The Haditha Massacre Photos That The Military Didn’t Want The World To See
The Haditha Massacre Photos That the Military Didn’t Want the World to See
The Lede
The Story That “Hillbilly Elegy” Doesn’t Tell
Like many memoirs, J. D. Vance’s book misses a few details, some of which complicate the story upon which he has based much of his politics.
By Jessica Winter
This story is a companion piece to Season 3 of the investigative podcast In the Dark.
On the morning of November 19, 2005, a squad of Marines was travelling in four Humvees down a road in the town of Haditha, Iraq, when their convoy hit an I.E.D. The blast killed one Marine, Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, and injured two others. What followed would spark one of the largest war-crime investigations in the history of the United States.
During the next several hours, Marines killed twenty-four Iraqi men, women, and children. Near the site of the explosion, they shot five men who had been driving to a college in Baghdad. They entered three nearby homes and killed nearly everyone inside. The youngest victim was a three-year-old girl. The oldest was a seventy-six-year-old man. …