Covered bodies of civilians allegedly killed by US Marines in Haditha. Picture / Reuters

Covered bodies of civilians allegedly killed by US Marines in Haditha. Picture / Reuters

WASHINGTON - To Americans of a certain generation, the news this weekend must have seemed dreadfully familiar: an endless war, whose rationale is ever harder to understand, a group of soldiers enraged by the loss of a comrade to an invisible enemy, running amok and exacting revenge on civilians, whose only crime was to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Today, the name that threatens to besmirch an entire war is Haditha, northwest of Baghdad, deep in the Sunni triangle.

A generation and a half ago, the place was My Lai, a hamlet in South Vietnam.

At Haditha, it is US Marines from Kilo Company of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marine Division.

In Vietnam, the troops at My Lai were Charlie Company, of the 11th Brigade of the Americal Division. Similarities abound even though the events are separated by 37 years.

No one disputes that what happened at Haditha on November 19 last year, when as many as 24 civilians, including women and children, may have been shot by US soldiers, was provoked by the death of 20-year-old Marine Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, killed by a roadside bomb.

In Vietnam, dozens of members of Charlie Company had been killed and wounded by insurgents in the weeks before the atrocity in the hamlet of My Lai 4 (then known in military jargon as Pinkville).

A couple of days earlier, on March 14, a Vietnamese version of a roadside bomb had killed one C Company sergeant and wounded others. Military intelligence concluded that a crack unit of the Viet Cong was in My Lai, and C Company was ordered to destroy them.

Three platoons were assigned to the operation, one led by Lieutenant William Calley, an unemployed college drop-out who had been rushed through officer training.

Calley's platoon entered the hamlet with guns blazing around 8am on March 16. There was no hostile fire and the men found 700 old men, women, and children. "We never saw a male of military age," one participant later said.

Over the next three hours, the men ran amok. Villagers were bayoneted, women and children were shot in the head as they prayed, at least one girl was raped and murdered.

Calley himself is said to have forced dozens of villagers into a ditch and slaughtered them with a machine-gun.

The exact number of victims is unknown to this day, anywhere from 300 to more than 500. A monument at the site lists the names of 504, their ages ranging from 1 to 82.