Image of Lt. Duncan Hunter standing in front of Saddam Hussein mural was posted on Hunter’s campaign website in 2008.
In March 2004, four Blackwater contractors were killed in Fallujah, Iraq. Charred American corpses were hung from a bridge across the Euphrates River.
Commanding the response of the 1st Marine Regiment was Col. John Toolan. One of his lieutenants was Duncan Duane Hunter, son of Rep. Duncan Lee Hunter, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
But Hunter’s service in the First Battle of Fallujah, or Operation Vigilant Resolve, has come under scrutiny in the NPR podcast series “Taking Cover.”
On Thursday, a now retired Gen. Toolan is heard criticizing Hunter as “very cocky” and “wasn’t the kind of guy that you would want your son to be led by.”
Two weeks earlier, NPR’s Tom Bowman and Graham Smith reported a friendly fire incident in which a mapping mistake by Hunter led to the mortar deaths of two Marines and an Iraqi interpreter.
The podcast says Toolan saw Hunter as a “reckless young officer with a disregard for basic safety protocols. For instance, not wearing his body armor or helmet when he should have.”
?ssl=1"> Investigative report on April 12, 2004, friendly fire incident noting role of Lt. Duncan Hunter. Image via NPR
NPR is exploring theories that the friendly fire incident was “buried” to prevent embarrassment to President George W. Bush running for re-election and the Hunters — father and son.
Toolan also told NPR: “Most second lieutenants in artillery units don’t get their butts chewed up by the regimental commander.”
In the April 6 episode, NPR reported that a Marine captain investigating the tragic strike said Hunter and another officer should get letters of caution, “basically a slap on the wrist.”
But after reading the JAGMAN report, Toolan recommended both be charged with dereliction of duty — which NPR says could have led to dishonorable discharge or even prison time.
Toolan’s boss was Gen. James Mattis — later President Trump’s secretary of defense — and “Mattis brushes all these recommendations aside, instead [saying] there should be no punishment at all,” says NPR.
NPR says Mattis blamed “unique circumstances of friction, fear, fatigue and urgency. A series of small errors led to this event, but there was no criminal conduct.”
Times of San Diego emailed the senior Hunter early Thursday afternoon, seeking comment, but hasn’t heard back.
?ssl=1"> Former Rep. Duncan D. Hunter, shown at his June 2022 divorce hearing, has not responded to NPR requests for comment. Photo by Ken Stone
Three-star Gen. James Conway, the top Marine commander in Iraq, agreed, NPR said, “and so do his superiors the rest of the way up the chain. No punishment. It was all wrapped up in August 2004, just four months after the explosion.”
Three years later, Hunter’s father was running for president — leaving a vacancy in Congress in San Diego’s East County. The younger Hunter, now a Marine reserve captain serving in Afghanistan, had announced his own run for Congress.
His wife, Margaret, ran the campaign — since active-duty military can’t run for office.
“So I’d call home and talk about the weather, ask how the kids were, and that was that,” Hunter told The Hill. “I would Google myself to try to see what my campaign was doing back in San Diego.”
In a June 2007 blog post, Margaret Hunter said: “Duncan is prepared to win by making his campaign one of integrity, honesty, steadfastness in our troubled times and of course with the tireless help of his family and friends, as they are tasked with getting his message out.”
Hunter later told The Hill: “What I feel most strongly here being in Congress is kind of the burden — the good burden — of representing all of our military. I’m the only one here of 535 who’s actually been there, and seen it and done it, and gotten dirty doing it.”
In a June 2019 interview with the “Zero Blog Thirty” podcast, Hunter said his father made him run, saying: “If you don’t do it, someone else will (without the same experience).”
“I was in Idaho … Now is the time to run,” Hunter said he was told.
(But in March 2009, Hunter told The Hill a different story, saying he announced to his father: “Hey, I’m going to run.” The elder Hunter’s reaction? “He didn’t have much of one,” the younger Hunter said.)
At age 30, after defeating Navy SEAL commander Mike Lumpkin in November 2008, Hunter became the first Iraq-Afghanistan combat veteran to serve in Congress. He took over his dad’s old congressional seat — and desk.
The elder Hunter left his son an inscription in a desk drawer. But the new congressman would’t reveal it. (“I’m going to keep that between me and him,” he said.)
?ssl=1"> Hunter walks from court hearing in December 2019 before his conviction in corruption case and pardon by Trump. Photo by Ken Stone
Eleven years later, amid the court-martial of Navy SEAL Chief Eddie Gallagher for war crimes, Hunter was hit for revealing too much, telling a Ramona audience that he was guilty of the same thing Gallagher was accused of — “taking a picture of the body and saying something stupid.”
In a 2019 podcast, Hunter went further in describing his Fallujah service, saying it was a “free-fire area” in which hundreds of civilians were killed.
NPR recently asked Toolan about that assertion.
“That is just an idiotic perspective,” Toolan said. “That’s somebody who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s not a free-fire zone, particularly when your forces are in there. You want to make sure that every round is accounted for.
“That would have gotten Duncan Hunter fired if he said that to me.”
