Afghanistan war logs: How US marines sanitised record of bloodbath

Brevity is the hallmark of military reporting, but even by those standards the description of one disastrous event is remarkably short: "The patrol returned to base."

It started with a suicide bomb. On 4 March 2007 a convoy of US marines, who arrived in Afghanistan three weeks earlier, were hit by an explosives-rigged minivan outside the city of Jalalabad.

The marines made a frenzied escape, opening fire with automatic weapons as they tore down a six-mile stretch of highway, hitting almost anyone in their way – teenage girls in fields, motorists in their cars, old men as they walked along the road. Nineteen unarmed civilians were killed and 50 wounded.

None of this, however, was captured in the initial military account, written by the marines themselves. It simply says that, simultaneous to the suicide explosion, "the patrol received small arms fire from three directions".

And the subsequent rampage as they drove away – which would later be the subject of a 17-day military inquiry and a 12,000-page report – is captured in five words: "The patrol returned to JAF [Jalalabad air field]."

The soldiers' initial concern, it appears, was a wounded marine – their only casualty. Forty-nine minutes after the initial bombing, they requested a "routine medevac" for a private with "shrapnel wounds to the arm". He was evacuated to safety.

An hour later came the first news of the trail of blood they left behind. A local government official told the marines there were "28 LN WIA", which in layman's terms means 28 Afghan civilians had been wounded. This later transpired to be a gross underestimate.

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