"T.J., you
were a great friend. I'm going to miss seeing you around" on smooth
stones and piled them in a funeral mound. And the war moved on.

But the
details of what happened that morning in Haditha are more disturbing,
disputed and horrific than the military initially reported. According to
eyewitnesses and local officials interviewed over the past 10 weeks, the
civilians who died in Haditha on Nov. 19 were killed not by a roadside
bomb but by the Marines themselves, who went on a rampage in the village
after the attack, killing 15 unarmed Iraqis in their homes, including
seven women and three children. Human-rights activists say that if the
accusations are true, the incident ranks as the worst case of deliberate
killing of Iraqi civilians by U.S. service members since the war began.

In January, after Time presentedmilitary officials in Baghdad with the
Iraqis' accounts of the Marines' actions, the U.S. opened its own
investigation, interviewing 28 people, including the Marines, the
families of the victims and local doctors. According to military
officials, the inquiry acknowledged that, contrary to the military's
initial report, the 15 civilians killed on Nov. 19 died at the hands of
the Marines, not the insurgents. The military announced last week that
the matter has been handed over to the Naval Criminal Investigative
Service (ncis), which will conduct a criminal investigation to determine
whether the troops broke the laws of war by deliberately targeting
civilians. Lieut. Colonel Michelle Martin-Hing, spokeswoman for the
Multi-National Force-Iraq, told Time the involvement of the ncis does
not mean that a crime occurred. And she says the fault for the civilian
deaths lies squarely with the insurgents, who "placed