PART 1: BLACK HEARTS: ONE PLATOON'S DESCENT INTO MADNESS IN IRAQ'S TRIANGLE OF DEATH

BLACK HEARTS: ONE PLATOON'S DESCENT INTO MADNESS IN IRAQ'S TRIANGLE OF DEATH
BY JIM FREDERICK

FOREWORD 

IN LATE SEPTEMBER 2008, CBS’s 60 Minutes aired a profile of U.S. Army general Ray Odierno, who, along with General David Petraeus, is credited with spearheading a new strategy that helped bring a dramatic decrease in violence to Iraq in 2007 and 2008. During that segment, he and correspondent Lesley Stahl walked around the marketplace of a town south of Baghdad called Mahmudiyah, one of the three corners of an area known as the Triangle of Death. As they walked and talked—neither, conspicuously, was wearing a helmet—Odierno told Stahl that the area was once occupied by just 1,000 U.S. soldiers, who coped with more than a hundred attacks against them and Iraqi civilians each week. Today, including Iraqi security forces, Odierno said, the region is patrolled by 30,000 men and experiences only two attacks per week. (That comparatively low level of violence held well into late 2009.) 

This book is about the soldiers deployed to that area back when the Triangle of Death lived up to its name, when it was arguably the country’s most dangerous region, at arguably its most dangerous time. 

I first became interested in 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division just after June 16, 2006. Working as Time magazine’s Tokyo bureau chief, I read a news report about three soldiers who had been overrun by insurgents at a remote checkpoint just southwest of Mahmudiyah. One trooper was dead on the scene and two were missing, presumed taken hostage. It was a gut-wrenching story, inviting horrible thoughts about what torture and desecration terrorists could inflict on captive soldiers. News of the search played out over the next few days, and on the 19th, the bodies were found, indeed mutilated, beheaded, burned, and booby-trapped with explosives. 

About two weeks after that, another story from Iraq caught my eye. Four U.S. soldiers had been implicated in the March 2006 rape of a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl, killing her, her parents, and her six-year-old sister. The crime was horrific and cold-blooded. The fourteen-year-old had been triply defiled: raped, murdered, and burned to a blackened char. The soldiers’ unit: 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. Because I followed both stories somewhat distractedly at first, it took a while for me to piece together that the accused were not just from the same company as the soldiers who’d been ambushed several weeks prior but from the very same platoon: 1st Platoon, Bravo Company. 

Two of the most notorious events from the war had flooded the headlines within days of each other, and they had happened within the same circle of approximately thirty-five men. What could possibly have been going on in that platoon? Were the two events related? As I was ruminating about such things, I got a call from Captain James Culp, a former infantry sergeant turned lawyer who was the Army’s senior defense counsel at Camp Victory in Baghdad. He was a source for a story I had worked on a couple years back and he had since become a friend.

He phoned to tell me that he had been assigned to defend one of the soldiers accused of the rape-murders, and he implored me to look into Bravo Company, “if not for the sake of my client,” he said, “then for the sake of the other guys in Bravo.” He told me that he had been down to Mahmudiyah several times examining the crime scene and interviewing dozens of members of the company. He finished that first call with a chilling assessment. “America has no idea what is going on with this war,” he said. “I’m only twenty miles away, and most of the people on Victory have no idea how bloody the fight is down there. What that company is going through, it would turn your hair white.” 

Intrigued by what Culp told me, I tracked the trials of the accused soldiers as they wended their way to court over the next three years, either attending in person or reading the court transcripts. I contacted several men from 1st Platoon, to see if  they were willing to talk. Surprisingly, they were. Despondent over being judged for the actions of a criminal few in their midst, they were eager to share their stories. The tales they told were raw and harrowing. They described for me the devastating losses they had suffered (seven dead in their platoon alone), the nearly daily roadside bombs called I.E.D's (improvised explosive devices) they had experienced, the frequent firefights they had fought, their belief that the chain of command had abandoned them, and the medical and psychological problems they were coping with to this day. 

They were generous with their time, unvarnished in their honesty. They suggested I widen my scope, arguing that I could not properly understand the crime and the abduction if I did not understand their whole deployment, and I could not understand 1st Platoon if I did not understand 2nd and 3rd Platoons, who had labored under exactly the same conditions but who had come home with far fewer losses and their sense of brotherhood and accomplishment more intact. Check it out, they suggested, it might lead you someplace interesting about how the whole thing went down. 

I followed their advice, interviewing more soldiers from all of Bravo and requesting reams of documents through the Freedom of Information Act. Embedded with the Army in mid-2008, I traveled throughout 1st Battalion’s old area of operations in Iraq, speaking to as many locals as I could. I interviewed the immediate relatives of the murdered Iraqi family. 

Every opened door led to a new one. Most soldiers and officers I talked to offered to put me in touch with more. Some shared journals, letters and e-mails, photos, or classified reports and investigations. I interviewed scores more servicemen, crisscrossing the United States several times, and ultimately broadened my scope even further to encompass not just Bravo but, for context, the rest of 1st Battalion. 

The story of 1st Platoon’s 2005–2006 deployment to the Triangle of Death is both epic and tragic. It was an ill-starred Triangle of Death is both epic and tragic. It was an ill-starred tour, where nearly everything that could go wrong did, and a chain of events unfolded that seems inevitable and inexorable yet, in retrospect, also heartbreakingly preventable at literally dozens of junctures. 

To some degree, the travails of Bravo Company are a study of the tactical consequences that flow from a flawed strategy. Their tour was part of the final deployments before counterinsurgency theory and tactics took hold, before the surge of 2007, before the cease-fires initiated by Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army became more or less permanent, before the Sons of Iraq program that paid insurgents to stop fighting Americans and start taking responsibility for their own neighborhood safety. 

Virtually ignored by military planners before the summer of 2005, the 330-square-mile region south of Baghdad that encompassed the Triangle of Death had become one of the most restive hotbeds of insurgency in the country, a battleground of the incipient civil war between Sunnis and Shiites, as well as a way station for terrorists of every allegiance ferrying men, weapons, and money into the capital. 

With far fewer troops and resources than were necessary for the job, the 1-502nd Infantry Regiment was flung out there with orders, essentially, to save the day. A light infantry battalion of about 700 men, the 1-502nd was assigned to root out insurgent strongholds, promote social and municipal revival, and train the local Iraqi Army battalions into a competent fighting force. 

It was a mission easy to encapsulate, but depressingly difficult to achieve. There was no coherent strategy for how they were supposed to accomplish these feats. There was confusion about whether they should emphasize hunting and killing insurgents or winning the support of the people who were providing both passive and active assistance to the terrorists. This confusion flowed from the Pentagon, through the battalion’s chain of command, all the way down to the soldiers. The 1-502nd arrived when America’s prospects in the country were dim, and, despite some successes in certain areas, the situation was dispiritingly some successes in certain areas, the situation was dispiritingly bleaker when they left, with insurgent attacks on the rise and the country threatening to come apart entirely. 

The Triangle of Death was a meat grinder, churning out daily doses of carnage. During their year-long deployment, soldiers from the battalion either found or got hit by nearly nine hundred roadside I.E.D's. They were shelled or mortared almost every day and took fire from rifles, machine guns, or rocket-propelled grenades (R.P.G's) nearly every other day. Twenty-one men from the battalion were killed and scores more were wounded badly enough to be evacuated home. 

The gore was unrelenting, not just for soldiers but also for civilians. Including Iraqi locals, just one of the battalion’s three bases treated an average of three or four trauma cases each day. Every soldier has stories of getting hit by I.E.D's. Many could tell of getting hit by several I.E.D explosions in one day. The unrelenting combat wore on their psychological health. More than 40 percent of the battalion were treated for mental or emotional anxiety while in country, and many have since been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury, or both. 

Bravo was particularly hard-hit. Within Bravo’s first ninety days in theater, all three of its platoon leaders, its first sergeant, a squad leader, and a team leader (in addition to several riflemen) had been wiped from the battlefield by death or injury. For 1st Battalion executive officer Major Fred Wintrich, the challenge doesn’t get any starker: “How do you reseed a company with almost all of its top leadership while in a combat zone? That was the task.” By the end of the deployment, 51 of Bravo’s approximately 135 soldiers had been killed, wounded, or moved to another unit. 

Human organizations are flawed because humans are flawed. Even with the best intentions, men make errors in judgment and initiate courses of action that are counterproductive to their self interest or the completion of the mission. In a combat zone, ranks interest or the completion of the mission. In a combat zone, ranks as low as staff sergeants make dozens of decisions every day, each with a direct impact on the potential safety and well-being of their men. A company commander or a battalion commander may make hundreds of such decisions a day. Fortunately, in complex environments, individual errors or even long chains of mistakes can often be corrected or they simply dissipate before they cause any adverse effect. Decisions from different people about the same goal either negate or reinforce each other, and, it is hoped, the preponderance of these heaped-together decisions pushes the task toward completion rather than failure. But sometimes, in the permutations of millions of decisions from thousands of actors converging on a battlefield over a period of weeks or even months, a singular combination comes together to unlock something abhorrent. These are what are known, in retrospect, as disasters waiting to happen. 

March 12, 2006, was one such disaster. Nothing can absolve James Barker, Paul Cortez, Steven Green, and Jesse Spielman from the personal responsibility that is theirs, and theirs alone, for the rape of Abeer Qassim Hamzah Rashid al-Janabi, her vicious murder, and the wanton destruction of her family. It is one of the most nefarious war crimes known to be perpetrated by U.S. soldiers in any era—singularly heinous not just for its savagery but also because it was so calculated, premeditated, and methodical. But leading up to that day, a litany of miscommunications, organizational snafus, lapses in leadership, and ignored warning signs up and down the chain of command all contributed to the creation of an environment where it was possible for such a crime to take place. 

I have sympathy for the many men of Bravo who simply want this episode to go away, who saw my inquiries as a continuation of a nightmare from which they have not been allowed to wake. Several times one or the other of them remarked to me, “No matter how screwed up the chain of command was, how strung out the men were, and how many risks the unit was taking, it was not so different from what happens all the time in the Army, was not so different from what happens all the time in the Army, and if March 12 hadn’t happened, you wouldn’t be here now, years later, in my living room, dredging it all up again.” This is undoubtedly true, but there is a circularity to this logic: “If something exceptional hadn’t taken place, you wouldn’t find it exceptional.” When the final variables clicked into place—an unsupervised foursome of men drunk and in a murderous mood on the afternoon of March 12—the unexceptional became exceptional, and the exceptional became history. 

On several levels, the story of Bravo is timeless and could emerge from any war. It is about the heroic and horrible things that men do under the extreme stresses of combat. It is about men who fight despite their fear, who violently extinguish other people’s lives, who watch the best friends they will ever have die before their eyes, who make decisions under conditions that most people can barely conceive of, who butt heads with their superiors and their subordinates, and who love some of their closest comrades in arms as intensely as they do any blood relative. 

But Bravo’s story is also inseparable from the buildup to March 12, the crimes committed that afternoon, and their aftermath, which still reverberate today. It is a story about how fragile the values that the U.S. military, and all Americans, consider bedrock really are, how easily morals can be defiled, integrity abandoned, character undone. 

Not surprisingly, this deployment has produced deep, irreconcilable rifts between many of the men who served together.Especially within Bravo Company, and especially within 1st Platoon, the anger and bitterness that many of the men feel is difficult to overstate. When the abduction and the rape-murders became public in such close succession, the unit descended into a frenzy of finger-pointing. Seemingly everyone tried to pin a single, unified blame on a select few (and who was blamed depended on who was doing the blaming) while scrambling to absolve himself completely. 

I had thought that the Army way was for everyone to accept a I had thought that the Army way was for everyone to accept a small piece of the responsibility for any debacle truly too big to be of any one person’s making and spread the blame to all parties, which would not only make it easier for everyone to survive professionally but, perhaps more important, also make the fiasco something that the Army could study and learn from. But the ordeal generated so much bile and rancor for so many people that the Army seems more interested in forgetting about the tragedy entirely than in ensuring it never happens again. 

Careers were ruined. Reputations tarnished. Medals withheld. Friendships broken. Prodigious resentments have festered because many men feel that blame was unfairly pushed down to the lower ranks and not shared by a higher command they believe was also culpable. 

This is true. The events surrounding Bravo Company were so complex and intertwined that to lay all responsibility not for the crime, but for creating an atmosphere where the crime could occur, at the feet of the few and relatively powerless, is the very definition of scapegoating. And to assert that the battalion command climate was anything other than utterly dysfunctional, or to declare that the soldiers of 1st Platoon were, at any point in the deployment, being effectively managed and led, is simply a whitewash.The Army failed 1st Platoon time and time again. 

It bears emphasizing that given the strain inherent in the eight and a half straight years it has been at war, the United States Army today is among the most-tested and best-behaved fighting forces in history. Rape and murder have been by-products of warfare since the beginning of time. Soldiers today, however, suffer mightily under the burden of “the Greatest Generation” myths and the sanitized Hollywood depictions of World War II. There is a persistent and unfortunate sentiment among modern warriors that they will never live up to the nobility and bravery of those who saw off fascism. But anyone with a better than glossed-over understanding of “the Good War” knows that even glossed-over understanding of “the Good War” knows that even Allied troops committed war crimes such as killing prisoners and raping foreign women at a rate that could be charitably called not infrequent. (One expert estimates that U.S. forces alone may have committed more than 18,000 rapes in the European theater between 1942 and 1945.) It is thus a testament to the control and discipline now exercised by the Army how rarely crimes such as this are actually committed today, and how swiftly the Army moves to investigate them. 

The rules of conduct have changed remarkably rapidly, as has society’s tolerance for military malfeasance. Although most Vietnam War movies are works of fiction, it is fascinating how often misconduct or outright felonies figure in them, sometimes just as subplots or secondary narrative devices. In contrast, today’s soldiers are required to be nothing less than warrior monks. Frequenting whorehouses and drinking anytime not on duty (and sometimes when on duty) in a war zone used to be tolerated, if not condoned, by the Army until just a few decades ago. Today, young men are expected to fight for months on end with zero sexual release and almost no social recreation whatsoever. The two-cans-of-beer-a-day ration is long gone, and even the possession of pornography is expressly forbidden. 

This is as it must be, of course. The story of Steven Green proves that in today’s media and propaganda environment, even one private with a rifle can affect the course of a war and dramatically harm America’s image abroad. Only one out-of control platoon needs just one Steven Green and a handful of co-conspirators to significantly damage the gains that a nearly thousand-strong battalion worked hard to achieve. That is why the manner that every last private is managed, every minute of every day, warrants scrutiny. 

Despite battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Tom Kunk’s insistence that he and his chain of command practiced what he incessantly calls “engaged leadership,” facts demonstrate that he and his senior leaders were woefully out of touch with the realities on the ground. Despite numerous warnings,Kunk and his realities on the ground. Despite numerous warnings,Kunk and his subordinates were either unable or unwilling to acknowledge how dire Steven Green’s mental state was specifically, or how impaired 1st Platoon was generally. Kunk instead belittled 1st Platoon’s incapacity, told them they were wallowing in self-pity, and blamed them and their platoon-level leadership for all their problems, which, in turn, exacerbated their feelings of isolation and persecution and contributed to their downward spiral. 

Bravo Company commander Captain John Goodwin made several explicit requests for more troops in late 2005 and early 2006. Kunk denied them all, arguing alternately that the company had enough men but was using them inefficiently or that there were simply no troops available. Whether Kunk, or his boss, or his boss’s boss could find combat power to spare is debatable. Many senior leaders say it was impossible, there were no surplus troops anywhere in theater, and they insist that an extra platoon or company cannot be generated out of thin air. Perhaps so, but when the three Bravo soldiers were captured on June 16, 2006, 8,000 soldiers were somehow mustered and flooded the area in less than seventy-two hours. 

As I have met and interviewed most of the soldiers and officers involved in the main arc of the events described in this book, they have become utterly, completely human in my eyes. As I have gotten to know them, it has been increasingly difficult to employ the comforting Hollywood dichotomies of good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains. I believe there were good leaders and bad leaders in this battalion, and I think the facts demonstrate who was who, but I also believe that bad leaders had good days and good leaders had bad days. While the story abounds in compelling personalities and colorful characters, they are, of course, not characters in any novelist’s sense. They are all, every last one of them, real people. And besides a few significant and felonious exceptions, they were all trying to do their best, making decisions on the fly and under fire, in unspeakably difficult and dangerous circumstances, for their men, their unit, difficult and dangerous circumstances, for their men, their unit, and the mission. 

My greatest privilege of the past three years has been getting to know so many soldiers from Bravo and the rest of 1st Battalion. There are so many cliches about “supporting our troops” or calling every soldier who has ever donned a uniform a “hero” that it debases serious tribute to genuine warriors, and trivializes the terrible sacrifices that real front line fighters make. It has been my solemn honor to have been allowed into these veterans’ lives and to hear their stories. 

They do not ask for anyone’s pity, but the troopers of 1st Platoon are not the same men they used to be. The majority of them are no longer in the Army. Some of them drink too much, some are in trouble with the law, some cannot hold a job, some get into frequent fistfights, some fly into storms of rage, some suffer from debilitating medical problems, and some are racked with depression, doubt, and despair. Most of them will cope and adjust, and work hard to make peace with what they have lived through, and ultimately they will be okay. But some of them will not. 

The trust these men have invested in me has been humbling, and in their trust I feel a massive responsibility. I believe they understood my goal when I described it to them, which is why they frequently sat with me for days on end going over every last detail, no matter how unsavory. The goal of this book is not to make soldiers look bad, but unlike many popular military histories, it does not attempt to gloss over the inherently brutal and dehumanizing institution of warfare, it does not edit out everything unflattering, let alone upsetting, and it does not seek to make soldiers or the Army look good as an unquestioned end unto itself. I have aimed, instead, to provide a non burnished look at how the soldiers of 1st Platoon and Bravo Company actually lived, fought, strived, and struggled during their 2005–2006 deployment to the Triangle of Death. This book is dedicated to them.

PRELUDE 

March 12, 2006 

IN THE LENGTHENING shadows of an afternoon sun, the masked men in black hurried from the farmhouse in a commotion. They had not left any witnesses. 

About an hour later, Abu Muhammad heard a knock on his door. A balding, short, and hefty forty-nine-year-old with a salt and-pepper mustache, Abu Muhammad had served fourteen years in the Iraqi Army and now worked for the Ministry of Health. Warily, he headed toward the window. You never knew who could be at the door. Everyone was tense since the invasion. Everyone was living in fear. To think people had originally welcomed the Americans, he often mused, welcomed the removal of Saddam! They never dreamed, never even considered, it would get worse after the dictator was gone, but it was so much worse now that people actually longed for Saddam—even the people who had hated him the most. Ever since the Americans came, there was no safety, there was no peace. Armed militias were roaming the countryside, both Sunni and Shi’ite, killing whomever they pleased.Bodies turned up every day. 

Everyone feared the Americans, too. The soldiers were massive and intimidating, their hulking frames made all the more fearsome with their equipment and rifles and dark glasses, their massive trucks carrying even bigger guns, and their thuggish, arrogant ways. They shoved and slapped the men around, sticking guns in their faces, accusing them all of being terrorists while herding the women into a separate room where who knows what they could do to them? The Americans said they were here to bring democracy and freedom, but they could not even provide the small amounts of electricity and water that even provide the small amounts of electricity and water that Saddam did.They brought death and chaos instead. 

There was another knock. A good sign. A knock was better than the door getting kicked in. Looking out the window, Abu Muhammad thanked Allah—it was a man he knew, a neighbor of his cousin and her husband who lived not far away. 

“You must come, Abu Muhammad,” the man said, calling him by his nickname. “Abu” means “father of,” and many Iraqi men carry such sobriquets. “You must come. Something has happened at your cousin’s house, something terrible.” 

Abu Muhammad lived in a village just outside of Yusufiyah, about twenty miles south of Baghdad in the flat lands between the Tigris and the Euphrates. His cousin lived in an even smaller hamlet a mile away. Pulling his car onto the dirt driveway of his cousin’s modest, one-story house, Abu Muhammad saw his cousin’s boys, eleven-year-old Muhammad and nine-year-old Ahmed, outside. They had just returned home from school. There was smoke billowing out one window of the house. The boys were crying, inconsolable. They were screaming and wailing and blubbering; it was impossible to make sense of anything they said. Scared that danger lurked inside, Abu Muhammad circled the house, looking in the windows to ensure the scene was clear. In the house’s sole bedroom he saw what looked like three bodies lying on the floor. There were big pools of blood. In the living room, he saw another body.This one was on fire. 

“Stay here,” he told the boys, as he entered the front door. The first thing that hit him was the smell: Propane. Musty smoke. Cooked flesh. Agitated and afraid, he scurried around the house. He went to the kitchen to turn off the propane tank, giving the valve a few solid turns.Then he moved to the bedroom. 

Socked by dust storms and bleached by the sun, Iraq’s usual color palette is filled with browns, beige's, and duns, as if the whole country were a sepia photograph. But here, inside the Janabi house, was a riot of colors, alarming in their vibrancy, a  Technicolor brilliance of violence, concentrated and otherworldly. Abu Muhammad had seen what the insurgent death squads could do, but he had never witnessed anything like this. Each body was a different sort of travesty. Qassim, the father, was face down in the far corner of the bedroom, in a lake of his own burgundy blood. His shirt was brightly patterned, striped with white, orange, and brown. The front of his skull had been blasted off. Gore and large chunks of gray matter stippled the walls in a wide, V-shaped pattern. A large mound of Qassim’s brain, about the size of a fist, lay nearby on the intricately woven rug. 

Not far from Qassim was Hadeel, just six years old. Wearing a bright pink dress, she was beautiful, her face almost pristine like a death mask, except that she was covered in blood, liters of it. It was everywhere, matting her hair, soaking her dress, covering her face in a thin dried sheen. A bullet fired from behind—perhaps she had been running away from her assailant—had blown the back right quadrant of her skull apart. A piece of it was lying several feet away, covered in skin and hair. Her hair band had been thrown across the room by the whiplash of the impact. In her right hand, she was still clutching some plants she had just picked, a kind of wild sweet grass that Iraqi children frequently gather and eat for fun. 

Closest to the door was Fakhriah, the mother, wearing a black abaya and an emerald velveteen house dress embroidered with white flowers. She was lying on her back with her eyes wide open. Abu Muhammad thought his cousin might still be alive. He reached down to feel her pulse. Nothing. She was dead. He turned her over, and then he saw the hole. She had been shot in the back, but the rich, dark hues of her clothing obscured the full extent of her wound. 

Shaken, Abu Muhammad moved into the living room. There was Abeer, only fourteen years old. What they had done to her, it was unspeakable. Her body was still smoking; her entire upper torso had been scorched, much of it burnt down to ash. Her chest and face were gone, with only the tips of her fingers, sticking out from the purple scraps of her dress sleeves, recognizably human. from the purple scraps of her dress sleeves, recognizably human. The lower half of her body, however, was mostly intact. Her thin, spindly legs were spread and, rigid in death, still bent at the knees. She was naked from the waist down, her tights and underwear nearby. 

The stench was overpowering. Abu Muhammad ran to the kitchen and grabbed the only vessel he could see and came back to the living room. He dumped the teapot, including tea leaves, onto her, causing more smoke and a hiss. There was no running water in the house, so he hurried outside to the canal flowing nearby. He told the boys to stay where they were, plunged the teapot into the canal, and jogged back to the house to douse Abeer’s body. This was slow, but he didn’t know what else to do. He wasn’t thinking clearly enough to try to find a bucket and wouldn’t have known where to find one if he had been. It took five or six trips to the canal with the small vessel to put the fire out, until Abeer’s remains were wet and cold. 

“Come,” he said to the boys, “come with me.” Abu Muhammad got into his car with the boys and dropped them off at his home to stay with his wife. Then he drove to a nearby traffic control point known as T.C.P.1 that was occupied by a dozen or so Iraqi Army (I.A) soldiers and about the same number of U.S. soldiers. He found one of the Iraqis and told him that they needed to come because his cousin and her family, they had been murdered. 

“Yribe! Hey, Yribe!” Staff Sergeant Chaz Allen called. Allen was 1st Squad’s squad leader. Since 1st Platoon’s platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Jeff Fenlason, was in another part of Bravo Company’s area for much of the day, Allen was in charge of T.C.P.1. 

“What?” said Sergeant Tony Yribe, who was one of Allen’s team leaders and one of 1st Platoon’s most formidable warriors. Six feet tall and 210 pounds,Yribe was broad-shouldered, heavily muscled, and square-jawed. Just twenty-two years old, he was on his second tour in Iraq, a grizzled veteran more than familiar with his second tour in Iraq, a grizzled veteran more than familiar with the dark realities of being a trained killer that they don’t show you in the movies and they don’t tell you about in basic training. He looked like an action hero and radiated a confidence that cannot be learned. To most of the younger guys in the platoon, he was practically a god. 

“The I.A's got a guy saying some family was killed behind T.C.P.2 or something,” Allen said. “They took a look and say there are definitely bodies down there. I need you to go check it out.” 

Just another day in Yusufiyah, Yribe mused. The rate at which Iraqis were killing each other was astonishing sometimes. Every day, pretty much, soldiers were fishing dead bodies out of canals, coming across them in shallow graves, or finding them dumped by the side of the road after midnight executions. Of all the reasons to hate this country and its people, this was just another one: their utter disregard for each other. 

As usual, Yribe noted, there were not enough men to mount a proper patrol. Ideally, they shouldn’t be maneuvering around here with anything less than a squad, about nine or ten men. But that almost never happened. If the soldiers here in the Triangle of Death followed the directives specifying the minimum number of men for whatever task was at hand, they’d simply never get anything done. Three-, four-, five-man patrols were common to the point of being standard. Yribe pointed out that there were not enough soldiers even for that bare minimum. Allen told him to grab a guy from here and pick up two more men on his way to the house from T.C.P.2, which was about three-quarters of a mile southwest. Allen would radio ahead so they would be waiting. 

“And be sure to bring a camera,” Allen said. “Battalion is going to want pictures.” 

Yribe grabbed another soldier and an interpreter and headed out. It was getting to be late afternoon. First Platoon, Bravo Company and all of 1st Battalion of the 502nd Infantry/Regiment, 101st Airborne Division had been in theater for five and a half months. Five and a half more months to go. It felt like an eternity months. Five and a half more months to go. It felt like an eternity —with an eternity yet to come.

Yribe arrived at T.C.P.2 and Cortez[L] and Spielman [R]were ready to go, suited up in full body armor, helmets, and weapons. Third Squad’s leader, Staff Sergeant Eric Lauzier, was on leave for a month, so twenty-three-year-old Paul Cortez was acting squad leader, a job many in Bravo Company thought was beyond him. He wasn’t even a sergeant, which is usually a requirement for leading a squad. He had passed the promotion board, but he wouldn’t pin on his stripes for a few weeks, so he was technically a specialist promo-table. A lot of Cortez’s peers and superiors in Bravo thought he was a punk who shouldn’t have been promoted at all. They found him immature, insecure, and a loudmouth, with a nasty streak to boot. He was probably the guy most desperate to prove he was as good a soldier and as tough a character as Yribe, but he wasn’t and he never would be. 

Cortez was in charge of a motley group of just six soldiers down at T.C.P.2, some of whom had been on their own at this spartan, unfortified outpost for twelve days straight. They were pretty ragged and strung out. Twenty-three-year-old Specialist James Barker was next in seniority, a soldier renowned for being a smart aleck, mischief-maker, and master scrounge artist but also one of the platoon’s coolest, deadliest heads in combat, with an uncanny memory and spatial awareness. Private First Class Jesse Spielman and Private First Class Steven Green had arrived from different T.C.P's just a couple of days ago to augment Cortez’s understaffed position. Twenty-one-year-old Spielman was a quiet, unassuming trooper who generally just kept his head down and followed orders. But Green? Twenty-one-year-old Green was one of the weirdest men in the company. He was an okay soldier when he wanted to be, which wasn’t often, but the oddest thing about him was that he never stopped talking. And the stuff that came out of his mouth was some of the most outrageous, racist invective many of the men had ever heard, which is saying something, considering the perpetual locker-room atmosphere of raunchy jokes and racial and ethnic taunts that are just part of the vernacular in any Army combat unit. Green could discourse on any number of topics, but they usually involved hate in some way, including how Hitler should be admired, how “white culture” was under threat in multi ethnic America, and how much he wanted to kill every last Iraqi on the planet. He would go on and on and on like this until somebody literally would have to order him to shut up. Two more newbie privates who’d arrived late to the deployment fresh out of basic training rounded out the T.C.P.2 group. 

Yribe picked up Cortez and Spielman and the five-man patrol walked the quarter mile to the house. Some Iraqi Army soldiers were already there. They had surrounded the house but were waiting outside for the Americans to show up. Yribe and the three U.S. soldiers cleared the five-room house in textbook infantry fashion just in case some insurgents were lying in ambush. Once they determined the house was safe, they started surveying the scene. 

It was grisly. Yribe started taking pictures and directed the other soldiers to look for evidence. Some Iraqi medics arrived to collect the bodies. As the men milled around trying to make sense of what they were seeing, Cortez started dry heaving. He looked green and pale and was drenched with sweat. He hacked and convulsed. 

“Jesus, just go outside,” Yribe told Cortez. What a pussy, Yribe thought as he looked around. This was some vile carnage, he reflected, but frankly, it was far from the worst he had ever seen in this Godforsaken country. Given the level of savagery he had watched Iraqis unleash on other Iraqis, the number of tortured, mutilated, executed bodies he had seen, the corpses bloated and stinking, human parts so traumatized by metal and heat that they had liquefied, or been ripped to shreds, nothing really shocked him anymore. And if Cortez can’t handle this, he thought, that says a lot about him. 

Yribe and Cortez had always been friends—their girlfriends were sisters, in fact but Yribe wasn’t sure how much he really respected him. Cortez had been a Bradley Fighting Vehicle driver with the 4th Infantry Division during the initial invasion in 2003, and he transferred to the 101st Airborne, a somewhat more prestigious division, because he wanted to be even closer to the action. Yribe had always teased him about that, being a driver. Everybody knows that they only put the shit-bags, the fat kids, and the cowards behind the wheel, he would tell Cortez. He had always been kidding, but maybe, Yribe thought now, maybe it was true. Maybe Cortez just couldn’t hack it. 

Yribe took photos from every angle, so that higher headquarters could put together a “storyboard,” a PowerPoint slide that described and illustrated major events in a one-page format for briefings and archiving. They made sketches of the house, noting where the bodies were lying. They emptied the pockets of the adults, looking for ID's, keys, or other identifiers. They picked up some AK-47 shell casings that were scattered about and dropped them into plastic bags. Every time Cortez had composed himself enough to come back in, he’d be able to last only a minute or two before he’d have to rush out gagging all over again. To get a full range of photos,Yribe told the other two soldiers to move the bodies around. They flipped some of the victims from front to back or vice versa to get shots of every corpse’s face and wounds. Through the two or three hours it took to survey the house, Cortez was effectively useless, but Spielman, on the other hand, was cool and efficient, rolling over and moving whatever body Yribe told him to. The burned girl’s remains were so disgusting, however, and there was so little of what could be called a body left, that they just left her where she was. The Iraqi medics had trouble getting her rigid, spread legs into a body bag. 

As one of the men moved one of the many mattresses that were thrown about the bedroom floor, something small and green skittered across the ground. It was a spent shotgun shell. That’s odd,Yribe thought, Iraqis don’t really use shotguns.

Summer 2005

1 

“We’ve Got to Get South 

Baghdad Under Control” 

WHEN COLONEL TODD EBEL took command of the 2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division in the summer of 2004, he knew he had little more than a year to get 3,400 men and women ready for a war that was becoming more complicated and dangerous every day. And by the fall of 2005, as the brigade approached deployment, the war was in its direst state yet. 

The deterioration of Iraq since the April 9, 2003, toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime had been precipitous and unrelenting. The invasion itself was a stunning success, when 170,000 U.S. and British troops (less than one-third the number who fought in 1991’s Operation Desert Storm) sprinted from Kuwait to Baghdad in twenty-one days, with just 169 killed in action. 

After the initial euphoria wore off however, nothing went according to plan because there was, quite simply, no plan. The American transition  formed just weeks before the invasion started and led by retired U.S. Army lieutenant general Jay Garner, was doomed before it could begin. With minimal staffing and funding, Garner proclaimed the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (O.R.H.A) an agent of rapid power transfer back to the Iraqis, just as the White House said it intended. But when it became apparent that post invasion Iraq was far more chaotic than the war’s planners had envisioned and that there was no decapitated but functioning government to hand power to, O.R.H.A’s reason for existing vanished. On April 24, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called Garner, who had made it to Baghdad only three days earlier, to tell him that he, and O.R.H.A, were being replaced. 

The White House appointed veteran diplomat L. Paul “Jerry Bremer to head the Coalition Provisional Authority (C.P.A), O.R.H.A’s successor. After the stillbirth of ORHA, Bremer arrived with a desire to show early, decisive change. Unfortunately, his first two bold strokes—made over the objections of Garner, the CIA’s Baghdad station chief, military commanders, and without the full blessing of the Bush administration—were disastrous. First, Bremer barred from government employment anyone who had held any position of consequence in Saddam’s Baath Party. Under Saddam, party membership was common among public-service employees, whether they were true believers or not. By firing down to these levels, the United States jettisoned the mid level doctors, bureaucrats, and engineers who actually provided essential public services to the people on a daily basis. Six days later, against even more opposition, Bremer dissolved the entire Iraqi military and national police force. In one week, he had thrown between 500,000 and 900,000 people, the majority of them armed and now humiliated men, out of work—on top of the already 40 percent of Iraqi adults estimated to be jobless.

The people who worked at the C.P.A, from Bremer on down, arrived with a kind of visionary—even missionary—idealism unsuited to the realities on the ground. For many, being Bush administration loyalists, rather than having experience in diplomacy or reconstruction, was their only qualification. Huge percentages of them never left the walled center of Baghdad known as the “Green Zone.” Due to the CPA’s weak administrative and financial controls, corruption and graft became rife among American and Iraqi contractors working with the organization. Of the $12 billion disbursed by the CPA in just over a year, $9 billion remains unaccounted for. The CPA failed, repeatedly, to deliver on its promises, including Bremer’s August 2003 pledge that “About one year from now, for the first time in history, every Iraqi in every city, town, and village will have as much electricity as he or she can use and will have it twenty-four hours a day, every single day.” 

Bremer and the C.P.A dramatically mishandled the complexities of the Iraqi ethnic, political, and social climate as well. Conducting himself with the imperiousness of a viceroy, Bremer confirmed most Iraqis’ suspicions that the United States had arrived not as a liberator but as a conqueror bent on a lengthy occupation. He created an Interim Governing Council (I.G.C) and divided its twenty- five seats along demographic lines, with fourteen spots going to Shiites,five to Sunni Kurd's, and four to Sunni Arabs. One seat went to a Christian and one to a Turkmen. While the Americans saw this as a simple matter of logic and fairness, and focused on the fact that they were bringing disenfranchised groups such as the Kurd's and the Shiites into the fold, to the Sunni Arabs, this was the world upside down.

Sunnis had been the ruling class since the British cobbled the country together from three provinces of the Ottoman Empire, a continuation of the privileged status they had enjoyed under that regime, and for centuries before that. For the Americans, who talked a lot about democracy, to overturn the power structure so radically by diktat struck many Sunnis as hypocritical, vindictive, and proof of what they had always suspected: It wasn’t just Saddam or even the Baathist's the Americans had come to punish. They aimed to demolish Sunni hegemony outright. The Shiites, meanwhile, reveled in the realization that for only the second time in modern history (the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran was the first), they were going to rule a country. 

While the Bush administration and the C.P.A’s ineptitude failed to provide virtually anything of value to Iraqis besides the removal of Saddam, an insurgency started flowering immediately.The large but sparsely populated Sunni-dominated western province of Anbar, where the city of Fallujah is located, was an early hot point. The insular tribes, whose sheikhs control ancient smuggling routes, had a reputation for fundamentalism and xenophobia even in Saddam’s time. They extended the United States the least goodwill, and let it run dry the fastest. These burgeoning insurgents effectively employed hit-and-run shootings, but they were particularly fond of mortar attacks and especially I.E.D's (improvised explosive devices), homemade bombs planted under the road or disguised on the surface in bags, debris, or even animal carcasses. I.E.D's were the perfect terrorist weapon: they were cheap, lethal, and terrifying because they were so hard to spot or counteract.

Armed attacks on U.S. forces started as early as May 2003 and spread throughout that summer. The groups were small and disorganized at first but slowly added to their ranks and refined their tactics. Their motives were various. Some insurgents were religious, some were nationalists, some were simply opportunistic criminals. Disgruntled military personnel—some true Saddamists, others with no real allegiance to the defunct regime but humiliated over their loss of status and privilege—became increasingly active. Although the majority of the people did not actively support the insurgencies, armed groups drew recruits from every economic stratum. And those who did fight enjoyed the tacit approval of huge percentages of the population.

The insurgency was not limited to Sunnis, however. Among the United States’ biggest and most lingering headaches was the surprising rise of Muqtada al-Sadr to become the most prominent voice of Shiite dissent to the American occupation. Until the invasion, al-Sadr was the undistinguished and politically insignificant thirty-year-old youngest son of a popular Shiite religious leader assassinated in 1999 by Saddam’s security forces. Immediately after the invasion, however, he seized his moment. Because of his lineage, he could mobilize millions of faithful with a single speech. Unlike some other Shiite parties, which appealed to the middle and upper classes, al-Sadr’s movement spoke to the poor, angry, alienated Shiite underclass whose pent-up rage was uncorked with the toppling of Saddam. And he had no time for America’s expectations of gratitude. Al-Sadr’s Friday sermons became increasingly virulent about the failings of the C.P.A.

Al-Sadr bolstered his power by running a kind of parallel government to provide the public services that the Iraqi state or the CPA simply couldn’t. He opened offices in cities and towns throughout the country, which served as community outreach centers, food banks, and water depots. They offered protection,  infrastructure essentials, and dignity to a battered Shiite populace.

Despite his righteous mantle, however, al-Sadr was not above inciting or exploiting violence for more-nefarious purposes or material gains. Far from it. The line between a legitimate populist movement and a gigantic, theocratic organized-crime and terror ring was a thin one. What began as a ragtag crew of exceedingly violent al-Sadr followers grew into a committed, if unruly, militia called the Mahdi Army that numbered in the thousands. Al-Sadr’s network of outposts served as Mahdi Army garrisons, armories, and torture centers where militia members carried out reprisal killings, flying court trials, and pure criminal thuggery.The U.S. Army and Marines clashed directly with the Mahdi Army several times, and although they always delivered a severe tactical drubbing, al-Sadr emerged from every such conflict the strategic victor. He was more powerful than ever, a hero to millions and a major player on the national stage. For years to come, al-Sadr would remain a dangerous and unpredictable irritant to the United States.

The first response of the Bush administration and senior military leaders was to ascribe the violence to the death rattles of Saddam loyalists, denying, in Rumsfeld’s words, that “anything like a guerrilla war or an organized resistance” was happening. In a persistent analytical misread, senior U.S. officials seemed unable to comprehend that there could be millions of Iraqis who considered themselves die-hard nationalists and patriots while also despising Saddam. Well into 2007, the Army called the insurgents A.I.F's, for “anti-Iraqi forces,” even though most non–Al Qaeda insurgent groups saw themselves as fiercely pro-Iraq but also anti–United States and, thus, against any government propped up by the United States.

As Washington lived in denial, the insurgency strengthened. In August 2003, for example, suicide bombers killed at least 180 people in a few weeks, and yet the United States declared victory whenever a major milestone was achieved, as when Saddam Hussein was captured in December 2003, or whenever the number of attacks dipped for more than a week or two.

Unfortunately, all lulls in violence proved transitory. And without enough troops, as increasing numbers of soldiers continued dying from these frustrating IEDs, many commanders on the ground panicked. Rough tactics became common. Leaders approved interrogation techniques that grew increasingly brutal. Without clearly formulated counterinsurgency theory or doctrine, the Army began using an array of techniques that were counterproductive. Units conducted huge sweeps of entire towns, hauling virtually every male over the age of ten into custody when only a tiny fraction of them were of any intelligence value.

As front line commanders became increasingly desperate, the White House and senior military leaders remained bafflingly insouciant about the situation. When CENTCOM (Central Command) commander General Tommy Franks, who had planned

and led the invasion, retired in July 2003, a new position was created to oversee all military units in Iraq. That job was not handed to another four-star general but to the most junior three-star general in the Army, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez. Without enough experience or resources, Sanchez and his staff were all but guaranteed to fail.

In his memoir, Sanchez sounds overwhelmed by his role, with no real idea of what was happening around him, and no clear vision of what he was trying to accomplish. The specter of Abu Ghraib, the notorious Saddam-era prison that the U.S. military had turned into a hell house of torture themselves by late 2003, hangs over his tenure and his book. He seems dimly aware that something foul was going on in the prison.“I had received some worrisome reports from the field that prisoners were being treated too harshly,” he writes—but he never seriously investigated. During this period, torture became more common across Iraq, not just at Abu Ghraib. One Human Rights Watch report detailed the systematic, daily abuse of detainees by members of the 82nd Airborne Division stationed near Fallujah in September 2003.

Many in the government and military downplayed the Abu Ghraib scandal as the actions of a few poorly trained reservists unprepared for the rigors of war, but even the most elite operatives in the U.S. military employed torture as standard practice. Another Human Rights Watch report described the 2003–2004 torture tactics of Task Force 121, a group of special operations forces units including Delta Force and SEAL Team Six.

For many Americans, the illusion that the Iraq War just might be going okay for the United States finally fell away on March 31, 2004, when four American private contractors ran into an insurgent ambush in Fallujah. A mob of locals dragged the bodies from their cars; burned, mutilated, and dismembered the corpses; and hung some of them from the support spans of a bridge. President Bush ordered the U.S. military to strike back with overwhelming force (against the objection of a Marine general who argued that this was exactly the overreaction the insurgents were hoping for). The military hit the city with 2,500 Marines and assorted armor groups on April 6. Arab television aired brutal and bloody images, broadcasting claims that hundreds of civilians were being killed. The backlash was enormous. Fighting erupted in several cities across Iraq. Sunni and Shiite militias actually united for a time against the common American enemy. The administration ordered Marine commanders, indignant at Washington’s flip-flopping, to halt the attack three days after it began.

Even without the Fallujah debacle, Bremer’s days as viceroy were numbered. In October 2003, Bremer had been summoned to Washington, where Rumsfeld and other members of the Bush administration told him to abandon his grand plans of an extended occupation and transfer sovereignty to the Iraqis as soon as possible. Ultimately, Bremer handed control of the country to Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi in a virtually secret ceremony on June 28, 2004, two days ahead of schedule. After Bremer’s and General Sanchez’s exit, John Negroponte, former ambassador to the United Nations, took over as ambassador to Iraq and four-star general George Casey became the head of U.S. military forces on the

ground.

Casey arrived with a new initiative to attack the insurgency directly.Casey’s campaign plan dictated that the Army concentrate first on controlling the capital, then attempt to close off the Syrian border, then battle for such insurgent safe-haven cities as Kirkuk and Mosul as well as Hit, Ramadi, Fallujah, and Mahmudiyah, which are strung along the Euphrates Valley between Syria and Baghdad. The idea was to clear and hold territory rather than simply fight and withdraw, as happened with the first battle of Fallujah.

Troop numbers, however, made this strategy untenable. U.S. troops did the clearing, but there weren’t enough soldiers to occupy recently purged areas. Iraqi forces were supposed to do the holding, but there were even fewer of them who were competent. A counterinsurgency rule of thumb holds that 20 soldiers per 1,000 civilians are necessary to run an orderly postwar reconstruction. At their peaks, NATO operations in both Bosnia and Kosovo exceeded

that ratio. Iraq’s population of 25 million people suggested that an occupation force 500,000 strong would be needed. During the planning for the war, however, Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz insisted that lighter, faster, and technologically advanced troops could not only conquer a country like Iraq with little more than 100,000 men but also hold it with even fewer. When Army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” would be needed to occupy Iraq, he was publicly ridiculed by both Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Shinseki retired four months later, one year ahead of schedule.

The public pillorying of Shinseki stifled any dissent about troop levels from anyone in or out of uniform for years afterward. The subject was so taboo that Bremer waited until he had just sixty days left in country to ask Rumsfeld, via a secret personal courier, for another division or two. Whenever top Army commanders were asked if they had everything they needed, they always said yes. Not until late 2006 did anyone with real authority advocate increasing troop levels as a way of making American soldiers, and Iraqi civilians, substantially safer.

In late 2005, Casey received the result of a study he had commissioned. Successful counterinsurgencies, the report said, emphasize intelligence rather than force, focus on the safety of the people, shut down insurgent safe havens, and train competent security services. On nearly every count, the U.S. effort was failing. In 2005, the number of insurgent attacks climbed from 26,500 to 34,000. And yet, amid all of this, Casey unrelentingly, consistently, adamantly pushed for fewer troops in Iraq. His plans to reduce the number of combat brigades in country from fifteen in 2005 to five or six by the end of 2007 remained on the drawing board well into late 2006.

This was the environment in which Colonel Todd Ebel was leading his brigade to battle. The 101st Airborne’s 2nd Brigade is the designated descendant of the 502nd Infantry Regiment, one of the most storied units in one of the Army’s most legendary divisions.The 101st, along with the 82nd Airborne Division, pioneered large scale, deep-strike paratroop warfare during World War II. Its exploits in the European theater, including the D-Day invasion of Normandy, Operation Market Garden, and the Battle of the Bulge, are almost mythical. Its screaming eagle shoulder patch is one of the most recognized military identifiers in the world. In Vietnam, the 101st continued its tradition as one of the Army’s premier front line forces. (Not knowing what a bald eagle is, the Vietcong were said to be terrified of the men who wore a chicken patch on their arms. They supposedly avoided the “Rooster Men” whenever possible.) During that conflict, the division overhauled its primary focus. Following the pioneering efforts of the 1st Cavalry Division, the 101st became one of the Army’s first “Air mobile” units, dropping soldiers into battle not from planes thousands of feet in the sky but from helicopters briefly touching down on, or hovering just above, enemy territory. By 1974, the 101st had dispensed with the increasingly tenuous notion that it was a paratrooper unit and focused exclusively on this new martial art now called “Air Assault.” After Vietnam, the 101st supported humanitarian relief efforts in Rwanda and Somalia, and supplied peacekeepers to Bosnia, Haiti, and Kosovo. Elements of the 101st were among the first to deploy for Operation Desert Storm and see combat in the post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan. Today, the 20,000 men and women of the 101st, which is headquartered at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, constitute a special troops battalion and seven brigades: four infantry, two aviation, and a support brigade.

The 101st was called into action again for the 2003 invasion of Iraq under its then commanding general, Major General David Petraeus. The 101st was one of the war’s primary attack forces, accompanying the 3rd Infantry Division from the south in the thrust to Baghdad. After the fall of the capital, the 101st moved north to stabilize Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city. With no guidance from the CPA, military commanders were left to pursue their own postwar reconstruction missions, to varying degrees of success. Petraeus would become the breakout leader of the war, mounting what is widely hailed as the best ad hoc rebuilding and counterinsurgency campaigns in the country.

Books such as Band of Brothers (and the ten-part HBO miniseries based on it), which followed a single company of soldiers from their pre-Normandy training all the way through World War II’s end, cemented the 101st Airborne’s reputation in the public’s consciousness as some of history’s greatest warriors. One of Band of Brothers’s indubitable strengths is its pinpoint focus on a small unit of men, Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment.But that strength created a significant side effect that rankles those with a broader view. “The funny thing about that book,” opined 101st Airborne historian Captain James Page, “is that you could come away from it with the idea that Easy Company was almost like a commando unit accomplishing things no one else was, when, in truth, there was a company to their left, a company to their right, and thirty-five other rifle companies just from the 101st alone doing the exact same things they were doing all war long.” Indeed, the glory was not restricted to Easy Company, or even the 506th. The 502nd Infantry Regiment (nicknamed “the Five-o-deuce,” or just “the Deuce”) played a crucial role in each of the division’s major World War II campaigns, and was home to the division’s only two Congressional Medal of Honor recipients for the whole war. 

Although not technically the same, “2nd Brigade” and “502nd Infantry Regiment” are, today, effectively synonyms. Except in rare cases, regiments are an obsolete organizational unit in the U.S. Army, but to preserve a sense of history, tradition, and esprit de corps, certain groupings of battalions carry on the names of particularly illustrious regiments.This continuum is entirely bogus, since so few Army units have been continuously active since their inceptions. The 101st itself, for example, has disbanded and reactivated no fewer than four times since World War II. When a new Army battle group is created, it often simply assumes the colors, crest, and regalia of some illustrious yet dormant unit from the past, even if it is based in a wildly different location or carries a vastly different purpose. Presto, instant history. And yet, this system of perpetuating noble lineages works: soldiers do not take much prodding to adopt a sense of pride and custodianship in the purported legacy and history of their unit. Modern warriors clearly long for a link between themselves and heroes of old. 

Ebel had much to live up to, not just compared with the heroes of old but even his immediate predecessor. During the invasion, which the Army has come to call Operation Iraqi Freedom 1 (O.I.F.1), Colonel Joseph Anderson commanded 2nd Brigade, which is also known as “Strike Brigade.” He was a beloved and respected commander who had led his troops with impressive effectiveness and would shortly be promoted to brigadier general. As a quasi-official 101st history of O.I.F.1 put it, “Second Brigade, simply put, was the MVP of the 101st during the push to Baghdad.” 

The son of a lieutenant colonel who served in Vietnam and a West Point grad, Ebel was promoted early to both major and colonel. Though not particularly tall, he has the lean build of the basketball player he once was, and the intellectual demeanor surprisingly common among senior Army officers, more in the mold of brainy Petraeus than brawny Franks. Subordinates occasionally derisively referred to Ebel as “The Professor.” Along his rise, he had once declined the command of a brigade for family reasons, but after serving with General Petraeus in Iraq in 2004 training the new Iraqi Army, he returned to tell his wife that since their kids were older and moving on to college now, he thought the time was right. She obliged, and for Ebel the 101st’s 2nd Brigade was his first choice.

Ebel took command just as Strike Brigade was, as part of the broader Army “transformation,” expanding from three infantry battalions to six diverse battalions. Now called a brigade combat team (B.C.T), 2nd B.C.T comprised two infantry battalions, an artillery battalion, a support battalion, a reconnaissance battalion, and a special troops battalion (which includes headquarters, intelligence, engineers, and communications companies). The B.C.T concept was designed to make brigades more independent of their divisions and thus better suited to the rapid deployment necessary for the “small wars” commonly believed to be the threats of the future. 

While 2nd Brigade was now a much larger entity, its headlining assets were still unquestionably its infantry battalions, known as the 1-502nd (“First Strike”) and the 2-502nd (“Strike Force”). As part of the Army transformation, the 101st Airborne Division was also in the process of creating its fourth infantry brigade from scratch, which required seeding it with officers and non-commissioned officers (N.C.O's) from the other three brigades. Ebel would ultimately deploy with 90 percent of his allotted total staffing strength, but only 65 percent of a full complement of officers. In his infantry-focused brigade, for example, he had no infantry-qualified captains and only one infantry major on his headquarters staff.

Second Brigade as a whole is also less formally known as the “Black Heart Brigade” or simply the “Black Hearts” for the distinctive two-inch patch they wear on each side of their helmets. The Black Hearts name and the helmet marker tie indirectly back to World War II. During large-scale training exercises, as thousands of paratroopers scattered over drop areas, developing efficient ways for battalions to reconstitute themselves became a serious issue. One for battalions to reconstitute themselves became a serious issue. One easy fix was visual: Each of the 101st’s regiments adopted a suit from a deck of cards and stenciled it in white paint on the side of their helmets. As soldiers darted around open battlefields, they could identify close comrades quickly and without even speaking. The 327th wore clubs; the 501st, diamonds; the 506th, spades; and the 502nd, hearts. Although the practice fell out of favor after the Vietnam era, the convention was revived with gusto in 2001. But due to the muted-color imperatives and cloth helmet covers of modern uniforms, the insignia today are not white-paint stencils but black stitched patches. Over time, the 502nd thus added a new nickname to its collection.

Knowing that the 101st would deploy to Iraq sometime in the fall of 2005, Ebel trained his men the best he could considering, frustratingly, he did not know exactly where they were going. In the early summer he had the suspicion they would assume responsibility for convoy security along the main supply route from Kuwait all the way to Turkey, but he knew that was subject to change. And it did. In late August, the Multi-National Corps–Iraq commander called Ebel to tell him he had a new mission for him. There was a National Guard unit, the 48th Infantry Brigade out of Georgia, in South Baghdad, the vast, flat expanse south of the city spanning the stretch between the Tigris and the Euphrates, and, the general made clear, they were just not getting the job done.

“We’ve got to get South Baghdad under control,” he told Ebel. Typically, a commander gets five to six months’ notice to recon an area, talk to the leaders he will relieve, and modify training regimens. Ebel got less than six weeks.

After visiting the 48th in Iraq in late summer, he returned to tell his battalion commanders, “It is not going to be an easy road. They are not even sure of what they have in the area. It just feels bad. We can expect a real fight.

2 

The Kunk Gun 

AS PART OF GENERAL CASEY’S larger strategy to reclaim the Euphrates Valley, part of 2nd Brigade’s mission would be to hold the region that had recently been dubbed the “Triangle of Death” for its relentless insurgent and sectarian violence, both against Americans and Iraqi-on-Iraqi. For the past three years, the area had been very lightly occupied by American forces, with no unit staying more than six months. Insurgents thrived wherever Americans were absent, and the area had become a deeply entrenched home base for a variety of insurgent groups, criminal gangs, and violent religious partisans. Insurgent organizations, including Al Qaeda in Iraq (A.Q.I), enjoyed virtually unfettered transit from the Syrian border down the Euphrates River corridor, from Fallujah through to Yusufiyah or Mahmudiyah and up into Baghdad. Between the rivers and the roads, terrorists had multiple paths into the city and ample staging locations to stash weapons, build bombs, house fighters, and plan attacks. Ebel’s mission would be to deny insurgents access to Baghdad throughout his area of operation (A.O) and, as his units’ intelligence increased, to uproot and destroy insurgent safe havens. 

Simultaneously, however, he was tasked with helping to train the 4th Brigade, 6th Division of the Iraqi Army (I.A) so that they, ultimately, could ensure the stability of the region. These two broad goals would sometimes be at odds with one another. Rooting out insurgent hotbeds was the most immediate, life-or-death priority. But training the I.A was what, in the long term, would allow the United States to leave Iraq. 

The spearheads putting pressure on this terrorist stronghold would naturally be Ebel’s two infantry battalions—First Strike, led by Lieutenant Colonel Tom Kunk, and Strike Force, led by Lieutenant Colonel Rob Haycock. But how to array them? Ebel decided it all came down to the personalities of his commanders. The eastern half of 2nd Brigade’s territory was urban, featuring the towns of Mahmudiyah, Yusufiyah, and Lutufiyah. As such, it required a leader who could navigate the complex political and ethnic power struggles playing out not just at the end of gun barrels but in council meetings, tribal gatherings, and other ostensibly civil occasions. It required a lot of glad-handing and negotiations with sheikhs and other powerful men of the area whose loyalties were constantly shifting and always suspect. The western sector was far more rural, with smaller hamlets dotting wide swaths of agricultural land and isolated farmhouses, making it an ideal hiding locale for native insurgents, foreign Al Qaeda, and other sorts who didn’t want to be found. 

“Tom’s more engaging,” said Ebel. “He’s more capable of communicating with others, in one sense. Rob was distinctly focused on fighting. Tom would be able, in my mind, to exercise restraint and go work with local officials. I sensed I needed Tom in the area where the population centers were.” 

When Tom Kunk first joined the Army, he never intended it to be his career. Growing up in Springfield, Ohio, he’d only enlisted in the Army in 1983 to earn some money for college. His branch was personnel administration. But he found he had a knack for Army life. He started taking college classes at night, completed his degree from the University of Maryland, and became an officer in 1988. He had also switched to infantry because if this was going to be his vocation, he figured, he wanted to be where the action was. 

The competition for status between U.S. Army units is extreme, and the hierarchies of prestige between divisions are byzantine, with nuanced rivalries about which branches (or subsets of branches) are the most “hooah.” (“Hooah” is the all-purpose word for anything that embodies the Army’s most gung-ho ideals. Typically used as an adjective—“That is hooah” or “He is hooah”—it is also frequently, to the point of self-parody, used as a salutation, interjection, or alternative to the words “yes” and “okay.”) Not surprisingly, the closer one gets to danger, and the more elite the unit, the greater the status. At the very pinnacle are the U.S. government’s “black” or “gray” military and paramilitary units such as Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, the CIA, and the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team.

On the next rung of the status hierarchy are the elite units of the conventional Army, such as the 75th Ranger Regiment and Special Forces (“the Green Berets”). After that come the combat arms branches (infantry, armor, artillery, and attack aviation). Within this stratum, the ground units consider themselves tougher than the pilots, whom they resent for the undeniable glamour of flight, tease for being glorified taxi drivers, and constantly claim are too risk averse. Infantrymen, meanwhile, believe they are superior to artillery specialists and tankers because they fight at much closer quarters, usually within eyesight of the enemy. 

Within infantry, there are still more substrata. Most infantry divisions today are mechanized, meaning they rely on Bradley Fighting Vehicles and other armored ground transportation to carry men into battle. But the light infantry divisions—the 101st Airborne, the 82nd Airborne, and the 10th Mountain—see themselves as the pure essence of ground combat: once they are dropped into enemy territory, they are on their own. 

Beyond combat arms is the vast rest of the Army, which has virtually no status in the eyes of the war fighters. If combat arms soldiers pay the rear echelon branches any respect, it is only because support troops are necessary to make sure that they, the main event, get what they need. But the hooah status of quartermasters, chaplains, or the finance corps? Please, says the trigger-puller. If you want to serve your country, those branches might be for you. But so might the Post Office. If you want to fight for your country, the only job to have is in combat arms, and the only job in combat arms, says the light infantryman, is in light infantry. 

Kunk served in 1991’s Operation Desert Storm and deployed to Haiti and Kosovo before participating in O.I.F.1 as the operations officer and then the executive officer of the 101st’s 2-502nd Infantry Regiment. Coming back home, he completed a master’s degree in human resources from Webster University and learned that when the 101st went back to Iraq, he would be commanding First Strike. 

Kunk assumed command of the 1-502nd on March 16, 2005. Due to his enlisted service, he was, at forty-seven, several years older than the average battalion commander. At six foot five, 230 pounds, and possessing a thunderous basso profundo, he is almost always the dominant presence in the room. His large, shiny, hairless dome earned him the unit-appropriate nickname of “the Bald Eagle.” Tough, uncompromising, even bullheaded, he distinguished himself in previous assignments by being a good organizer and planner, with a fine attention to detail. He had a small battery of Army cliches—“doing the harder right over the easier wrong,” the importance of “engaged leadership,” and how he always tried to “teach, coach, mentor”—that he repeated endlessly. 

Rare for a light infantry battalion commander, Kunk did not have a Ranger Tab. The aura and the importance of the small black-and yellow Ranger patch in the Army hierarchy of hooah is difficult to overstate. Worn on the top of the left sleeve, it may look inconspicuous, but it has talisman properties. It signifies the wearer has graduated from Ranger School, one of world’s most grueling leadership courses. Less than 40 percent of the men who start the course graduate. Sixty-one days long (if completed without having to repeat a section), it focuses on small-unit combat tactics (everyone is stripped of rank, and everyone takes turns leading), through harsh conditions in mountain, swamp, and forest settings. Instructors design scenarios to induce maximum stress and confusion, and students go weeks with severe sleep deprivation and caloric restriction. It is common for already fit men to lose thirty to forty pounds, and almost every graduate has at least one story about hunger-and exhaustion-induced hallucinations he experienced. 

For virtually every other branch of the Army, the Ranger Tab is For virtually every other branch of the Army, the Ranger Tab is an elite trophy. For infantry units, however, and especially light infantry units, it is almost a requirement for officers and senior N.C.O's. Graduates of Ranger School, like graduates of West Point, have a strong subculture within the Army (though the Ranger club is open to enlisted men). When one soldier meets another, the top left shoulder is the second thing he looks at after rank. And for those in infantry leadership positions without one, not having a Ranger Tab is a constant source of insecurity, a noteworthy deficiency no matter how sterling the resume otherwise. It is certainly possible to rise to general without the tab, but if a tab-less officer falters in his career, you can be guaranteed to hear someone say, with a tinge of pity: “Well, you know, he isn’t a Ranger.”

Kunk’s mission was daunting. Like Ebel, he was also replacing a beloved commander, Lieutenant Colonel Del Hall, and he had only six and a half months to continue the training of 700 men spread across six companies—a headquarters company, three rifle companies (Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie), a weapons company (Delta), and a support company (Echo)—for their next deployment without a clear idea of where in Iraq they would be headed or what their mission would be. 

As the battalion worked that summer, Kunk’s leadership roster slowly took shape. The battalion’s executive officer and second in command was thirty-seven-year-old Major Fred Wintrich. The son of an infantry officer, Wintrich had flunked out of West Point because of bad math and science grades, but he was committed to an Army career. He received his commission in 1991 after finishing a history degree at North Georgia College. Behind his back, several junior officers referred to Wintrich, with affection, as “Fast Freddie,” due to his animated speaking style and wild gesticulations. 

First Strike’s operations officer and third in command was Major James “Rob” Salome. Bald and built like a bulldog, with a serious, almost dour demeanor, the thirty-three-year-old West Point grad was, both temperamentally and physically, an almost perfect inverse of the gangly, gregarious Wintrich. Complementing each other well, they soon developed a close working relationship.

One of the hallmarks of the modern U.S. Army is that every officer leadership position, from platoon leader and company commander all the way through brigade commander and division commander, has a parallel and complementary non-commissioned officer (N.C.O). Commanders are accountable for mission planning, executive decision-making, and the ultimate responsibility for everything the unit does or fails to do. Senior N.C.O's are responsible for helping to ensure the timely and accurate execution of the commander’s orders, the care and welfare of the men, the specific tasking of personnel, and advising the commander of the enlisted man’s view of things. Kunk’s senior N.C.O was Command Sergeant Major Anthony Edwards, a native of Sanford, North Carolina, who had enlisted as an infantryman in 1980. He was known to be stern and serious about the basics, and he was also somewhat aloof, cultivating few close friends or acquaintances within the battalion. 

Rounding out the rest of Kunk’s leadership team were the company commanders and first sergeants of the 1-502nd’s three rifle companies, weapons company, logistics company, and headquarters and headquarters company (H.H.C). Commanding H.H.C was Captain Shawn Umbrell, a former Army airborne medic who had returned as an officer upon his graduation from the University of Toledo in 1999. He had become commander of First Strike’s Charlie Company in June 2004 and badly wanted to retain that position long enough to take his men into battle. To his great disappointment, that would not happen. When the H.H.C command slot came up in May 2005, Umbrell was, as is common for the senior company commander in a battalion, obliged to take it. H.H.C's may not be as hooah as infantry companies, but with nine different platoons performing functions varying from scouts and medics to supply and communications, they are bigger, more logistically intensive operations. Still, he was disappointed. Umbrell, who possesses a naturally sunny disposition and gentle manner, resolved to make the best of the situation, not to moan about the 135 men he left but to serve the 230 he now had the best that he could. 

Thirty-six-year-old Captain Bill Dougherty was a flinty-eyed Thirty-six-year-old former infantry sergeant from Philadelphia who had served with a Ranger battalion in Afghanistan and with the 502nd Infantry Regiment during O.I.F.1 before replacing Umbrell as Charlie’s company commander in May 2005. One of Umbrell’s primary pieces of advice when he handed over the reins was, “Dennis Largent is always right.” Dennis Largent was Charlie’s first sergeant, the company’s senior enlisted soldier and right-hand man to the company commander. The son of a retired lieutenant colonel, Largent was a buzz-cutted, blunt-nosed giant. Charlie Company (nicknamed “the Cobras”) had an intense esprit de corps, one of the most pronounced that many had ever seen in their entire Army careers.

Much of that Charlie pride flowed from and centered on Largent, who had been first sergeant since before the invasion. Soldiers loved Largent and they loved being in the company. He could be strict and impossibly tough on his soldiers. But there was something strange about the way Largent yelled. Even when he was jet-engine loud, Dougherty said, he was never abusive or cruel. “There was still just so much love there,” Dougherty explained. “He could be dishing out the most royal ass chewing ever, but it was always clear that he was not hating on the soldier, he was trying to teach him. And there was a little bit of humor there all the time too.” 

There was a lot of humor in Charlie. Since they were the Cobras, they had adopted the logo of COBRA, the shadowy international bad guy organization from G.I. Joe cartoons. They plastered that snake logo on everything: unauthorized unit patches, Hags, T-shirts, anything they could think of. The stencil started popping up on so many flat surfaces that the line between logo and graffiti was thin. 

The company also had a tribe of garden gnomes that had become mascots. Years before, a group of drunken soldiers had stolen several garden gnomes from a trailer park and, as a prank, hidden them in places that Largent would find them for weeks to come. There was a gnome in the company refrigerator, a gnome in the latrine, a gnome in every third locker. Largent turned this into a team-building opportunity. He would call the whole company into team-building opportunity. He would call the whole company into formation every time he found a gnome and pretend to be furious. The gnomes became the company’s good-luck charms. Each squad was issued a gnome. Soldiers gave them names and affixed Cobra patches to their shoulders, and the company took them, these heavy stone gnomes, on deployments. It became a rule: The newest private was responsible for carrying that squad’s gnome in his rucksack wherever they went.

The Cobras had come to refer to themselves as “the People’s Army.” Once, in garrison, the legend goes, Charlie was assigned to do some sort of community service activity like helping with a blood drive or a park cleanup project. The men were complaining, because that was definitely not something they thought soldiers should be doing. Largent was having none of this, and he launched into a long, impassioned tirade that was simultaneously tongue in cheek yet also deadly serious about how the whole reason the Army exists is to protect and serve the American people, and soldiers should consider it an honor to help with a blood drive or anything else society asks them to do. 

“The Army is not a democracy,” he thundered, “but we defend democracy with our lives! We are not the President’s Army! We are not the Secretary of Defense’s Army! Or any of the Generals’ Army! We are the People’s Army!” The soldiers hooted and hollered. They loved it—and suddenly they were excited and enthusiastic to go help with the blood drive. 

From there, the People’s Army took on a life of its own. Charlie Company was the People’s Army, they told anyone and everyone. Over time, this moniker would become a source of great annoyance to the battalion’s leadership, who thought the phrase sounded more than a little communist, and a lot like the battle cry of 1st Battalion secessionists. On several occasions Kunk told Largent to knock off the People’s Army stuff and start promoting First Strike as his soldiers’ primary rallying point. Largent replied that he didn’t really think he should do that. Cracking down on the People’s Army would only drive it underground, he said, and fuel its popularity, turning it into a true middle finger pointed at the battalion, rather  than a funny little differentiator.

As the battalion geared up for deployment and trained throughout the summer, many of the company commanders and first sergeants determined that Kunk was not going to be the easiest boss to get along with. They knew Kunk had a reputation for being demanding and having a volcanic temper. Those characteristics were nothing special in the Army. “Demanding” and “short-fused” could, in fact, describe more commanders than not. Kunk, they realized, however, was something different. Only a few days after he took command in the spring of 2005, the whole battalion headed to the Joint Readiness Training Center (J.R.T.C) at Fort Polk, Louisiana, where light infantry units undergo two-week, immersive “in the box” war-game exercises. 

In hindsight, some point to the J.R.T.C stint as a harbinger of everything that would go wrong in Iraq, both with Bravo’s 1st Platoon and at the battalion level. On the first day of the simulation, 1st Platoon made a spectacular tactical error, and the J.R.T.C’s “enemy force” captured nineteen of their soldiers. Immediately, 1st Battalion’s company commanders focused on how to rescue their men as soon as possible. So they were dismayed when they heard the brief from Kunk, that he was ordering surveillance and recon of the enemy for the next twenty-four hours. Kunk had formulated a complete plan for the next day without any input from his commanders, except to go around the room seeking affirmation that this was the right way to go. After awkward silences and halfhearted assent, Umbrell spoke up first. 

“I think this plan is fucked up,” he said. “We’ve got all these assets,” he said, incredulous. “We’ve got Bradley's, helicopters, several companies of men ready to go, and a short time window to this whole exercise. And we’re not going to go get our guys?” The rest of the commanders followed suit, saying that sitting around with men in enemy hands was a bad idea and they should start formulating a rescue now. Kunk ignored their protests and the surveillance plan remained in effect. 

“That was the first big fallout between him and all the company  commanders,” said Alpha Company’s commander, Captain Jared Bordwell. Several company leaders said they learned something that day that would be reinforced repeatedly throughout the next year: Their input was not wanted, and when Kunk was challenged, one of two things would happen. Either he demolished dissenters with an angry tirade, or he would more quietly dig in his heels. But he would not consider an alternate point of view, modify his opinion, or change the plan. Bordwell had a particularly hard time with Kunk early on. Cocky and aggressive, he had taken command of Alpha Company in early 2005. Because he was always eager to take the next mission, his men dubbed him “Captain America.” Bordwell went afoul of Kunk immediately, however, because he had not learned to adjust his style to accommodate the new boss’s way of doing business. Bordwell had previously worked for a battalion commander who didn’t obsess over details. When he asked his captains what they were doing and they replied, “Training my men, sir,” that was all he wanted to hear. But Kunk was a demon for the minutiae: How many rifles do you have ready to go? How many of your night vision devices need repairing? What percentage of your vehicles still need parts? 

At the time, Bordwell thought a company commander didn’t need this sort of information at the ready all the time. So when Kunk would ask Bordwell something like how many water cans his company had, Bordwell said not only did he not know, but he didn’t really need to know; that’s what his executive officer was for. This was not the kind of answer that made Kunk happy. In Kunk’s world, said his subordinates, only Kunk got to employ sarcasm, and he let Bordwell have it. “Looking back, I see the whole picture now,” Bordwell reflected, acknowledging that soldiers without water can’t fight and a company commander should, in fact, know how many cans he has at all times. “But it was the approach he took I initially struggled with."

That approach was belittlement. The officers had a name for it: the Kunk Gun. When it swung around your way, you ducked for the Kunk Gun. When it swung around your way, you ducked for cover. They also called being subjected to one of his tirades Getting Kunked. It wasn’t that Kunk had high standards, or yelled at them a lot, or was even mean, they said. The captains had been in the Army for six or more years. Some of the first sergeants had nearly twenty years’ experience. They had all worked for difficult, even mean, bosses. This was not that. Kunk treated his subordinates with nastiness and impatience they had never seen before, where correction and coaching turned into shouted, expletive-laden humiliation and disparagement. Kunk’s meetings became events to dread, more about him proving how little his underlings knew than in sharing information or solving problems. If subordinates didn’t have the correct response at the ready,Kunk would humiliate them, assail their qualifications to hold command, and even fire off the sanctum sanctorum of accusations—doubt their concern for the welfare of their own soldiers. 

Kunk dripped with contempt. By Army culture, superior officers may call subordinates by their first names. Some do so as an indication of familiarity or even affection.Kunk, with the venomous emphasis he applied to each name, wielded it as a weapon of disrespect. “Have you ever thought of that,Bill ?” “Do I have to do your job for you, John?” He routinely ridiculed subordinate commanders in front of their own men, and he was not above threatening lieutenants with violence, telling one that he would “beat his fucking ass” if he did not follow a recently delivered order. If anyone disagreed with him or ventured an alternative idea, he took that as a personal challenge, and he would sometimes end discussions by declaring, “Trump! I win, because I’m the battalion commander.” 

For the few months between the J.R.T.C and deployment, the Kunk Gun was firmly fixed on Bordwell, and it was having an effect. If, initially, Bordwell’s first sergeant found his company commander a bit arrogant, though not unacceptably so, the daily drubbings by Kunk were making Bordwell indecisive and eroding his confidence. The relationship continued to deteriorate. Once, Kunk became upset because Bordwell didn’t reply to some of his e-mails, but Bordwell had consciously not done so because the e-mails contained no questions, only information. Kunk interpreted the non-response as being ignored. Tensions came to a head: Kunk threatened to fire Bordwell, giving him another chance only after Bordwell filled out a self-analysis tool to evaluate his strengths and weaknesses and affirmed his desire to stay in command.

It wasn’t just Bordwell, however. Kunk was hammering all the company commanders. The captains became timid decision-makers, avoided speaking in meetings or otherwise attracting attention, and generally steered clear of Kunk as much as they could. Several first sergeants, concerned that Kunk seemed bent on purposely embarrassing their commanders, banded together to have an intervention with Sergeant Major Edwards.You need to tell Colonel Kunk that he needs to cut it out, they told Edwards. He is undermining our commanders and they’re second-guessing everything they do. In combat, that can be deadly. Edwards told them that he would see what he could do, but they never heard back from him, and they never discerned a noticeable change in Kunk’s style. 

Later in the summer, Bravo and Charlie and much of the battalion staff went on another war-game exercise at the National Training Center (N.T.C) at Fort Irwin, California. Again, there were problems and misunderstandings. First Sergeant Largent and Lieutenant Colonel Kunk got into a private conversation and, Largent thought at the time, they began talking confidentially, one old-timer to another. Largent thought, as the senior first sergeant in the battalion, he could give some honest feedback to Kunk that would be both off the record and taken to heart. 

“What do you think the problem is?”Kunk asked Largent. 

“Frankly, sir, you are being a dick,” Largent responded. “To the men, to the commanders, to everyone,” he said. “You are just angry all the time. You need to back off them a little bit.” Largent later reckoned this candor was a tremendous miscalculation. Kunk, Largent concluded, did not want an honest assessment, and the conversation was not a private consultation,  because for as long as the two worked together from then on, Kunk would frequently, publicly declare, “Well, that’s because First Sergeant Largent thinks I’m a dick! Isn’t that right, First Sergeant? I’m just a dick, so what do I know?” 

As the senior company commander, Umbrell also felt a responsibility to try to be a mediator between Kunk and the captains. Once, before deployment, he tried to approach Kunk about his leadership style. He referenced a book about leadership that Colonel Ebel had assigned them to help him make his point. That book,The Servant, by James Hunter, uses the story of Jesus to demonstrate that leadership has nothing to do with ordering people around because you have more power than they do. True leadership, the book says, inspires people to follow you because you serve their psychological need for purpose, value, and direction. Told as a parable, there is even a drill sergeant character in the book who allows the author to tackle all the accusations that this thesis is just a bunch of feel-good mumbo-jumbo irrelevant to the tough realities of today’s corporations or armed services. One passage addresses the sergeant directly, saying, “The leader has a responsibility to hold people accountable. However, there are several ways to point out deficiencies while allowing people to keep their dignity.” 

In private one day, Umbrell said to Kunk, “The way that you’re talking to the company commanders right now is creating an environment where nobody wants to come talk to you. The book that Colonel Ebel is having us read, what that author says about leadership, you are doing the opposite.” The very next morning, Kunk showed up with photocopies of material he had pulled out of another leadership manual that talked about how there were several different but effective leadership styles, including the rigid authoritarian. “So that’s where we were,” Umbrell recalled. “He’s not changing. He’s not changing. That’s how it all started going bad for the command climate.” 

Kunk never had problems with his own staff to the degree he did with the companies.  Majors Salome and Wintrich were not effusive in their praise of Kunk, but they eschewed direct criticism. “It’s not an isolated leadership style,” said Wintrich. “There’s not just one guy in the Army who will poke you in the chest and say, ‘You know what? You’re not doing a good enough job right now. You need to pick it up.’ It’s not always a pleasant leadership style to be around, but it does often achieve results.” Other subordinates not in charge of his line units, such as the medical captain and the intelligence captain, found him to be a praiseworthy, even inspiring leader. This is a discrepancy not lost on others. “For Tom Kunk, there were two types of people,” said First Lieutenant Brian Lohnes, who was leader of the battalion’s scout platoon and also worked in Major Salome’s operations office. “There were ‘his boys,’ and then there were ‘the other people.’ And if you were one of ‘the other people,’ it didn’t matter how great your performance was or what you did, he was going to punch you in the balls every chance that he had. Every time you sat down for a meeting, he was going to embarrass you.”

Upon returning from N.T.C in August, the battalion staff finally got a full briefing on their mission. They were heading to the Triangle of Death. H.H.C commander Shawn Umbrell wrote in his diary, “6 SEP: Was briefed on battalion sector today. Looks like south of Baghdad, near Mahmudiyah. This is reportedly a rough area. We’ll be going on the offensive within 24 hours of taking the sector. The enemy will be in for a wake-up call. Our boys are ready. We’re prepared to take casualties, we know that’s the cost.” 

The assignment took Kunk by surprise, but he was nothing if not certain about his own abilities. “Ebel said it was the most complex fight, dealing with people, so multifaceted,” he recalled. “It was Iraqi security forces. It was building government. All the different ethnicity. The Sunnis, the Shiites. All those competing things. That’s why he chose the 1-502nd, because he felt that I had an incredible grasp for that.” 

Planning was hurried. “We started having daily intel meetings,” said one platoon sergeant. “It was an eye opener. We started realizing that it was time to get your game face on. I remember  doing my brief to my men, saying, ‘Okay, you guys wanted to get into the shit, so guess what? Here it is.’” Most of the men had never heard of the towns they were heading to, and the information they were getting from the unit already there was scant. But they did the best they could. “Open-source information is better than classified information, that’s the big joke,” quipped one of the company executive officers. “We did our planning off of Google Earth.” 

In addition to occupying their A.O, First Strike had to send soldiers to fulfill two other brigade-wide tasks. Kunk chose one platoon from Charlie to become an Iron Claw team—one of several I.E.D-hunting platoons that roamed the brigade’s territory in massive, armored I.E.D-detecting trucks with giant digging arms on the front, which inspired the teams’ name. 

Kunk was also required to provide 36 N.C.O's and officers to make a MITT team. MITT teams (military transition teams) were responsible for training Iraqi soldiers by living, working, and patrolling with Iraqi Army units around the clock. Kunk chose two dozen key leaders from Alpha Company to be the core of the MiTT team, shoring up the ranks with soldiers from the other companies. Bordwell interpreted this move as punishment for being Kunk’s most problematic commander. “I lost my first sergeant, all three rifle platoon leaders, two out of three rifle platoon sergeants, four senior staff sergeant squad leaders, and four team leaders,” Bordwell said. “They pulled the backbone out of my company.” 

As the wheels-up date approached, Umbrell made a final entry in his diary: “29 SEP: Said my good-byes today. One of the hardest things I have ever done. Jacob understands I will be gone for a long time. We all cried. I am happy to finally get started. I can start the countdown now for coming back. Soldiers are in high spirits. The whole out load has been smooth. I’m proud to be a part of all this. Very proud.”

OCTOBER 2005

Next65s

“This Is Now the Most Dangerous Place in Iraq”

FAIR USE NOTICE

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. As a journalist, I am making such material available in my efforts to advance understanding of artistic, cultural, historic, religious and political issues. I believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Copyrighted material can be removed on the request of the owner.