You’ll not be surprised to learn that Ilario Pantano’s book Warlord (Threshold, 2006) offers his take on the shooting incident that led to his Article 32 hearing at Camp Lejeune in April 2005.
Also of interest are his observations about the progress of the Iraq War during his time on the battlefield. In the following passage, he describes an insurgent (a “Muj”) who was shot — but not killed — after attacking American Marines.
Probably that wounded Muj had shown up at a Baghdad hospital moaning that trigger-happy Americans had gunned him down, just an innocent peasant. He’d appear on the CBS Evening News, solid proof that American troops were out of control.
A few pages later, Pantano describes the frustration engendered among Marines when their commanders backed away from plans to thwart insurgents in Fallujah in April 2004.
All that the Fallujah handover had accomplished was to buy a few weeks’ grace…. But it actually also accomplished something else: abandoning Fallujah had the revealed the United States as an ineffective occupier. It had telegraphed to the world we didn’t have the stomach to inflict the kind of pain required to beat the resistance out of an enemy, a people.
You can learn more about Pantano’s thoughts on the war — including his own experience — during a John Locke Foundation Headliner luncheon Sept. 28 in Wilmington.
