Corporal Jason Washburn (Marines): "I remember one woman walking by. She was carrying a huge bag, and she looked like she was heading toward us, so we lit her up with the Mark 19, which is an automatic grenade launcher, and when the dust settled, we realised that the bag was full of groceries. She had been trying to bring us food and we blew her to pieces."

"Something else we were encouraged to do, almost with a wink and nudge, was to carry 'drop weapons', or by my third tour, 'drop shovels'. We would carry these weapons or shovels with us because if we accidentally shot a civilian, we could just toss the weapon on the body, and make them look like an insurgent."

Hart Viges (Army): "One time they said to fire on all taxicabs because the enemy was using them for transportation...One of the snipers replied back, 'Excuse me? Did I hear that right? Fire on all taxicabs?' The lieutenant colonel responded, 'You heard me, trooper, fire on all taxicabs.' After that, the town lit up, with all the units ?ring on cars. This was my first experience with war, and that kind of set the tone for the rest of the deployment."

Vincent Emanuele (Marine rifleman): "An act that took place quite often in Iraq was taking pot shots at cars that drove by. This was not an isolated incident, and it took place for most of our eight-month deployment."

Corporal Brian Casler (Marines): "...I saw marines defecate into MRE bags or urinate in bottles and throw them at children on the side of the road."

The book and its contents is completely ignored by both the USA and UK media.

• Some of the consequences of the USA invasion and occupation of Iraq (from United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq and Save the Children):
  
  One out of six people in Iraq has been displaced from their homes.
  122,000 children in Iraq did not reach their fifth birthdays in the year 2005.
  54% of people in Iraq live on less than $1 per day (15% live on less than $0.50 per day.
  70% of people in Iraq lack access to potable (drinkable) water.
  43 % of children in Iraq under five years old suffer a form of malnourishment; 23% suffer from chronic malnourishment; 8% suffer acute malnourishment.

As USA writer Kathy Kelly puts it: "In the past year, U.S. aerial bombardments of Iraqi neighborhoods increased five fold while the number of Iraqis incarcerated in U.S. prisons in Iraq has doubled. (Some 24,000 Iraqis are now imprisoned by USA forces, approximately 650 of whom are juveniles). If a foreign country were bombing U.S. cities and imprisoning U.S. civilians, would we ever agree to pay the invaders' military expenses? Would we agree that the aggressor nation had no fiscal responsibilities to pay for reparations?"