Marine friendly

Nov 29, 2023

More than three years after Duncan D. Hunter resigned from Congress in disgrace following a campaign finance scandal, an investigative podcast from National Public Radio has shed light for the first time on the former East County politician's involvement in a deadly friendly-fire incident while he was a Marine artillery officer serving in Iraq in 2004.

It took more than three years and multiple congressional hearings for Marine Corps officials to publicly admit that the deaths of two Camp Pendleton Marines and an Iraqi translator were the result of friendly fire and not an enemy attack, and not even then was Hunter's name disclosed. Without making a direct accusation, the podcast also floats the theory of a second potential cover-up: that Hunter's father, who was then chair of the House Armed Services Committee, used his powerful elected position and a congressional visit to Iraq two months after the accident to ensure the results of the Marine Corps investigation stayed hidden.

Duncan L. Hunter, a Republican who represented East County in Congress from 1981 to 2009, vehemently denied any involvement in covering up the incident involving his son. He told the Union-Tribune on Wednesday that he didn't know at the time of his June 2004 trip to Iraq that his son had been involved in friendly fire just months earlier, or that such an incident had even occurred.

"The idea that I went over to Iraq to try to lean on the Marines is just a lie," the 75-year-old Hunter told the Union-Tribune. "NPR made a story out of whole cloth ... they smeared us both."

On Friday, he held a news conference near the USS Midway Museum to present the results of a polygraph test that he commissioned, which he said showed he was being truthful when he answered that he did not interfere in the Marine Corps investigation or help cover it up in any way.

"I took a lie-detector test," the elder Hunter said Friday morning. "The conclusion of the polygrapher ... was ‘examinee truthful.’"

Reached by phone Friday, the administrator of that test, John Bollard, confirmed the results presented by Hunter.

The incident investigated in NPR's "Taking Cover" podcast occurred in April 2004 and involved a Marine mortar shell being fired into a Fallujah schoolyard where American troops were hunkered down. In addition to the two Marines and interpreter who died, 12 Marines from Camp Pendleton were wounded.

The NPR investigation revealed for the first time publicly that the younger Hunter was one of three officers involved in mapping and approving the mortar attack, though his exact level of responsibility, if any, remains unclear. He was not one of three Marines recommended for discipline.

The younger Hunter did not respond to multiple attempts by the Union-Tribune to contact him over the past week. After leaving the Marine Corps, he went on to succeed his father in Congress, serving for more than a decade until early 2020, when he resigned after he and his then-wife pleaded guilty in federal court to illegally spending campaign money for their personal use. President Donald Trump pardoned him later that same year.

For the podcast, the younger Hunter spoke only briefly to a KPBS reporter who contacted him at El Cajon Superior Court on his way to a child support adjustment hearing. The reporter asked him about his involvement in the friendly-fire incident.

"The Marine Corps's handled this," he said. "They’ve looked into it."

The elder Hunter told the Union-Tribune that his son did not want to discuss the incident publicly because pointing blame or responsibility away from himself would be perceived as pointing it toward someone else.

"Anytime you explain why you’re not at fault, that's interpreted as throwing the other guy under the bus," the elder Hunter said.

The "Taking Cover" podcast, a culmination of a three-year investigation, started out with a tip. Longtime NPR Pentagon reporter Tom Bowman said a source who’d spent significant time in Iraq told him about a friendly-fire incident, though the source didn't have specific details. According to Bowman's telling of that meeting, the source told him the incident was believed to be one of the worst Marine-on-Marine friendly fires in decades and claimed it was covered up because the son of a powerful congressman was involved.

Bowman recruited Graham Smith, a Pulitzer Prize winner and investigative producer at NPR, to help him probe for more details, which were not readily available. After a significant amount of digging, the pair eventually learned what happened in that Fallujah schoolyard as they interviewed Marines and Navy personnel who were there, including top Marine Corps leaders. They also obtained several different copies of the Marine Corps’ investigative report, some of which were redacted differently than others, allowing them to piece together a clearer picture of the friendly-fire incident.

Both men spent significant time reporting on America's wars in the Middle East and had embedded with military units in the past. They told the Union-Tribune in an interview last month that those experiences gave them credibility with the combat veterans they interviewed.

The incident they investigated occurred during a Marine Corps offensive now known as the First Battle of Fallujah. On April 12, 2004, a platoon of Marines from Echo Company from the Camp Pendleton-based 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines was hunkered down in an abandoned school that had an open-air courtyard in the center, according to the podcast and a copy of the investigation provided by the Marines.

Lt. Gen. Gregg Olson, who is now a three-star general and an aide to the Marine Corps’ top officer, was a lieutenant colonel at the time and a battalion commander responsible for more than 700 Marines. He told Bowman and Smith that on the day of the incident, he had sent one of his more experienced officers on a sensitive mission to try to capture a high-value target. According to Olson, that left less experienced officers, including Hunter, who was a first lieutenant, to handle duties in the fire support coordination center.

During this time, the platoon of Marines in the schoolyard observed Iraqi fighters about 150 yards away building a large barricade made of tires. As they intermittently exchanged fire with those building the barricade, one of the Marines from the platoon requested a mortar attack to destroy the tire pile.

The process for calling in such a strike, mapping the location of the target and approving the attack is complicated. The role of Hunter and those in the fire support coordination center, according to statements Hunter and others wrote as part of the investigation, involved taking the request and writing details about it — such as which unit made the request and the location of the target — on small cards. The officers would then plot the attacks on maps that also showed Marine positions. Targets that were near Marine positions were supposed to be designated "danger close" so that the officers approving the attack could take extra precautions.

In his hand-written statement that's part of the investigative file, Hunter wrote that he was handed a mission card "and I plotted the target on a blown up imagery map. The target plotted 150 (meters) from the closest friendly unit."

Despite that close proximity, neither Hunter nor anyone else in the room noted that the mission should be designated "danger close," according to the Marine Corps investigation. Hunter wrote in his statement that he was "bird dogging" at the time, which he explains to mean he was watching another officer "to learn how to do the job." Another officer with the same rank wrote in his statement that Hunter was actually doing the job, not just training.

Hunter wrote that he "placed a yellow pin at the target location on the map." He wrote that he then asked a higher-ranking officer to approve the mission, which that officer, Olson, did. The mortar was fired.

But instead of hitting the tire barricade, the mortar struck the school courtyard, killing Lance Cpls. Brad Shuder and Robert Zurheide, plus the Iraqi interpreter. The interpreter is not mentioned in the Marine Corps’ investigative report, but the NPR reporters tracked down his family nearly 20 years later to inform them for the first time that he’d been killed by friendly fire.

Many of the Marines involved in the incident told the NPR reporters they knew immediately that it was friendly fire. The internal Marine investigation came to that same conclusion within months, yet the Marine Corps did not admit as much publicly until 2007, during a series of congressional hearings prompted by the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman, who abandoned an NFL career to join the Army Rangers.

Even with the results of the investigation now public, the exact role the younger Hunter played is still unclear, as are the exact circumstances that led the Marines to fire the mortar at their own position. Olson, the three-star general who was in the room with Hunter that night as the battalion commander, originally told the NPR reporters that Hunter pointed to the wrong target on the map. He later recanted that statement, saying he’d misremembered details, though he maintained that Hunter or the other first lieutenant should have noted that the Marines in the schoolyard were "danger close" to the enemy target.

Ultimately, then-Col. John Toolan, who was commanding officer of 1st Marine Regiment, recommended that Olson be reprimanded through a letter of caution, and that two other officers receive disciplinary action, according to the podcast and investigative file. But his boss, then-Gen. James Mattis, overruled Toolan, deciding none of the men should face discipline or punishment. Then-Gen. James Conway, the top Marine in Iraq at the time, signed off on Mattis’ decision.

That finalization happened on June 30, 2004 — two days after the elder Hunter visited Fallujah. That visit included a meeting with his son, the elder Hunter said Wednesday. A Union-Tribune review of news stories and archived press releases show the elder Hunter, in his role on the House Armed Services Committee, visited Iraq on at least five occasions, including in May 2003, February 2004, June 2004, February 2006 and March 2007.

The elder Hunter said the June 2004 trip was a bi-partisan visit that resulted in Congress securing much-needed equipment, including rifle scopes, for the Marines on the front lines. He visited Conway, but is adamant that the April 12 friendly fire was never discussed.

Shortly after the three deaths in Fallujah, Marine Corps officers knocked on the doors of the fallen Marines’ families. Zurheide's widow told NPR she was pregnant — her due date was April 12, the day her husband was killed. But the Marine who showed up to her Camp Pendleton home told her that Zurheide was shot by enemy combatants, she said in the podcast.

She soon started hearing rumors from other members of her husband's platoon that he was killed by friendly fire, not the enemy. But those were just rumors until the summer of 2007, years after the Marine Corps’ legal standard to inform families of such an incident had passed. That's when, she said, after the congressional hearings, a Marine Corps general and attorney showed up at her door, confirmed officially for the first time that it was friendly fire and gave her a copy of the investigation.

The elder Hunter said Friday that he plans to track down the families of Shuder, Zurheide and the interpreter and provide them copies of the polygraph test in an attempt to prove he had no hand in suppressing the results of the investigation.