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At the age of 21, Robert Pennington was already on his third tour in Iraq. He had seen his best friend killed in house-to-house fighting in Falluja in 2004. He had fired on a car that failed to stop at a checkpoint and killed an Iraqi child -- an act that his superiors called unfortunate but in accord with the rules of engagement. But on April 26, 2006, in the town of Hamdaniya, the young Marine lance corporal and the seven other members of his squad stepped over the line. Frustrated by the Iraqi police's revolving-door releases of a suspected insurgent that U.S. forces had arrested three times, the squad decided to execute the man. A barking guard dog at the home of their intended target, a suspected cell leader known as Gowad, thwarted the marines, who instead broke into the house of Gowad's lieutenant, Hashim Ibrahim Awad, and shot him. Then they planted an AK-47 rifle on the body, along with a shovel, to make it seem as if he had been digging a hole to hide a roadside bomb. With that cover-up, the squad members tacitly acknowledged that they had knowingly violated the rules of engagement laid out by their superiors. At their trials this year Pennington testified, "We were sick of their rules and decided to write our own."

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