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Combat is stressful and confusing. The "fog of war" and "friction" are very real. Mistakes happen, and sometimes those mistakes lead to tragedies like a short mortar round that kills a couple of Marines. It's fricking terrible, and in a lot of ways more tragic than getting killed by the enemy. But when you're operating in a high stress, high tempo environment things like this can happen. We investigate them, we make whatever changes we think we can to avoid it again, we learn lessons, and we continue on.

Truly, my biggest issue is with the journalists who look at these things with the clarity of 20 years of hindsight and act like the Marines and officers making decisions and acting on those decisions in real time were operating with the same level of clarity. And then they use THAT context to make the principals involved look malicious, evil, or stupid. They never contextualize what it is like being the ones making those decisions - mainly because they've never been the ones in the arena.

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This

I was part of OIF I and was involved in two friendly fire incidents. First one was a fire mission where an LAV called in for a mission danger close. They gave us two coordinates. Thiers and the enemies. We were going to fire one round and adjust from that one but the problem was the guy giving the coordinates had mixed up his and the enemies coordinates (we later found out)so the one round we fired landed basically on top of the LAV. Luckily no one was killed but a few Marines did get lightly wounded.
The second one was when we were firing about 300 yards from a road we were shooting over. It was pitch black dark and another unit was traveling down the road and thought our firing was us shooting at them so they returned fire including a .50 cal from a 5 ton. Thank God nobody was hit, probably due to a guy in my unit who fired up a blue flare from his 203 very quickly which meant we were friendlies and they stopped firing.
Turns out (again later after the fact) it was a group from CSSB 10 (combat service support battalion) who had gotten lost and weren't even supposed to be where they were. I'll never forget the sound of the .50 cal rounds made when hitting the ground and metal, completely different then small arms.

You're first thought is anger but there isn't even time to think about it. We still had a mission to complete and like they told us its what we trained for. Fog of war is a real thing and does happen. There was no intent to kill or harm anyone in those two incidents. Just learn from it and move on.

As long as nothing illegally and intentionally happened there is absolutely no reason to bring it up years later unless its used as a training moment.