On March 29, 2004, more than a year after the battle of Nasiriyah, U.S. Central Command released its investigation of the alleged friendly-fire incident. The inquiry board, overseen by an Air Force brigadier general, blames the deaths on a poorly oriented Marine forward air controller who was located behind Charlie Company's position. The board pointed out that the A-10 pilots had been repeatedly "cleared hot" by the controller to engage what were thought to be Iraqi fedayeen. The investigation goes on to say that laboratory tests determined that no Marines were killed and that only one Marine was wounded by the Air Force jets, contentions that fly in the face of virtually every eyewitness account of the battle.

Another Marine forward air controller operating in the Nasiriyah area at the time of the incident argues that although the Marine blamed for authorizing the A-10 strikes was clearly in the wrong, the pilots still had a responsibility to visually confirm their targets before squeezing the trigger: "They made eight passes before finally breaking off their attack. They knew there were friendlies nearby. The pilots never confirmed what it was that they were shooting at." This officer, who controlled 42 airstrikes in the opening stages of the war, further asserted that given the atmospheric conditions -- it was daytime and there was no ground haze -- and the very low flight of the A-10s, the pilots had acted recklessly.

In response to those charges, a Central Command spokesman said that because of the reported threat of Iraqi ground fire, the A-10s had been loitering above Nasiriyah at high altitude and had descended into visual range only when they were cleared by the Marine forward air controller. According to Air Force regulations, pilots are not obligated to visually confirm their targets before engaging.

Other former military officers have criticized the Central Command report for failing to tackle possible technological solutions to the friendly-fire problem. In an article in the Houston Chronicle, Ralph Hayles, a former Apache attack helicopter pilot, said the investigation's findings missed the bigger picture. "Blaming a forward air controller on the ground doesn't address the problem of having no way for combat aircraft to identify who they are targeting on the ground," said Hayles, who mistakenly fired on U.S. troops during Operation Desert Storm, killing two. After the 1991 war, the Pentagon promised that it would make anti-fratricide technologies a high priority. Nevertheless, after spending $180 million over the course of the next decade, no anti-fratricide system was ever fielded.

For the survivors, friendly fire remains a difficult issue to process emotionally. One widow of a Marine killed by friendly fire during the Gulf War told this writer that she often feels like a second-class citizen among other surviving families, as if her loss were somehow less real and devastating than those whose loved ones had died at the hands of the enemy. Their deaths are treated by many as an embarrassment, a grim asterisk, something not easily fathomed and thus to be looked past. Fratricide occupies a strange place in the horrific panoply of war because it not only snuffs out the precious flicker of life but also creates a villain where before there was a comrade. War reduces us all with its grim report on the human condition: soldier, civilian observer, correspondent, all must cope with war's soul-crushing revelations, fratricide being but one element of the plague. Nevertheless, friendly fire remains, in a sense, the perfect metaphor for the evil of war as a whole: We are, in essence, killing ourselves.

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