Deadly Mistake Typifies Shaky Line U.S. Walks

On the day Baghdad fell, one-armed Iraqi war veteran Mohammed Khadim Hussein was buoyant with hope. The country’s hated dictator had vanished, and the U.S. bombing was ending. So Khadim Hussein, who had taken refuge in the suburbs, piled a few relatives into his 1982 Toyota Corona to check on his home in the city center.

That same afternoon, Marine Sgt. Miles Johnson and Pfc. Patrick Payne Jr. rode the last truck of a long military convoy arriving in Baghdad after the long push north. They were assigned to protect fellow Marines on what officers warned would be the most dangerous day of the war, as the convoy crawled through the crowded streets of Saddam Hussein’s capital. Their M-16s were locked and loaded; the two Marines from Camp Pendleton were eager for action.

The Iraqis came upon the tail end of the U.S. convoy as they left the city center in the early spring twilight. Seconds later, Khadim Hussein and two passengers were dead, shot by Johnson and Payne.

The incident was noted and then largely forgotten in the chaos surrounding the fall of Baghdad on April 9. But it now stands as an omen of what was to come. Despite the U.S.-led occupation, Iraqis and Americans here live largely parallel lives. When they do intersect, misunderstandings, disillusionment, suspicion and an imbalance of power often define their relations -- and frequently result in violence.

Last month, a Marine Corps investigation concluded that there was no basis on which to charge Johnson or Payne. An executive officer said Johnson was “trigger-happy” and “overreacted,” but Marine Corps lawyers said the shooting was justified because the Marines’ belief that the Iraqis posed a threat was reasonable “given the conditions of war that existed at the moment.”

To many Iraqis, Americans seem remote, hostile, unpredictable and utterly ignorant of Iraqis’ language and customs. For Khadim Hussein, his 17-year-old son and two other companions, a busy highway they had safely driven just hours before was suddenly blocked by men with guns.

To many Americans, Iraqis are clannish, inscrutable strangers who fail to appreciate the U.S. troops who fought and died to liberate them. Worse, they are potential assassins or human bombs. To the Marines in this case, whose columns had been attacked by snipers and car bombs on the way to Baghdad, Khadim Hussein was a man who foolishly went for a drive in a war zone.

The deaths have devastated Khadim Hussein’s extended family and left a legacy of anger and bitterness. A tight knot of Marines struggled with conflicting emotions -- but the troops concluded that they performed a difficult mission exactly the way they were trained to.

Although the U.S. military does not keep track of civilian casualties, a survey of news accounts by the nonprofit group Iraqbodycount.org indicates that 6,100 to 7,800 Iraqi civilians been have killed during the U.S. military campaign since March. A Times survey of Baghdad-area hospitals in May estimated that at least 1,700 Iraqi civilians died and more than 8,000 were wounded in the battle for the capital.

More recent deaths include the shooting of a 14-year-old boy at a wedding ceremony Thursday and of five Baghdad residents at an unannounced Army checkpoint in late July.

Erroneous shootings have fanned the anger toward U.S. troops in Iraq. A member of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council said last week that most Iraqis were discontented with the U.S.-led forces because they “treat the Iraqi people with violence and contempt.”

U.S. casualties also have mounted amid the postwar insurgency. About 300 Americans have been killed and more than 1,200 wounded, according to the latest data. Many of the U.S. casualties since May 1, the day President Bush declared major combat operations over, have been a result of attacks on convoys.

In the case of the three men killed April 9, there are parallel versions of what happened.

Marines who checked the car after the shooting reported that they did not see a fourth Iraqi, who was wounded in the legs and abdomen by flying glass but survived.

A grainy videotape taken by Australian journalists from the last truck of the convoy shows Johnson shouting orders to stop and then firing a warning shot in the direction of an approaching car. A volley of shots is then heard, and the car swerves to the left. The Iraqi, Ziad Monaam Abed Latif, Khadim Hussein’s 23-year-old cousin by marriage, said he heard no warning shouts or shots. The first and only thing he remembers is the driver and the others being fatally wounded.

Latif said the passenger in the front seat held a white towel out the window as they drove. Johnson and Payne said the car bore no white towel or flag, and journalists who examined it later did not see one. Latif said the Toyota coasted to a stop against a Marine vehicle after the driver was shot. The Marines said the car swerved toward the vehicle but missed it by inches.

Johnson said he finally opened fire from a distance of about 25 feet; Latif estimated it at 100 to 150 feet.

The Marines ask why the car’s occupants didn’t heed leaflets dropped by U.S. planes warning Iraqis to stay home. Khadim Hussein’s family members -- like most Baghdad residents -- said they never saw any leaflets.

Although the Marines involved were cleared, Lt. Col. Peter F. Owen, executive officer of the regiment, told investigators that the incident should be used by commanders “as an example of how not to conduct a checkpoint.”

Owen said Johnson “overreacted and just fired on the vehicle because he was scared.... It seemed pretty clear to me that Sgt. Johnson ... was trigger-happy.”

Johnson, 26, a well-built man with an aura of confidence, insists that he acted entirely within the parameters of his training and orders. “I still don’t understand why that car didn’t back off,” he said. “Didn’t they realize this is war?”

Future Looked Bright

The skies above Baghdad were a dirty eggshell shade on the afternoon of April 9. Smoke from oil fires ignited by Iraqi forces to confuse American warplanes stained the air. Streets were strewn with wrecked vehicles, debris and weeks’ worth of uncollected garbage.

Khadim Hussein was feeling upbeat, his family recalls. He had despised the Baathist regime; it had imprisoned one of his brothers for five years; it had launched a war with Iran in the 1980s that killed another and cost him his left arm.

At 46, with a job buying and selling diesel engines, Khadim Hussein was convinced that a more promising chapter was opening in his life -- and in the lives of fellow Shiite Muslims, whom the Baath Party had oppressed for 36 years.

Khadim Hussein drove with his son Emad, Latif and another relative, Hussein Ahmed Khadim, 32, from the Baghdad suburb of Habibiyeh, where Khadim Hussein had moved his extended family into a house that had belonged to his dead older brother. The Toyota was a reward from the government for Khadim Hussein’s loss of an arm to a mortar blast in the Iran-Iraq war, and he drove now with his right hand clutching a knob on the steering wheel. On the windshield was a sticker for the disabled.

After three weeks of huddling in their homes, Iraqis were reemerging into suddenly undefended streets. Earlier that day, Iraqi soldiers and militiamen had shed their uniforms and abandoned bunkers and foxholes throughout the capital. On the third and final day of full-scale combat in Baghdad, it seemed to the Iraqis that the war was winding down.

The men arrived without incident at Khadim Hussein’s abandoned home in the downtown neighborhood of Karada, where everyone on the narrow street of stuccoed homes was talking about the arrival of U.S. soldiers and Saddam Hussein’s defeat.

After several hours spent visiting and restocking the house with mattresses and food, the men continued the conversation as Khadim Hussein drove back to Habibiyeh at dusk.

“We were happy that the regime fell down,” recalled Latif, Khadim Hussein’s cousin. “We were talking about that.”

The men were excited by the arrival of the Americans and thought they had no reason to be afraid on this road. They had taken it many times before. It passed the General Security Service, a notorious compound where Iraqis would disappear into the hands of the secret police. But now, the whole city knew that the government forces had fled.

It was nearly 7 p.m., and the early-April light was fading as the Toyota crested an overpass and glided down the divided highway toward the security building.

Convoy Moving at Dusk

Less than 200 yards away, Johnson and Payne were waiting for trucks ahead of them to make a U-turn into the walled compound. The original plan was for the entire convoy to be safely inside by dark, but night was falling and the troops were still on the highway.

The two Marines worried that snipers would fire on them from surrounding apartment buildings and trees. They felt exposed and vulnerable. Sporadic gunfire was still ringing out nearby.

In the push north through the Iraqi desert, the Marines of the 1st Regimental Combat Team had been attacked by Iraqi fighters wearing civilian clothes and driving civilian vehicles. They had used civilians as shields, firing from hospitals and schools. Convoys, especially, had been targeted.

Many men in the convoy had been deeply disturbed by the deaths of 18 Marines in a fierce battle in Nasiriyah on March 23 -- some rumored to have been killed by Iraqi soldiers pretending to surrender. Marines’ bodies were still on the battlefield when the convoy rolled through.

Johnson and Payne, trained as infantrymen but assigned to the headquarters unit, were frustrated and resentful. They had not fired a shot in Iraq.

Johnson, of Washington, D.C., had been set to leave the Marine Corps to attend college but was caught up in the “stop-loss” policy that prevented anyone from departing. There was no room for him in an infantry unit, however, so he was assigned to a support unit.

“I had a chance to be a platoon leader in war. It doesn’t get any better than that. Instead, I was stuck here,” Johnson said later.

Payne, 21, a tall and boyish native of Claremont, had been part of a front-line unit in Kuwait but was demoted and transferred for lying to superiors about his involvement in a hazing incident.

Johnson and Payne were under strict orders to keep civilians away. Even women and children, they had been told, were potential threats.

“Don’t trust a ... one of them,” a gunnery sergeant had told his Marines. “I don’t want to have to write a ... letter to your ... mother saying you got killed because you got ... stupid.”

A new book, “The March Up: Taking Baghdad With the 1st Marine Division,” by retired Marine Maj. Gen. Ray L. Smith and former Assistant Secretary of Defense Bing West, describes the Marines as suspicious of all Iraqis. The book praises the Marines for trying to prevent civilian casualties but also criticizes the corps for not giving its troops better orders on how to deal with civilian cars approaching their convoys. They said that young Marines might have been overly alarmed by reports of civilian-led attacks.

“The Marines had no set rules for when to fire on an approaching vehicle, or at what distance,” Smith and West wrote. “Since Nasiriyah, rumors of Iraqi perfidy had flown up and down the column.... The troops heard that the generals at CentCom headquarters, the secretary of Defense and the president were accusing the Iraqis of suicide bombings. You couldn’t trust a single Iraqi.”

Johnson and Payne, in truck No. 593309, were in full combat mode -- tense, sleep-deprived and full of adrenaline. They had the basic Arabic phrases learned from phrase books that had been issued to every Marine. They were on Condition A, rounds in the chambers, ready to fire.

At dusk, a civilian car approached. Standing beside the truck, Johnson recalled, he shouted in English and Arabic for the driver to retreat. He gestured and fired a warning shot into the air, he said. The car swerved and sped away.

Minutes later, a second car approached, its headlights shrouded in dust.

“It wouldn’t stop,” recalled Pfc. Willie Wallace, 20, the driver of the Marine truck.

“We were all afraid of that car,” said Lance Cpl. Randall Hill, who was in the truck with Johnson and Payne. “We had to do something quick.”

Again, Johnson shouted in English and Arabic, and waved his arms, he said. He fired a warning shot into the pavement, he said, and waved and shouted again. The car closed to within 25 feet, he said.

“I shouted at them. I did a warning shot,” Johnson said. “They didn’t listen. I had no choice. They were too close.”

Johnson fired into the car. Payne sprayed the windshield with his M-16. Other Marines, hearing the shooting, opened fire too. But Payne took the leadership role.

“I just reacted,” he said. “Things kind of slowed down, like everything was in slow motion. I was so focused on them, it was like tunnel vision. Everything was crystal-clear. They just kept coming at us.”

A Matter of Seconds

Latif, in the back seat, said he had not noticed the military vehicle. “They started shooting even before we saw them,” he said.

In a matter of seconds, Khadim Hussein lay dying, shot through the neck and torso. Rounds tore through Khadim Hussein and ripped into Emad in the back seat, killing him. The boy slumped against the door, his head bloodied, his eyes still open.

In the front passenger seat, Khadim Hussein’s uncle, Hussein Ahmed Khadim, toppled into his nephew’s lap, dead. Latif crouched in the back seat, terrified and playing dead, he said later.

Latif said he hid, motionless, on the floor. He did not know whether he had been shot, he said, but he knew the other three were dead because he tried, and failed, to rouse them.

A Navy doctor traveling with the convoy examined the three bloodied men and pronounced them dead, according to the Marine investigative report. The report, and Marines interviewed for this story, said no one saw a fourth man in the back seat.

Latif said he remained on the floor of the car until dark. Then he opened the rear door and tumbled to the ground, he said, where he stayed for about half an hour. He played dead as several Americans approached, he said, but they did not look closely.

After they left, he said, he managed to get the attention of a pickup truck that had slowed to make a U-turn to avoid the Marines. It dropped him off at his father’s house in Baghdad, where a doctor was called to treat his cuts from broken glass.

Meanwhile, the Marines were dealing with another problem. The gunfire at the car had touched off a hail of fire from the compound, where Marines inside thought they were under attack. From the rooftops, they fired red-tracer rounds toward the street. Marines on the street, who were hunting for Iraqi snipers in the area, assumed the shots were coming from Iraqis and fired back. In the confusion, a Marine outside the compound was wounded in the leg.

The Marines have a policy of investigating all cases in which Iraqis are killed by Marine fire. Investigators were sent out to the site the next morning. A Times reporter traveling with the unit was interviewing the regimental commander, Col. John Toolan, on other matters when Toolan brought up the deaths of the three civilians.

“We train these young Marines as best we can,” Toolan said. “We train them to act decisively and correctly, but the decision to act is theirs. We can’t make it for them.”

After the Marines at the compound learned that the Iraqis had been unarmed, a rumor swept the compound that Johnson and Payne would be punished. Some Marines were visibly angry. “If those kids get hurt over this, this is not the corps I want to be in,” an officer said.

The shooting had shaken Toolan, who had been given command of the regiment just a week earlier with orders to be more aggressive than his predecessor. At a regimental meeting called by Toolan, an enlisted man demanded to know whether Johnson and Payne would be punished. It was a rare display of assertiveness by a Marine toward a commander at an open meeting.

“We train our young Marines and hope they do the right thing,” Toolan replied, and then quickly changed the subject.

The investigative report noted that rules-of-engagement cards issued to Marines in Iraq do not mention warning shots. And in training, Marines are discouraged from firing such shots because they can provoke “sympathetic firing,” such as that of the Marines who opened fire after hearing Johnson shoot. The Marine Corps is reevaluating its policy on warning shots because of this and other incidents.

After reviewing the investigation, Brig. Gen. John Kelly, assistant commander of the 1st Marine Division, decided that no punishment or reprimands were in order for any of the Marines involved. Although he was known to be critical of Marines who fired at civilians in other cases, Kelly did not criticize the actions of Johnson, Payne or the others. “I still believe in the essential goodness of our Marines,” he said.

Protecting their convoys continues to be one of the main problems facing U.S. troops in Iraq. In a speech last month, Lt. Gen. James Conway, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said he believed Marines had suffered fewer casualties than Army units since May 1 because they are more aggressive about convoy security.

In the days after the shooting, Johnson and Payne expressed mild remorse that civilians had been killed. But neither expressed second thoughts or recriminations.

A few days after the incident, in what fellow Marines viewed as a vote of confidence, Johnson was assigned to provide security for a senior officer on a mission outside the compound. Today, he is a close-combat instructor in the martial arts program at Camp Pendleton.

Payne, also back at Camp Pendleton, said he had no regrets about the shooting.

“Those people chose their own deaths,” he said. “I’m at inner peace with what I did. I had to protect my Marines.”

Bodies Pulled From Car

No telephones were working in Baghdad. Thinking that Khadim Hussein and the others had spent the night in central Baghdad, the women and children of the family were stunned by the ghastly procession that arrived back in Habibiyeh the next day.

Latif had arranged for another relative to ask the Marines if he could haul away the bullet-pocked Toyota. He towed it into the family’s driveway, the corpses still inside. Screams and wails broke out as relatives pulled the bodies from the car.

More than 3,000 people attended the funerals. At the family home in Habibiyeh, the car sat under a tarp, stained with the blood of Khadim Hussein, Ahmed and Emad. The family counted 43 bullet holes.

Stretched across the driveway, a black banner read, “Killed by American forces.”

The bodies were buried beneath brown polished sandstone in the rubble-strewn yard of a Baghdad shrine, shaded by date palms. Each grave is marked with the names of the dead and a phrase from the Koran: “What God wills, must be. God’s will is always right.”

Jawad Hussein, Khadim’s brother and now the guardian of his family, said he would like to meet the Marines who killed his relatives.

“I would ask them, ‘Did my brother do anything to them?’ ” he said. He described Khadim Hussein as someone who was widely loved because of the attention he paid to neighbors and relatives, a trait he developed after losing his arm. “If they knew this person, they would be really sad about what they did.”

The family has moved back into the home in Karada, where the small, bare living room is a portrait in grief. Khadim Hussein’s widow, Umm Mohammed, dresses in black from head to toe, isolating herself at home for a full year of mourning. She still cannot comprehend the swirl of circumstances that robbed her of her husband and son.

“I have no idea -- we didn’t know there was a curfew. There was no electricity; the car was old, its lights were poor,” she said. “The Americans must not have asked him to stop. If they had asked him, and he understood, he would have. I know it.”

Latif said he regards the shooting as an accident, but he insists that the Americans gave no warning.

Family members have registered a complaint with an Iraqi human rights committee. They hope to someday receive compensation for their loss. They say they have not received an apology and haven’t been contacted by any U.S. investigators.

Khadim Hussein left behind three sons -- Mohammed, Moayed and Ahmad -- and a daughter, Raghad. Moayed, 18, the oldest child still living at home, has dropped out of school to care for his mother and has taken a job to support the family.

Ahmad, 10, wept constantly at first. Now he smiles occasionally despite the loss of his father and brother who fixed things and played practical jokes. Sometimes he plays soccer with friends.

Gaunt and serious, Moayed is another story. He never smiles and appears to harbor a quiet fury. He keeps his distance from the U.S. soldiers who patrol his neighborhood.

“I try not to go near the Americans,” he said. “I have a fire inside, and I do not want to be near them.”