Word: wuterich
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Dates: during 2006-2006
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...Wuterich, 26, who grew up in Meriden, Conn., signed up for the Marines at 17 and volunteered for the infantry, the grunts who are the heart and soul of the corps. Finding boot camp a dull grind compared with what he felt the recruiting videos had promised, he asked to switch out of the infantry. "I thought I could use my mind a little differently," he says. But he was turned down. He tried again in 2002, requesting a transfer to counterintelligence, but his eight tattoos disqualified him; those kinds of markings make a man too easy to identify. Among...
...Frank Wuterich knew before he finished boot camp that he didn't want to be a Marine for life, but he may wind up one anyway. Wuterich is the central suspect in the Iraq war's most notorious massacre, at Haditha, where 24 Iraqis were killed by U.S. Marines--Marines led by Wuterich. During his first media interview, the former high school band member and honor student is exceedingly polite. Wearing jeans, black sneakers and a light blue polo shirt, he shows a visitor around his two-story semidetached house at Camp Pendleton in southern California, patiently answers questions...
...Wuterich long imagined the corps as just a stop on the way to a career as a music producer, but he re-enlisted after 9/11, in part to support his family while Marisol finished her nursing degree but also because he was itching for action. With the rank of sergeant, he was dispatched to Iraq with Kilo Company of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, in September 2005. He saw his first firefight that month in the town of Hit when his team suddenly came under fire. "Was I scared? Sure," he says. It turned out that the shots were...
...Wuterich is under investigation for what happened on another day, just two months after his arrival in Iraq. On the morning of Nov. 19, 2005, Wuterich's squad, on patrol in Haditha, was hit by an improvised explosive device that killed one of his men. Iraqi witnesses and sources familiar with the two Pentagon investigations under way claim that several of the squad's 12 Marines then went on a rampage of killing in the town, leaving 24 Iraqis dead, including five women and six children. Wuterich's lawyer Neal Puckett would not permit Wuterich to talk about those events...
...mystified by a lot of this," he says. He wonders, for instance, why the investigators have not pushed harder to speak to him. But it was his lawyer who did not allow him to talk to them, as is common practice among defense attorneys. Wuterich was scheduled for retirement three months ago, but is being involuntarily held in the corps while the probes continue. Transferred to Pendleton with the rest of his unit in April, he is officially on duty, but he is not a full member of his platoon. When it goes on a training exercise soon...