do nothing for him. He was right. I turned away from him as he lay on the floor, in his dirty white underwear, chunks of concrete and debris surrounding him.
I walked out of the mosque angered by the murder that I had just witnessed but somehow oblivious that Nidal could be next. I wanted to find the battalion commander and show him the videotape. Who was to blame? Was the Marine acting on his own or following orders not to leave anyone alive behind their lines of advance?[3] Ultimately it didn’t matter. NBC and I decided to self-censor the report and not show the actual shooting, assuming it might be too inflammatory.[4] Our actions botched the story. By agreeing to censor the video, we kept important information from being part of the critical public discourse during a time of war. I had failed in my duty as a journalist and that failure haunted me for years.
I went back to reporting on war, but I never stopped thinking about what had happened in that Fallujah mosque. Wanting some kind of closure, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the U.S. government, desperate to get any other details. In 2007, three years after the mosque shooting, the full report of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service arrived in my mailbox. It was the size of a Manhattan telephone book and heavily
