Has this become the Marine way?

One moves cautiously in war.

Death can be waiting behind a tree, over a hill or in a darkened room.

Duty conflicts with fear as a soldier steps silently through an enemy zone, imagining weapons pointed like fingers at the heart of his being.

Any moment, a sudden burst of gunfire sprayed from the deepest silence of one’s fears can end a life that, moments before, had tingled with energy and animation.

It isn’t that difficult to die in a war.

And yet there are rules to the games of horror that humanity has created. The rules say that it is all right to kill this way, but not that way. You kill those who threaten to kill you, but not those who cower in corners.

You don’t kill the helpless.

These thoughts have been with me since the revelation that 24 unarmed civilians, including children, may have died at the hands of a dozen United States Marines in a rage over the death of one of their own a short while before.

The news, accompanied by photographs of body bags and grieving survivors, was greeted with both silence and outrage. How could a dozen well-armed and well-trained Americans, wearing the proudest uniform in our military inventory, have murdered innocent civilians?

Those who have loudly supported our troops in Iraq adamantly insist that the Marines were following the rules of engagement in Haditha. Those who have just as loudly opposed the war for its content of horror boil with outrage over what they see as the final dissolution of the American dream: a nation of righteous heroes gone suddenly mean.

As an ex-Marine, I was stunned at the breakdown of combat discipline that allowed the massacre to occur. As a human being, I was appalled and saddened. As an observer, I wasn’t surprised.

I have hesitated to write about Haditha until now because I wanted to sort through all kinds of emotions. Defenders of the dozen Marines tell us that we don’t know what it was like at the moment of confrontation because we’ve never been there.

But I have been there.

I have seen friends die in war under the cruelest of circumstances. I have been enraged to the point of tears at an enemy who killed in prolonged sessions of agony. I have wanted to scream, to fire my rifle into the air, to scorch every village that lay in our path, to bring wild vengeance down on their heads.

I did none of that, and I never witnessed any American soldier who did. We were trained, as one man put it, to use our brains before we used our guns. We didn’t shoot each other in fits of rage or panic, and we sure as hell didn’t shoot civilians.

That was in Korea. This is in Iraq. Are the wars that different, or are we that different? I have thought about this in both shame and wonder, pondering a temperament that would have allowed a massacre of such monumental proportions.

I have also wondered at the irony of outrage over the killing of 24 civilians when our bombs have killed thousands. I have pondered the contradictions of rules in an essentially rule-less human endeavor. I have looked deep into memories of training and discipline that kept me alive in combat without having butchered the innocent.

I think that we were different back then. The difference didn’t evolve from just the size and scope of the wars, and not even from the special emotions that individual wars evoke. We were a different kind of people, with the same hubris but with a more elevated and contained image of ourselves.

Those were the days when it wasn’t OK to taunt and terrify prisoners of war. Those were

the days when imprisonment without due process wasn’t a standard of legal comportment. Those were the days when

torture wasn’t a national

policy.

We didn’t have a leader back then who invaded a sovereign nation on false pretenses, who declared himself a “war president” as though the establishment of new killing fields was an achievement worthy of a standing ovation and who, by strutting and posturing, turned a war of “liberation” into a jihad, dividing the world into camps of terror that are a thousand times more fearful than they were before the first bombs fell on Baghdad.

We began to change in Vietnam when the slaughter at My Lai fell as a shadow over honor, and we come to a time again when the shadow deepens.

The America I see today

isn’t the America I knew as a kid. It isn’t the America that faced an enemy to keep the world free. It isn’t the America whose uniform I wore to defend a small country against the might of communist aggression. This is an America of angry men and clenched fists. This is an America that goes to war for power and profit, and shouts down those who protest.

Voices will be raised in

defense of the 12 angry men

being investigated for killing

innocent civilians in Haditha. Their defenders will say that it’s a shame but this is war and bad things happen and death is just around the corner when bullets fly.

I will listen to the excuses, but I will still know deep in my heart what lies at the evil core of the deed. We’re different than we were.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.