Episode 3: Sounds Like Murder
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Previously on In the Dark. In the morning of 19th November 2005, American soldiers had executed three families. This is my uncle Hamid.

24 people killed by U.S. Marines. Some are comparing the Haditha killings to the Vietnam massacre at My Lai. I heard M-16. He heard the military just shouting hysterically in a really strange behavior. I found out that there were pictures taken of

Those pictures today have still not been seen. Where are they? Guys, I have never had bigger news for you. This morning at 9:19 a.m. Central Time, CENTCOM released the investigative file for Haditha. What? We are in possession of it right now. Oh my gosh. We're like two minutes away. Okay. You ready? I'm ready.

The Marines who were in Haditha on November 19, 2005, the ones who responded to the IED explosion and saw the aftermath of the killings that followed, are now in their 30s and 40s. They live all over the country. So this is going to T-bone right there. The entire In the Dark team fanned out to try to find them. On my right is a kind of farm. Here we are. We're in Arlington, Texas. I am in Kenosha, Wisconsin. We're in the desert with some Joshua trees.

We drove to some quite remote places. We're in the middle of fucking nowhere. Deep into rural Missouri. We encountered a lot of what you might call deterrents. We had this, like, Marines placard that said, if you come on this property, I have been trained to kill you. Consider this your warning in negotiation. No trespassing violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again. You feel comfortable going in? Yes.

We knocked on people's doors anyway, completely out of the blue, and tried to explain what we were doing. Hey there. My name's Parker. I'm working on a project about the Iraq War.

We were not totally surprised to discover that lots and lots of Marines had absolutely no interest in dredging up details about the war. I'd rather not. I remember a lot, but I'd rather not. I'm not interested in talking about that. That was a long time ago, and I tried to move past all that, so no thank you on all that. I have no comments. I just fucked this my whole life. Thank you. Have a great day.

One Marine insisted he wasn't the guy we were looking for. Even though it was clear that it was him. Kind of a little bit, yeah.

We tried to reach nearly every service member in the Haditha investigation who seemed like they could have seen something important on November 19th. About 150 people in all. And eventually, we found some who were willing to speak with us. They invited us onto their porches and into their living rooms. They kept us on the phone for hours. Some of them honestly seemed like they'd been waiting all along for us to appear. Nobody ever just stops and says, hey, tell me about this. You're the first person to actually sit and listen for a second.

We interviewed 39 Marines and other service members who were in Haditha that day, almost none of whom had ever talked to a reporter about what they'd seen. And what they told us, and what we read in the hundreds of statements we sued the government to get, is the story of November 19th, told not by the shooters, but by the men who saw what happened just before the killings and just after. This is season three of In the Dark, an investigative podcast from The New Yorker.

This season is about the killing of 24 men, women, and children by U.S. Marines in Haditha, Iraq. It's a story not just about the killings themselves, but also about the failure of the U.S. military to bring the men responsible for them to justice. In this episode, we're going to tell you about November 19th, what we learned from talking to the Marines who were there, what they saw has never been told before. This is Episode 3, Sounds Like Murder.

To understand what happened on the day of the killings, it helps to start a few months earlier, to go back to the moment when these Marines first arrived in Haditha. The Marines were from a battalion called 3-1, short for 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines. They called themselves the Thundering Third, the Balls of the Corps, the Tip of the Spear. Most of the guys in 3-1 were young when they enlisted. They'd graduated high school after 9-11 and had signed up knowing they'd probably be sent to war.

By the time they were sent to Haditha in the fall of 2005, many of them were on their second or even third deployments. They remember being told to get ready for an epic battle. The unit that was in Haditha before them had lost more than 20 Marines. They expected that Haditha would be filled with insurgents, members of al-Qaeda, foreign fighters, terrorists looking to kill Americans.

And the Marines' job was to eliminate them. You know, get ready, prepare for the worst. Casualties, gunfights, bombs blown up. I mean, house-to-house clearing, just a dogfight.

In fact, they thought Haditha would be as fierce a battle as Fallujah. This is going to be like Fallujah part two. Fallujah was another city in Iraq where a lot of these same guys had fought a year earlier. And in Fallujah, the fighting had been no holds barred. Insurgents had taken over the city and holed up in buildings and tunnels. And the Marines had fought house by house to take the city back. Kick open the door, something's there, and you just shoot it. Fallujah, you know, shoot first, ask question later.

They'd been sent in to extinguish the insurgency. And they'd extinguished everything in sight. It's in the history books. National Geographic, all that shit. They'd gotten medals and bragging rights for life. I think everyone's chest got a little bit bigger. I think their balls all got a little bit bigger. They all became trigger happy. They were salty. So on the eve of the entry into Haditha, the Marines were both psyched and kind of terrified. They gathered at the edge of Haditha before dawn. Guys who'd learned how to fight in Fallujah mixed in with new recruits.

Among the group was a 25-year-old Marine from Connecticut. His name was Frank Wuderich. Wuderich had never seen combat before, and this was his chance. He was pumped. He put on his night vision goggles and looked around. He felt, as he would later tell an interviewer, a sense of awe. Wuderich had been assigned to be a squad leader. Even though he'd never been on the front lines, he was now in charge of 11 guys. He worried he wouldn't be up to the task of leading his men into battle, but he tried not to show it.

As they walked through the desert, Woodridge turned to his radio operator and said, You know, if I make out of this alive, this is probably the most amazing thing I've done. But as the Marines entered Haditha, what they found was strange, completely unexpected.

It was quiet. The city, the streets were empty. It was pretty anticlimactic. Oh, another life illusion. We encountered zero resistance. I don't think I know anybody that fired a single shot that day. Hell, we had people freaking hanging out the windows waving at us. We really didn't capture or arrest anybody or do anything those first couple days. Just walked in, took over, started setting up our firm base, setting up patrols and just waiting for something to happen. The Marines found an abandoned school and set up bunks and classrooms to sleep on.

The school became their base of operations inside the city. They called it Forward Operating Base Sparta, or FOB Sparta. In the days that followed, the Marines settled into a routine. They patrolled the city endlessly, trying to build relationships with residents and looking for traces of insurgent activity. Patrols, patrols, patrols.

It could be mounted patrol on the Humvees or a foot patrol. There were clearly insurgents in the town, but they mostly seemed to be hiding out, burying IEDs, occasionally popping up to fire a couple shots at Marines, but definitely not mounting some kind of large-scale attack. That epic battle the Marines had been told to expect wasn't happening. And so instead, the Marines spent their days searching for these hidden insurgents and their supplies.

The Marines would show up at houses and look for weapons. They would scan the ground for little red and white wires peeking out of the soil that could indicate an IED. They spent a maddening amount of time examining mounds of dirt, dirt that could be hiding something dangerous or could just be dirt. For the Marines, Haditha was, in a word, boring, so boring.

It was talk to people, invite people in. It was talk to the sheik, talk to the neighborhood, talk to the women. It was just all that hearts and minds kind of thing. There was no conflict. There was no city to clear. It was just pot shots taken here and there. We actually have a recording of how boring the day-to-day in Haditha could be. So I guess about that time of day, about 9.20 a.m.,

In the morning, people were starting to rise and shine. We met a Marine named Michael Fay. His job was pretty unusual. He was a combat artist on the Haditha deployment. Basically, his job was to document the war through drawings and audio. He made a bunch of recordings, and he gave them to us. It's now about 1730 on October... This one is from a day he spent with Frank Wuderich, the squad leader, in mid-October. I'm in the roving patrol.

led by Sergeant Woodridge. It's fairly quiet this morning. There is a light breeze stirring the palm trees. There are bougainvillea-looking shrubs overhanging the walls with bright magenta flowers.

Some fruit trees, you can see some pomegranate. Listening to Faye's tapes from back then is pretty remarkable. It's just weeks before Wuderich and five of his Marines will kill 24 people. But the Haditha Michael Faye captures seems calm, almost tranquil. We are set up in a small alley. I can definitely hear the sounds of children in the courtyards.

He watches kids playing soccer in the streets. He sees an elderly man sitting in an alley with his grandson. He notes the chirping of birds and the barking of dogs. He patrols all day, and nothing happens. We're finishing up the day here at an observation post. You can hear in the background the evening singing from the minarets. And right now it's...

It's past sunset, it's the gloam. Got a three-quarter waxing moon. And all the minarets, all the mosques right now are singing up a storm. But no violence, at least so far. So it's been a good day. Michael Fay, the combat artist, seemed to love this peaceful version of Haditha.

The waxing moon, the bougainvilleas, the sound of children playing, the voices calling to prayer. But for a lot of the Marines, this all started to become kind of grating. When the fucking prayer comes on, fucking like five times a day, you're like, fuck. I always wanted to shoot that guy that does it and then put some Tupac on so everybody can hear it.

The Marines watched DVDs and lifted weights. They hung around the smoke pit and smoked cigarette after cigarette. But the lack of combat, the fact that they knew that insurgents were nearby but rarely saw them, was unnerving. It's like you're watching a horror movie and, you know, they kind of prep you for the big scare. It was kind of like that without the payoff. Like, there was no big scare after that. So you're kind of like adrenaline hitting boots and you're running, you're looking down the alleys, you're looking for something, anything.

Never, never saw it. One guy told us, Haditha was like a jack-in-the-box. You never knew when something terrifying would pop out. One night in October, the company commander, Captain Lucas McConnell, gathered his Marines. Michael Fay, the combat artist, was there taping. The recording he made is remarkable. It captures a moment when all this boredom, this lack of combat, lack of killing,

had gotten so frustrating for the Marines that McConnell addressed it head-on.

Believe it or not, sooner or later, we will kill some of these folks who need to be killed. And that's the beautiful thing about this world, is that there's always someone who needs to be killed. And we're the folks to do it. McConnell calls out Sergeant Woodridge by name. Where's Sergeant Woodridge at? Right here, sir. Right on my flank here. I specifically challenged the squad leaders to do some soul-searching. The Marines had spent days and days clearing houses and digging up and confiscating IED parts and ammo.

Captain McConnell tells his men to keep their heads up. He tries to reassure them that what they're doing is worthwhile.

And every time you find something, whether it be a 120 round or the 130 you found the other day, to me, that's an American, that's an Iraqi life that was saved out there. So don't let that just drip by you like it's something you found, but you didn't get to kill someone that day, so maybe it wasn't a special day. It is a special day. McConnell tells his men that their chance to kill someone will come.

Every day they step off the base could be the day. The rough? The rough. Great job, 3rd Platoon. The rough. The rough. Hey, last thing. Every time we step out in a vehicle, it's movement to contact. They just need to keep trying to find and engage the enemy. So be thinking about that. No one's sleeping. It's movement to contact. Plenty of time to rest. But when you're driving down this road, I might plan on killing somebody. The rough. The rough. It was one month and six days before the killings.

We'll be back after the break. Hi, it's Madeline. I'm going to be honest with you. This season almost didn't happen. But we were able to report season three to its conclusion and bring it to you because we joined The New Yorker. At In the Dark, we believe that investigative reporting can lead to real change. That's why I'm asking you to become a New Yorker subscriber.

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From the producers of Anything for Selena and the Pulitzer Prize-winning podcast Suave comes My Devo, a podcast about roots. Dive into the legendary life, music, and lasting influence of Latin America's most prolific songwriter and showman, Juan Gabriel, El Devo de Juarez. Hosted by Maria Garcia, this is My Devo, an Apple original podcast produced by Futuro Studios. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.

One day last summer, Samara and I tracked down a guy named Brian Witt. We'd come to talk to Witt because his story was particularly important. Witt was actually with Wuderich's squad the morning of the killings. He was the corpsman assigned to them, the medic. Witt lives in Florida now, in a yellow ranch house.

Hi. I'm Madeline. This is Tamara. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you guys. Whit's a skinny guy. Why are we even? I just came home from work, by the way, so I'm not usually, like, have dirty arms and shit, so. He's the assistant manager at a discount store in Fort Myers. He told us he had a tough time adjusting to Iraq. The Euphrates River reminded him of Saylorsville, Kentucky, the small town where he'd grown up.

I remember it making me miss home so bad seeing it because it was like when you walk through those trees and looked at the river, it's like you were out of Iraq. I was like back home in Kentucky or something looking at a creek. We stood with Witt in his driveway and talked to him for hours. The sun set and the crickets came out. He tried to keep us on his right side, literally on the right side of his body. He does that with everything. He said someone at the VA had called him ritualistic.

As he talked, he chained-smoked cigarettes. 305s, because they're only, yeah, they're five bucks, man. Don't want to get smoke on you, so I'll try to get it. And he kept moving, inching backwards around his red Hyundai, tapping his fingers on the car, fidgeting with the wipers. As Witt began to talk about November 19, 2005, he closed his eyes. I want to say it was a nice morning. I remember, like, a bit of red sky. I can always picture that. It was right along the river, the first part.

Witt had woken up early, and the assignment that morning had been pretty basic. Take some supplies and some Iraqi Army soldiers the Marines worked with to an outpost. Witt had been assigned to a squad that was new to him. It included a number of men whose actions that day would later be investigated. Their leader was Sergeant Frank Wuderich, and there were 10 other men in the squad that day. They included Lance Corporal Stephen Tatum, a quiet, tall Marine from Oklahoma, and Lance Corporal Justin Sherritt,

who manned the squad's machine gun and who sometimes wore a patch that said Punisher. The movie had come out the year before. Witt and the rest of the men packed some equipment into four Humvees and drove in a convoy across town. They did the drop-off, and then at about 7 a.m., they turned around and headed back. There was four Humvees. That was it. Personally, I was in the third one, and it was just an open-air Humvee. I was just sitting in the back of it.

The Marines wore body armor and helmets, and they carried a card with the rules of engagement written on it. Rules they'd been trained on over and over again. Rules like, don't shoot anyone who's surrendered. And most importantly for what would happen next, make sure to identify people before you shoot them. Only target the enemy. The convoy moved fast over bumpy roads. It bounced over giant potholes, places where insurgents had detonated IEDs. You could just see there was just pot marks everywhere.

Just days earlier, one of those IEDs had injured some Marines from their platoon. Afterward, according to a Marine who'd later testify about it, Frank Wuderich said that if they ever got hit again, they should kill everyone nearby. One of Wuderich's lawyers would later deny he ever said that. The convoy turned left onto El Hay El Sinai Road, which ran past a residential neighborhood. The Marines called it Root Chestnut. A white car was driving on the street, too, toward the convoy from the opposite direction.

Witt turned around and looked at the Humvee behind his, the last one in the convoy. That Humvee was driven by a Marine named Miguel Terrazas. Terrazas was sort of a squad mascot, a beloved goofball who'd fought bravely in Fallujah. A guy who everyone called TJ after a memorable night in Tijuana. A guy who many Marines described as their best friend. Terrazas' Humvee was right behind Witt's, close enough that Witt complained to him about the cold morning air. Witt turned back around and faced forward. And then...

there was an unbelievably loud sound. I was honest to God almost deaf. Like, what the fuck was that? And then it's like, oh, I know what that was. An IED. There was a lot of debris and stuff coming down. I was out of the vehicle with my boots on the ground and then a tire hit.

the pavement, like 20 feet from me. That's how quick I was out and how close we were. The tire had been in the air. Witt's ears rang, but he could hear another Marine shouting. I just remember him saying, you know, they got Terrazas. They got us, man. For a moment, Witt noticed the white car that had been driving along the road. It had come to a stop nearby. Witt dashed back through the smoke to where Terrazas' Humvee had been seconds earlier. That's when he saw Terrazas. I mean, I knew he was dead as soon as I saw him.

Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, TJ, everyone's best friend, was lying dead in the road, his body in pieces. Two of Witt's other squad mates were injured. One was pinned beneath the wreckage. The lower half of his body was smashed. He was going into shock. Witt gave him a shot of morphine and helped get him free and yelled to someone to radio for backup. Witt was so focused on tending to the wounded that he didn't see what else was going on around him. And he didn't see what happened as he left Root Chestnut in the medevac.

He didn't see the passengers in the white car, a group of young men on their way to college in Baghdad, get out of the car where it had stopped near the convoy. He didn't see Wuderich and another Marine shoot the men. He didn't see Wuderich and several of his squad mates, Tatum, Sherritt, and two others, head south from Root Chestnut. He didn't see them approach a nearby house, the house where Khalid's sister, Asma, lived. And he didn't see what happened inside that house, and the next one, and the next one.

What happened that morning inside the houses and beside the white car, what happened to the 24 people whose bodies Khaled Salman Receif would later find at the hospital, would eventually lead to an investigation and another investigation and a whole series of criminal charges. But all of that would come later. That morning, for most of the Marines in 3-1, it wasn't clear exactly what had happened. But as the day went on, it became all too obvious that whatever it was, it was something terrible.

That's after the break.

And that's where my podcast, Crime Story, comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. On the afternoon of November 19th, several hours after the IED explosion on Route Chestnut, a sergeant named Aristoteles Barbosa was hanging out at Fob Sparta, the school where the Marines lived.

Barbosa was basically a logistics guy. His job was to keep things running at the FOB. Around 4 p.m., Barbosa's superior, the gunnery sergeant, approached him with an unusual assignment. Gunny comes up to me. He's like, hey, Barbie. I was like, hey, there's some bodies we've got to pick up, you know, some collateral damage. The gunny didn't tell Barbosa how many bodies there were or what had happened to them. I was like, I need some body bags. And he's like, yeah, I think I got a few.

Barbosa knew that Gunny thought that keeping lots of body bags close by was bad luck. That was one of those superstitions that he had. The Gunny gave Barbosa all the body bags he had. It wouldn't be nearly enough. He just gave me like three or four, I don't remember. He just gave me a stack of body bags and I threw them in the vehicle and sent my guys out. Barbosa told the Marines, Get the bodies and bring them back. Barbosa stayed at the FOB and the Marines headed out to Root Chestnut.

They joined up with the Marines who were already out there, posting security near where the IED had killed Terrazas. The area was teeming with Marines. One of them was Jose Roldan. He told us they knew something had gone down, but they didn't know what. You ever notice, like, in the crime scene, you see a whole bunch of cops everywhere walking around, and some cops are upstairs, some cops are downstairs. That's kind of what it was like. So there's Marines walking everywhere, kind of exploring and shit. One of the guys on the scene, a Marine named Ryan Briones, had a camera on him that day.

I interviewed Briones at a steakhouse in Silicon Valley. He told us he'd recently gotten out of prison. He refused to let me record, but as he sliced into a ribeye, he recounted what he'd seen in vivid detail. He seemed to relish talking about it. And said the metallic taste of the meat brought back memories of November 19th. Briones said he and another Marine, a guy named Andrew Wright, were told to take pictures of the bodies.

These were presumably the pictures that the Marine Corps Commandant, General Michael Hagee, would later boast about keeping away from the public. Briones and Wright traveled from house to house, site to site, to find the bodies and photograph them. There was the white car, near the spot where the IED had exploded. And lying nearby were the bodies of five Iraqi men, four of them with shots to the head. There was a two-story stone house, the house where Khalid's sister Asma lived.

Inside, Briones and Wright found six bodies: three men, two women, and a small boy. They photographed them as they lay. One of the rooms in the house had clearly been on fire. Briones said the smoke made his eyes hurt. When they were finished in that house, Briones and Wright walked to another stone house nearby. The first thing that they saw as they entered the second house was a man lying dead near the doorway. In the back of the house, they found a woman lying dead on a bed. Four dead children were huddled next to her.

The wall above the bed was riddled with bullet holes. Wright started numbering the bodies with a red sharpie so he could keep track of them. He drew the number 10 on the foot of an 8-year-old boy. He drew an 11 on the back of a 5-year-old girl. He drew a 12 on the cheek of the 3-year-old lying next to her. And a 13 on the forehead of the next girl over. On the floor in front of the bed, they saw a dead woman. And on the floor behind the bed, a dead teenage girl. Wright numbered them two.

When Briones and Wright finished in that house, they walked back to Root Chestnut. Along the way, they photographed the body of an Iraqi man lying outside. Back on Root Chestnut, Wright later told investigators, he caught up with Justin Sherritt, the gunner in Woodridge's squad. Wright asked Sherritt what had happened. We killed them all, Sherritt said. We killed them, Punisher style. It was getting late, but Briones and Wright still had one more house to get to. Inside, they found four dead men.

As Baroness and Wright finished taking their photos, several other Marines went into the houses to remove the bodies. Mike Riles was one of them. Our reporter Parker Yesko asked him about it. Do you just remember kind of what it looked like? I do. Yeah, I do. Riles had trouble describing what he saw that day. Some parts he wouldn't say out loud, other parts he'd forgotten. Jose Roldan did share what he saw. We saw a whole bunch of dead bodies.

I had injuries from fragmentations, like a grenade blast, shrapnel, bullet wounds. One body was so badly burned, it was almost unrecognizable as a human. Here's Jarrett Bilski. There was a body that was burned basically to where you can put him in a bucket. There was an arm, a leg, there was a small embers in the torso. The Marines had a hard time moving a lot of the bodies. They were heavy and stiff.

Jarrett Fury said that since that day, he hasn't been able to eat meat with bones in it. The smell was horrible, like rancid hamburger meat or something. Bilski described getting bodies into the Humvees basically any way they could. We didn't put them in any body bags. We just picked them up by the arms and legs and dragged them to the Humvee. We just stacked them in as many as we could as they were. I have an image of holding up a

This is Mike Riles again. But the way that some of the other Marines talked about what happened, and what they actually did, was more ghoulish. It was like they didn't even see the bodies as belonging to human beings.

One Marine, a guy named Adrian Jimenez, told Parker about how he discovered a piece of brain in the back of one of the Humvees. The little squiggly lines. It was a good piece, too. How big? Like a potato. Nice little chunk. Jimenez described putting on his gloves and reaching for it. What were you thinking as you picked it up? That I was going to throw it at my friend. You got to have some kind of humor. Dark humor. Really dark, you know? You got to have fun. Or else it's just going to suck.

Because it sucks anyways. Jimenez also found a leg in the Humvee. From the knee down. Whose? Whose? I don't know. Probably some fat guy because it was a big leg. Nice. Half a leg. Half a leg. Barefoot. Jimenez picked up the leg, chased his friend around with it, and then threw it at him. Later, he said, they threw the leg in a burn pit. Nothing to me. Regular day. Regular day. I just wanted to go to sleep. It was late at night by the time the Marines were done.

Once the Humvees were filled with bodies, they drove back to Fob, Sparta. Aristoteles Barbosa was there, waiting for his guys to return. And they come back, and they call me outside, and yeah, there was about 24 bodies in the back of the vehicles, and I'm like, holy fuck, man. And I remember I opened a Humvee, and I just see bodies stacked up, you know, and I opened another one, same thing, and I'm like, shit. Barbosa said one of the bodies he saw was the body of a little girl.

Maybe five years old. She was young. What did you think when you saw her? I thought of my daughter at the time. My daughter was about four. And my daughter has that little Goldilocks, so it reminded me of her. And what'd you think? That I wouldn't want to be in the dad's shoes, you know, if that was my daughter. But the girl's dad was dead, too. Barbosa tried to fill in the blanks, wondering why the Marines would have done this. If they did it...

as retaliation for what happened to TJ. I mean, maybe in their eyes it's justified. They lost one of the most loved guys in the company, so they just weren't happy. In their eyes, if that was the case, in their eyes, it's justified. Not in my eyes. In your eyes, what would that be? Sounds like murder, right? The Marines took the bodies to Haditha Hospital.

Hospital workers unloaded them and brought them inside. Then the Marines went back to their base. As they finally got a few quiet moments after the chaos of the day, they were thinking about their fellow Marine, their friend, Lance Corporal Terrazas, TJ, the Marine who'd been killed by the IED. A Marine named Gabriel Velasquez told us that he'd moved through most of the day like a zombie, trying not to think about what had happened to TJ. It was hard for him to talk about even now.

Like I just removed myself from like reality. And then that night it just, it just came out. Like I was just laying in bed and I just started crying. I just, I still couldn't believe it. And like, what do we say? Who do I talk to? He's not there. It's not the same. It wasn't the same. Like this is not, this is still not real. It's still not real. And it just was crying and crying and

That night, Lucas McConnell, the company commander who weeks earlier had told his men that they'd soon get their chance to kill, gathered some of his Marines together to talk and to mourn Terrazas' death. McConnell had gone to the scene. According to statements in the documents we received, he knew his Marines had killed women and children in their homes. And yet that night, he didn't ask the squad many questions about how so many people had ended up dead.

He said later he didn't want to probe them too much after they'd just lost a Marine. Instead, he told his men to keep their heads up. He told them they'd done the right thing. And that's where most of the Marines we spoke with decided to leave it. None of them reported what they'd seen as a possible war crime. Instead, they rationalized.

Many of the men assumed there must be a valid explanation for why the Marines did what they did, despite how it looked. Maybe a lot of this is imagination and none of this was near as bad as it seemed. I'm talking about what actually happened to the civilians. Surely, they thought, some of the men killed must have been insurgents. I mean, to me, they were enemy combatants. Were they 100% enemy combatants? I don't know.

But a Marine who worked in intelligence had searched the bodies earlier in the day, trying to figure out if any of the people killed were insurgents, and if they were connected to the IED in some way. He'd searched the white car and the houses. He'd searched people's pockets. He hadn't found anything suspicious. And then there was the obvious problem with the insurgent theory. So many of the dead were women and kids. Parker talked to Mike Riles about it. Did you think that some of them were insurgents? Me personally, no.

And why not? At least for the women and children, right? Like, a four-year-old girl, probably a seven-year-old. Like, no. Because intuitively, it doesn't make sense. If the dead hadn't been insurgents, maybe there was another explanation. Maybe insurgents had been inside those houses, firing at Marines. And women and children just got caught in the middle. And then the insurgents had gotten away. I mean, it was a horrible thing, but it was...

I mean, like you can't avoid certain situations when you're getting shot at. You know, they were being shot out. They assaulted the shooters and did what they did. Unfortunately, in that particular event, there were civilians caught in the crossfire. Or they imagined more elaborate scenes. Who knows? Maybe the terrorists did all this. Maybe bad people did all this. Maybe...

Maybe they were using them for shields. Maybe they were inside the house holding kids in front of them and shooting over them from the doorway. I don't know what, I don't know, maybe anything is possible. And regardless of what had happened, most of the men we spoke to preferred not to pass judgment. It wasn't me that did the shooting. Even if there was a seed of doubt, it wasn't my place to question. Things probably happened that weren't supposed to happen.

like we can't sit there and Monday morning quarterback it or something. You know, you can call it fog of war, you can call it a bad decision, whatever the case may be, but that's what they did. And I'm not going to second guess them. The Marines we talked to mostly weren't interested in getting to the bottom of what really happened that day. And besides, they seemed to be saying, figuring that out would be almost impossible, the whole fog of war thing. But I didn't think so. Yes, this happened almost 20 years ago and in another country and during a war,

But I decided to just tackle it the way I would if I were assigned to cover a shooting that happened a few blocks from my apartment. Basic journalism. I would try to look at whatever evidence existed. I would try to find anyone who might have witnessed the actual killings and talk to them. Try to talk to anybody accused of being involved and get all the evidence I could find. And in this case, I would keep trying to get those photos that the military was keeping from me. And then I would see what it all added up to.

So over the next three episodes, that's exactly what we're going to do. Coming up on In the Dark...

Did you think that a war crime had been committed? I don't have any opinion on that. We are on our way to Haditha. Me and Noor, we were under the bed. He get his rifle and then start shooting at us when we are under the bed. He said, I popped your nine mils cherry. What did you think when he said that? I assumed it meant that he had fucking shot someone with it. You had time to unsling a weapon that jammed, put it down, rack your nine,

And those men just stood there and then you shot them all? And not very surprised. You're shaking your head. She did not happen. She said, it's insane. This is not what happened. There's just one thing we need to make sure we ask you while we're here. I've already told you everything you're going to get. We've read your statements to investigators. Have a nice day. Thank you.

If you want to listen to Episode 4 right now, ad-free, you can do that by subscribing to The New Yorker. Subscribers will get all of our remaining episodes, ad-free, a week early. Go to newyorker.com slash dark to subscribe and listen now. In the Dark is reported and produced by me, Madeline Barron, managing producer Samara Freemark, producers Natalie Jablonski and Raymond Tungakar, and reporter Parker Yesko.

In the Dark is edited by Catherine Winter and Willing Davidson. This episode was fact-checked by Lucy Kroening and Linnea Feldman-Emerson. Original music by Allison Leighton-Brown. Additional music and theme by Gary Meister. Sound design and mix by John DeLure. Our art is by Emiliano Ponzi. Art direction by Nicholas Conrad and Aviva Mikhailov. FOIA legal representation from the FOIA team at Loewe & Loewe. Legal review by Fabio Bertone.

In the Dark was created by American Public Media and is produced by The New Yorker. Our managing editor is Julia Rothschild. The head of global audio for Condé Nast is Chris Bannon. The editor of The New Yorker is David Remnick. If you have comments or story tips, you can send them to us at inthedarkatnewyorker.com. And make sure to follow In the Dark wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like at my locker and she came up to me and she was like stuttering super bad. I'm like, stop f***ing around. She's like, I can't. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms, and spreading fast. It's like doubling and tripling and it's all these girls. With a diagnosis, the state tried to keep on the down low. Everybody thought I was holding something back. Well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah.

No, it's hysteria. It's all in your head. It's not physical. Oh my gosh, you're exaggerating. Is this the largest mass hysteria since The Witches of Salem? Or is it something else entirely? Something's wrong here. Something's not right. Leroy was the new dateline and everyone was trying to solve the murder. A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios. Hysterical.

Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. From PR.