Yousef Aid Ahmed has memorized the places where his four brothers' bodies laid after they were killed by US marines, he said. The family recounts that November day in 2005 and says it was a massacre of the brothers, along with 20 other people, following a roadside bomb in Haditha.

Since 9/11 we've been engaged in wars around the world, and General [James] Mattis has been a leading battlefield commander in many of those theaters, including in the April 2004 siege of Fallujah, where the US Marines killed so many people that the municipal soccer stadium in the city had to be turned into a graveyard for the dead.

There is nothing better than getting shot at and missed. It's really great.

In this age, I don't care how tactically or operationally brilliant you are, if you cannot create harmony - even vicious harmony - on the battlefield based on trust across service lines, across coalition and national lines, and across civilian/military lines, you need to go home, because your leadership is obsolete. We have got to have officers who can create harmony across all those lines.

I would happily storm hell in the company of these troops ... how strongly they have demonstrated to the world that free men and women can fight like the dickens.

There are hunters and there are victims. By your discipline...you will decide if you are a hunter or a victim.

An untrained or uneducated Marine ... deployed to the combat zone is a bigger threat to mission accomplishment ... than the enemy.