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How US marines sanitized record of bloodbath
Brevity is the hallmark of military reporting, but even by those standards the description of one especially disastrous event is remarkably short: "The patrol return to base."
It started with a suicide bomb. On 4 March 2007 a convoy of US marines, who had arrived in Afghanistan three weeks earlier, were hit by an explosives-rigged minivan outside the southeastern city of Jalalabad.
The marines made a frenzied escape, opening fire with automatic weapons as they tore down a six-mile stretch of highway, hitting almost anyone in their way–teenage girls in the fields, motorists in their cars, old men as they walked along the road. Nineteen unarmed civilians were killed and 50 wounded.
None of this, however, was captured in the initial military account, written by the marines themselves. It simply says that, simultaneous with the suicide explosion, "the patrol received small arms fire from three directions".
And the subsequent rampage as they drove away–which would later be the subject of a 17-day military inquiry and a 12,000 page report–is captured in five words: "The patrol returned to JAF [Jalalabad Air Field]."