Essay 3

Haditha: What Happened?

Getting Started
For this assignment, you are going to consider the following different types of "texts" (fiction, news "analysis," news reporting, and historiography/philosophy of history) alongside each other:

• Tim O'Brien's collection of short stories: The Things They Carried

• William Langewiesche, "Rule of Engagement" (Vanity Fair article)

Vanity Fair video footage of Kilo Company (by Lucien Read)

• Time Magazine's series of articles on the Nov. 19 2005 Haditha Incident:

Tim McGirk, "Collateral Damage or Civilian Massacre in Haditha" (19 March 2006)

Matthew Cooper, "The Haditha Scandal's Other Casualty" (26 March 2006)

Michael Duffy, "The Shame of Kilo Company" (28 May 2006)

Jeffrey Kluger, "How Haditha Came to Light" (4 June 2006)

Philip Caputo, "Rules of Engagement" (4 June 2006)

Adam Pitluk, "The Lost, Lamented Marine" (4 June 2006)

Michael Duffy et al., "The Ghosts of Haditha" (12 June 2006)

Sally Donnelly, "Exclusive: A Marine Denies Involvement in a Haditha Cover-Up" (19 August 2006)

Sally Donnelly, "The Face of Haditha" (17 September 2006)

• any one piece of writing you have read for HIST111B (think, especially, about all of the readings from HIST111B that have had to do with the difficulty of writing history and "getting it right")

Structure of Final Essay
This essay is purposefully designed to be the most UN-structured piece of writing you have been assigned so far. By this, I mean that I want for you to determine what this essay is about and how you want to structure it. There are no rules--literally. First, read and re-read (and think deeply) about the texts above, and spend some time considering connections between them. Next, write an essay in which you put forward any opinion you like on the Nov. 19 2005 "incident" at Haditha, Iraq, using O'Brien's book, Langewiesche's essay, the Time news coverage of the event, and one author from your HIST111B readings--in any way you see fit--to help you make your case and illustrate your main points. The only real requirement is that your essay should demonstrate to me that you have read and thought hard about all of the above texts, and there should be some direct quotation from these texts as well.

SAMPLE Citations for Works Cited Page

Borges, Jorge Luis. “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero.” In Labyrinths: Selected Stories and

Other Writings. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1964.

Langewiesche, William. “Rules of Engagement.” Vanity Fair Nov. 2006: 312-28, 350-55.

McGirk, Tim. “Collateral Damage or Civilian Massacre in Haditha?” Time 19 Mar. 2006.

<http://www.time.com/time/world/ article/0,8599,1174649,00.html>.

O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried: Stories. New York: Broadway Books, 1998.

Pitluk, Adam. “The Lost, Lamented Marine.” Time 4 June 2006. <http://www.time.com/

time/magazine/article/0,9171, 1200766,00.html>.