Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that the troops shirked their duty. I'm just a bit leery of the legal analysis in the article. I spent a fair amount of time in Iraq on multiple deployments that spanned from invasion/occupation to 2005 goat rodeo to pre-, during, and post-"surge" and encountered a slew of situations ranging from routine to WTF. I cannot imagine a situation where I would have observed noncombatants being seriously harmed or their lives put in danger and not being able to intervene to stop it. I suspect that perhaps the folks getting into the SUVs were not Soldiers, or perhaps they were not as close to the action as suggested, or perhaps some chronological error was made in the article, or something else. It just sounds a bit odd.