In January 2005, with the Iraq insurgency in violent bloom, the dutiful company commander and the struggling sergeant deployed with the 42nd Infantry Division to Kuwait and then to northern Iraq. At a forward operating base in Tikrit, under battlefield conditions in a hostile Sunni Arab region, a mutual distrust between Sergeant Martinez and Captain Esposito devolved into acrimony and, according to Army prosecutors, premeditated murder.
“I want him to die,” one soldier later testified he heard Sergeant Martinez say soon after their arrival in Iraq.
On June 7 of that year, Sergeant Martinez detonated a Claymore mine he had placed in the window of Captain Esposito’s quarters, Army prosecutors said, killing him and severely wounding a first lieutenant, Lou Allen, who died later in surgery. They said three hand grenades were also used in the attack.
In the coming months, Sergeant Martinez is expected to face court-martial in the deaths. He has consistently maintained his innocence. If convicted, he would be eligible for the death penalty.
Attacks on soldiers by another soldier usually of a lower rank, known in military slang as “fragging” because a fragmentation grenade was often the weapon of choice, were an alarming problem during the Vietnam War but have been extremely rare in Iraq. The 2005 attack is only the second such case the Army has prosecuted since the beginning of the Iraq war. By comparison, in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970, the Army logged more than 300 attacks that killed 75 commissioned and noncommissioned officers, said Paul J. Springer, a history professor at West Point.
Experts attributed the dropoff to the professionalism and higher morale that came with the all-volunteer military instituted in 1973. “With fragging, you’re likely to find someone who never really fit into the military system, who probably felt like an outsider,” said Dr. David Walker, a psychiatrist who served in the Air Force.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/16/ny...th&oref=slogin
A Fragging
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