Ryan and Christy's Place

In the headlines from Iraq this morning, along with the huge question of whether or not Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in a raid in Mosul, is news of American soldiers killing four Iraqis, including one child, outside of a base in Baquba.

For the full story click HERE

According to reports, soldiers on patrol, mostly likely the base's Quick Reaction Force fired on upon the vehicle after the driver ignored repeated warnings to stop the vehicle. The incident was highly suspicious based on a recent car bomb on the same road, which runs between the cities of Baquba and Khalis.

This could prove to be another black eye in the American efforts to create peace in Iraq, but hopefully it won't be portrayed very negatively in the media. I can already hear the Sunday morning news shows criticizing the soldiers for the loss of innocent life, but honestly unless you've been there in those soldiers’ boots, the talk show hosts have no room to talk, nor does anybody else.

Based on what I've read about the story, it appears that those soldiers did the right thing by firing on the car, especially with the vehicle's reported proximity to a U.S. base. FOX News is reporting the incident as the soldiers mistakenly firing on the vehicle is most likely incorrect. In hindsight, with the vehicle coming up clean and the loss of four Iraqi lives, including the loss of a child is regrettable, it wasn't a mistake.

What people fail to understand when a situation like this takes place is the high stress level these soldiers are under and the split-second decisions that they have to make.

Take for instance my former base in Iraq, where I usually served guard duty three times a week at the front gate. At that gate, we had warning signs at about 200 meters away along the road entering the base. The signs, written in both Arabic and English, told visitors that any private vehicle that fails to stop at that sign and wait for further instructions from the guards at the gate were subject to be engaged by deadly force. If a vehicle came pass that point, there was no way for us to know what might have been inside. We weren't worried about the loss of a citizen's life; we were more concerned about protecting ourselves and the other men on that base from the threat of a vehicle-born improvised explosive device.

What all this boils down to is that once you are in a high combat zone such as Iraq you have one mission that stands out above them all, to protect the men that you serve with. This goal becomes even more important when there are threats in proximity of a U.S. base.

There is an investigation that will be prompted by the military on this incident, and who knows what it will find. But if things happened the way it appears in the news, these soldiers won't face any kind of penalty. They were doing their job, which includes making split-second decisions, but unfortunately sometimes those decisions are the wrong ones.

- Ryan