PART 2: 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

3 

“This Is Now the Most 

Dangerous Place in Iraq” 

IN THE TWO and a half years since the toppling of Saddam’s regime, the rural outskirts of Baghdad known as South Baghdad had become one of the deadliest locales in the country. In one sense, this was an ignominious destiny for the cradle of civilization. It was here, in Mesopotamia, the land between two rivers, that the great Bronze Age empires of the Sumerians, the Babylonians, and the Hittites invented or solidi-ed advances in farming, writing, astronomy, and mathematics. It was here that nameless poets assembled the legends of Gilgamesh, Hammurabi codified the first set of laws, and Nebuchadnezzar built his hanging gardens. For centuries, Babylon, the ruins of which are just fifty--five miles south of Baghdad and thirty five miles from Mahmudiyah, would remain a leading city of the world, a place that, Herodotus wrote, “surpasses in splendor any city of the known world.” 

On the other hand, Mesopotamia has also been a perpetual battlefield since before history was recorded, one of the bloodiest and most frequently contested fault lines between the Eastern and Western worlds. An Arab Muslim bastion since the seventh century, when invaders from the south decisively wrested the region away from the Persians, the area also became the locus of the Sunni-Shi’ite schism that continues to this day. All of the major events associated with the split occurred within eighty miles to the south of modern-day Mahmudiyah. 

While Europe languished in the Dark Ages, the Sunni caliphate in Baghdad became the center of the greatest empire Islam ever produced until 1256, when the Mongols sacked the city. The seat of Sunni power moved to Istanbul, where the Ottoman Empire governed the region with a loose hand until the end of World War I, when Britain took control of three Ottoman governorship's: Kurdish Mosul in the north, Sunni Baghdad in the middle, and Shi’ite Basra to the south. In 1920, amid widespread rebellion, the British handed sovereignty over the three provinces, now called Iraq, to a Sunni ally named Faisal from the Hashemite tribe. Monarchy was no aid to stability, however. Fifty-eight governments ruled Iraq between 1921 and 1958, until revolutionaries overthrew and executed King Faisal II. 

In 1968, the Sunni-controlled socialist Baath Party returned to power for the second time in five years, led by President Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr and his right-hand man, Saddam Hussein. Saddam began eliminating opponents, and when al-Bakr resigned suddenly in 1979, citing failing health, he was sworn in within hours. He quickly initiated a series of purges and executions of anyone who threatened his grip on power, including influential Shi’ite clerics. 

Saddam instituted a state that was nominally socialist and appealed to nationalism, but it was really a personality cult. In 1980 he launched a war against Iran, which would last eight years, deplete state coffers, cost a million Iraqi lives, and leave the countries’ boundaries essentially where they started. Then, in 1990, Saddam invaded Kuwait, citing disputes over oil prices. The United States’ response led to the Gulf War, during which Saddam was badly defeated. After years of diplomatic tussles over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the UN Oil-for-Food program, President George W. Bush, buoyed by then-questionable and now discredited evidence that Saddam was pursuing WMD and aiding Al Qaeda, invaded Iraq in March 2003 and toppled the dictatorship in twenty-one days. 

Saddam had realized the importance of South Baghdad as a gateway to the capital and as the fault line between the Shi’ite south and Sunni midlands.Two of the country’s key highways cross here, making it a transportation and logistics choke point. You cannot easily get into Baghdad from the south without passing first though Lutufiyah, a town of 20,000, and then Mahmudiyah, population 100,000. Likewise, Yusufiyah, a town of 25,000 people seven miles to the west of Mahmudiyah, is a crucial connector between Fallujah and the Syrian border with Iraq’s south. Including all the smaller villages and farmland, population estimates for the region as a whole range between 500,000 and 1 million people. Mahmudiyah has some apartment buildings eight or more stories high and the densely packed atmosphere of a city many times its size. Yusufiyah and Lutufiyah, however, with their dilapidated, low slung tan buildings and garbage-strewn streets with open, black- water sewers scratched into the mostly unpaved street shoulders, feel smaller than they actually are. 

Seeking a buffer of allies to balance out the Shi’ite urban populations here, early on Saddam instituted a land-grant system and other rewards programs for Sunni families and other political compatriots willing to settle and farm the surrounding countryside. He made enticements particularly sweet for retired military and intelligence officers (who, in Saddam’s time, were mostly Sunni) and politically connected families of soldiers killed in the Iran-Iraq War. To this day, for example, Iraqis call two small villages outside Yusu-yah “Al-Dhubat” and “Al-Shuhada,” which mean, respectively, “The Officers” and “The Martyrs.” Saddam improved the highways and expanded and upgraded the already extensive network of hundreds of miles of canals bringing the water of the Euphrates to the far reaches of the area. 

Some families from Sunni tribes with ancestral ties to the western province of Anbar, such as the Janabis, Quargulis, Ghariris, and Dulaimis, also heeded the call, becoming powerful presences in the area. Saddam gave tribal chiefs large stretches of prime agricultural land, money, and other favors in exchange for little more than passive loyalty. This largess created wide economic disparity. Many of the houses near the Euphrates, a stronghold of the Quarguli tribe, would qualify as mansions in any country, with expansive, well-manicured yards and lush palm groves while the Qadifiyah apartments and other housing blocks in Mahmudiyah are slums as abject as anything in poorest Baghdad. In times of unrest, however, Saddam expected repayment. During the failed Shi’ite uprising of 1991, for example, he called upon local Sunnis, especially the Janabis, to curb the rebellion. 

While the area around Yusufiyah and farther west, especially on the banks of the Euphrates, is prime farmland, Saddam turned the region around Lutufiyah into a hub of the Iraqi military-industrial complex. The Medina Division of the Republican Guard and the Hateen Weapons Munitions Complex were headquartered not far to the south, and six miles due west of Lutufiyah was the massive AlQaqaa State Establishment—a weapons assembly and storage depot with dozens of bunkers and buildings sprawling across twenty square miles. 

Eight miles west of Yusufiyah town and right on the banks of the Euphrates is the Yusufiyah Thermal Power Plant. The Russian Technopromexport corporation started constructing a 1,680- megawatt natural-gas and fuel-oil power plant on the one-square- mile site in 1989, but work halted in 1991 before the Gulf War. Construction resumed in 2001, but the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian engineers made little progress before ceasing work during the 2003 invasion, and yet again as sectarian violence escalated in 2004. By 2005, it was a wasteland of rusting water tanks and mini-mountains of re-bar. Nothing on the site was close to being completed except for a five-story cement hull designed to house the turbines and the hundred-foot-tall smokestack, which was visible for miles around. 

After the invasion, no Americans permanently occupied the region and the power dynamic that had existed for decades was upended. Sunni tribal leaders and other prominent men were unwilling to give up their grip on power, but their mandate, in the form of Saddam Hussein, had vanished. The Shiites, meanwhile, with the numbers and momentum finally on their side, were only too willing to take advantage of the power vacuum. First the government and basic services stopped functioning, and then the killing began.

In South Baghdad, civil war Jared almost from the beginning. It started with a lack of law and order and a spate of revenge killings tied to anything from tribal feuds and personal vendettas to a more generalized score-settling by Shiites against Sunnis for decades, if not centuries, of repression. By the summer of 2003, however, the burgeoning Sunni insurgency had become more organized, allowing the outnumbered Sunnis to fight back. Two of the most powerful homegrown Sunni insurgency groups were the Islamic Army in Iraq (I.A.I) and the Mujahideen Army. Like virtually all Iraqi insurgent groups, both denied any fealty to Baath-ism or nostalgia for Saddam and his regime, even though many of their members are former party grandees, military officers, or other elements of society that were favored under his rule. Both groups’ aims are distinctly political and nationalistic, and while they have become more religiously conservative over time, the roots of their sectarian hatred are not so much because they view Shiites as heretics but because they see them as collaborators. Sunni groups retaliated against Shiites but also started mounting attacks against American forces, contractors, and any element of what they believed to be a puppet Shi’ite government. 

An early foreign arrival to the area was the thirty-six-year-old vagabond Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. After the American invasion of Iraq, Zarqawi created a group called Monotheism and Jihad and started spending most of his time in Iraq’s Anbar province and South Baghdad. He didn’t waste any time causing widespread carnage, developing an abiding fondness for suicide car bombings. In a one-month frenzy of violence in August 2003, he planned spectacularly lethal hits on the Jordanian embassy, the UN headquarters in Baghdad, and the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf. 

Thanks to such high-profile attacks—and his gruesome habit of releasing videotaped beheading's over the Internet—Zarqawi’s infamy grew, making him one of the most notorious terrorists in the world. Followers flocked to him. With each one of his well- publicized successes (or American scandals such as Abu Ghraib), more money and men from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria flowed across the Syrian border. In the fall of 2004, Zarqawi joined Al Qaeda, changing the name of Monotheism and Jihad to Al Qaeda in the Land Between Two Rivers, or Al Qaeda in Iraq (A.Q.I), even though relations between him and Osama bin Laden had been strained ever since they met in 1999. From the start, bin Laden found Zarqawi’s extreme hatred of Shiites to be particularly divisive. Their rift was a common one in Islamist circles. Bin Laden and Al Qaeda believed that the war against the “far enemies” (the United States, Israel, and Western unbelief in general) was the priority, while Zarqawi insisted that overcoming the “near enemies” (Shiites and purportedly apostate Middle East governments such as those in Jordan and Saudi Arabia) was paramount. The alliance was one of convenience for both parties, and it was deeply flawed from the beginning. Zarqawi benefited from the worldwide recognition of the Al Qaeda name and the added credibility it gave him, but he retained operational control of what targets to hit and when. Bin Laden needed a ready-made presence in the place that was quickly becoming the global epicenter of anti-American anger, and it provided an easy way to make sure Zarqawi’s power and prominence did not eclipse his.[bulls*#t,Bin Laden had been dead for 16 months before the 2003 clusterf#*k by Washington started. DC]

In South Baghdad the interests of Al Qaeda, local insurgencies, and pure tribalism frequently intersected.The number of nationalist insurgent groups similar to but smaller than IAI and the Mujahideen Army was legion, and they were in a constant tumult of mergers, alliances, disputes, spin-offs, and splits. But they found an early and easy ally with Al Qaeda. The Quarguli and Janabi tribes, among others, had interlinking roles in smuggling during Saddam’s time, and Al Qaeda successfully co-opted and exploited those links to build a formidable recruiting and financing pipeline. Near Yusufiyah, for example, an arm of the Sunni Janabi clan had been feuding with the Shi’ite Anbari tribe for a long time. With the Janabis’ help, Al Qaeda expelled dozens of Anbari families from their homes, which AQI turned into safe houses, classrooms, weapons storage areas, and torture chambers. 

Sectarian violence increased. It broadened, becoming systematic, increasingly bloody, and relentless. Sunni gangs forced Shiites from their homes. Flyers circulated warning Sunni landowners to get rid of any Shi’ite tenants or both landlord and tenant would be killed. Kidnapping, torture, and murder became everyday events. Bands of masked thugs chased people down in the street, beat them bloody, tied their hands, and executed them. No occasions were off limits, no tactics were taboo. One suicide bomber drove an ambulance to blow up a Shi’ite wedding party in Yusufiyah, killing four and injuring sixteen. 

The Sunni groups did not limit their purges to locals. Toting AK47's, they set up checkpoints on Highway 8, the major artery connecting Baghdad and the country’s south, seizing gas tankers and cargo trucks and killing anyone they suspected of attempting to get to the Shi’ite pilgrimage centers of Najaf and Karbala. Shi’ite clerics ditched their distinctive black turbans and robes as they passed by. Insurgent groups offered $1,000 bounties for every Shi’ite killed. Gunmen checked IDs, looking for distinctively Shi’ite names, or anything else that did not meet with their liking. They quizzed passersby in theology or praxis. If the examinee failed, he would be beaten and perhaps executed and mutilated, all on the street, in broad daylight, and then left there. 

Roads were littered with burned and bullet-ridden cars. Corpses festered and decayed on town streets. They became bloated, stinking, rotting masses of gooey flesh that dogs and rats fed on. Any semblance of policing stopped, because the police were frequently targets. And insurgents often impersonated the police, complete with looted squad cars and stolen uniforms. 

Average citizens were forced to make unbearable choices. Caught in a kind of lawlessness that had never happened under Saddam despite all of his many crimes, they frequently had to pick a side or face kidnapping, extortion, or murder. Those who could moved away, but there was no guarantee that the neighborhood of escape would not someday be engulfed by similar violence. The hatred for Americans that the average South Baghdad resident felt, for allowing all this to happen, for removing Saddam with no plan to fill the void, was deep. Some locals quivered with rage just talking about it. It was one thing for the Americans not to be able to provide water or electricity or jobs. But safety? The basic human dignity of knowing that someone will not shoot you down like a dog at any moment? That was unforgivable. Everyone feared for their safety every minute of every day, and most Iraqis hated America, and the American soldiers they saw, with an ardor that was difficult to articulate. Some of them gladly picked up weapons to fight the Americans, some actively helped the fighters in other ways. And even those who didn’t, even those who tried to stay away from conflict as much as possible, kept their mouths shut because speaking to the Americans about anything would earn them a visit from the death squads. 

The area was just as dangerous for foreigners as it was for locals. More so, in a way, because they were easier to spot. Some said the bounty for a foreigner was $2,000, others claimed it was $10,000. Six Spanish intelligence officers were shot dead in November 2003. In January 2004, two Iraqis working for CNN were killed while traveling near Mahmudiyah. Four months after that, a Polish TV crew was attacked in the same area and two Japanese journalists were shot dead. Some foreigners were freed, including two French journalists as well as Christian Science Monitor writer Jill Carroll. Others, including Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni, the I.A.I murdered. 

On October 3, 2004, the French news wire Agence France-Presse (A.F.P) was the first Western outlet to use the phrase “triangle of death,” in a story, fittingly, about the discovery of two decapitated bodies in Mahmudiyah. A.F.P used the phrase frequently after that, noting that the term was already common among locals. A.F.P capitalized the coinage within a few days and it caught on with the wider press. Within sixty days, the moniker had been used more than a thousand times in newspapers across the globe. 

When the U.S. Army fought to take the city of Fallujah a second time in early November 2004, thousands of fighters fell back into  the Triangle of Death, making it the new heart of the insurgency. But a new American troop presence had arrived as well. As the United States accelerated the handover of sovereignty, securing enough stability to conduct credible nationwide elections became the military’s priority. The United States targeted dozens of lawless towns, charging units with making them safe enough to hold January elections. For many areas, including South Baghdad, it was the first persistent U.S. military presence there had ever been. 

In the fall of 2004, the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, a reserve group from Chicago, captured the Jurf al-Sukr Bridge, a major Euphrates crossing six miles southwest of Yusufiyah. They also set up the first U.S. bases in Mahmudiyah and Yusufiyah. A battalion commander with the 24th Marines told the UK’s Independent, “With Fallujah over, the action has moved here. This is now the most dangerous place in Iraq.” Indeed, on November 14, 120 insurgents made a full assault on the Marines’ platoon-sized patrol base, a school they had commandeered on the outskirts of Yusufiyah. The attack was bold and sophisticated and the battle lasted several hours. Most of the Marines were down to their last few bullets when reinforcements finally broke through with fresh supplies. By the end of the day, one Marine and some 40 insurgents were dead. 

Although the Marines attempted to establish a semblance of order, they were severely undermanned and under equipped. They lost ten men in six months and, during that time, the violence continued to escalate. Though boycotted by the Sunnis, the January 2005 elections did take place without any major incidents. The Marines decamped in February, replaced by the Army’s 2-70th Armor Regiment, which nominally controlled the area until June 2005, when, with two days’ notice, the 48th Infantry Brigade of the Georgia National Guard moved in. They closed up the Yusufiyah patrol base at the school and moved it to a potato-processing plant closer to the center of town. 

Throughout 2005, Shi’ite partisans mounted major counterattacks against the Sunni groups. Across the country, as the Iraqi Army and Iraqi police started to reconstitute themselves, they became overwhelmingly Shi’ite-dominated institutions. Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and the Badr Corps, another Shi’ite militia, infiltrated them both. The police, run by the Shi’ite-controlled Interior Ministry (headed, in fact, by a former high-ranking Badr Corps member), were particularly debased. In many regions, the local police forces turned into death squads themselves, killing Sunnis without restraint. Interior Ministry–sponsored violence was so widespread that in late March 2006, Iraqi television broadcast a remarkable announcement: “The Defense Ministry advises Iraqi citizens not to obey instructions from Interior Ministry personnel unless they are accompanied by coalition forces.” It was a constant point of uncertainty and frustration for American commanders working with the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army: you never knew where their first priorities lay. And average citizens? They were even harder to figure out.

* During his February 2003 address to the United Nations outlining the United States’ case for war with Iraq, U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell erroneously identified Zarqawi as a key link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. In fact, Zarqawi’s ties to Al Qaeda at that time were thin and to Saddam they were nonexistent. Whether that assertion was the result of a purposeful misrepresentation or incompetent analysis is still being debated, but no link between Al Qaeda and Saddam has ever been proven.

4 

Relief in Place,Transfer of Authority 

IN SEPTEMBER 29, 2005, at 10:00 p.m., much of 1st Battalion and the rest of 2nd Brigade left Fort Campbell, Kentucky, making a stop at Germany before arriving in Kuwait just after midnight on October 1. The bulk of the units settled in for a few weeks of last- minute training while advance parties began flying to Camp Striker, where Colonel Ebel and most of 2nd Brigade would make their headquarters. Striker was part of the Victory Base Complex, a massive U.S. military multi-camp that surrounds most of Baghdad International Airport. Two and a half years into the war, Victory had become a city all its own, with hangar-sized cafeterias, fleets of S.U.V's, acres of air-conditioned housing trailers, and post exchanges that had Burger Kings, Subways, and Green Beans coffee shops, a fair approximation of Starbucks. Lieutenant Colonel Rob Haycock and his 2-502nd also set up its headquarters at Striker as its forces began to spread out to occupy the western half of the brigade’s sector. Simultaneously, the 1-502nd’s advance parties fanned out to their ultimate A.O's to meet the 48th Brigade, check out their new homes, and gather intelligence before their handover. Over the next month, the 101st units would slowly add to their ranks while the 48th drew theirs down and transferred final authority of their battle spaces at the end of October.

Lieutenant Colonel Kunk decided to split the battalion into three elements. The bulk of men, machines, and equipment would set up at F.O.B (Forward Operating Base) Mahmudiyah, a large former chicken-processing plant on Highway 8, which the military had renamed Route Jackson, about a mile north of the city itself. F.O.B Mahmudiyah became the home of battalion staff, Headquarters and Headquarters Company, Alpha Company, Delta Company, and Echo Company. Living conditions were spartan compared with those of Striker, but there was a bare minimum of support and supply amenities. The majority of the soldiers lived in five- to ten-man tents with wooden floors and air-conditioning that could bring temperatures down by 20 to 30 degrees during the summer. There were shower trailers and a chow hall serving hot meals. There was an eleven-person detachment from private contractor K.B.R on site with a carpenter, a plumber, a couple of supervisors, and several workers from India, Sri Lanka, and other developing countries who did maintenance and cleaning. Battalion headquarters moved into a giant three-story brick building, while the company commanders put their headquarters, staff living quarters, and other operations in the other existing structures around the site. 

Delta Company took the northern slice of the battalion’s area of operation, bounded by a highway the Army had renamed Route Tampa to the north and Mahmudiyah city limits to the south, while MiTT-depleted Alpha Company took charge of the central sector that included Mahmudiyah itself. Charlie Company moved south to Lutufiyah and occupied an old telephone switching station. Its territory covered Lutufiyah proper and the massive Al-Qaqaa State Establishment weapons depot. Bravo, meanwhile, headed to the town of Yusufiyah, and its terrain formed most of the 1-502nd’s western boundary. 

Kunk gave Charlie and Bravo the missions he judged to be the toughest because, at that time, he considered them his best companies, led by his best commanders. Both required setting up shop, in a favored Army phrase, “away from the flagpole” of battalion headquarters in the sectors where violence was the worst. This was a vote of confidence from Kunk, who was pleased with both companies’ performance at N.T.C, but particularly Bravo’s. Bravo, Kunk declared, “just did an absolutely phenomenal job. They showed the maturity, they showed the discipline, at the platoon and squad levels.” 

This was Bravo Company commander Captain John Goodwin’s third time in the Army. Skinny, almost gaunt, with hollow, deep-set eyes, Goodwin is originally from Solon, Ohio, a well-to-do suburb of Cleveland. He enlisted in 1986, troubleshooting radio systems for the Army’s signal corps. He got out in June 1990 but reenlisted two the Army’s signal corps. He got out in June 1990 but reenlisted two months later when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. He drove a Humvee during the United States’ hundred-hour push into Iraq, spent another three years in the service, got out in 1994, and moved to Pulaski, Wisconsin, with his wife and three daughters to work for a yacht builder. That career did not work out. “I don’t mind hard work,” he quipped, “but getting fiberglass embedded into your skin on a daily basis gets old quick.” He decided to get his bachelor’s degree and, upon graduation in 2000, become an officer in the National Guard. “We were looking to buy a house somewhere toward Madison,” he recalled. “I was going to maybe work for the state or something. I was thirty-two and still trying to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up.” 

Goodwin joined the Army this time by mistake. Rather than fill out a National Guard ROTC contract, he accidentally filled out an active-duty Army R.O.T.C contract instead. As graduation approached, his R.O.T.C adviser told him he was going on active duty immediately. Goodwin insisted there must be some mistake. Once he backtracked over what had happened, it took a while for the shock to wear of. His life had just been upended. Thoughts turned to his wife: he had promised her in 1994 that the second time was it. And now this. “I was dejected, we were making all these other plans,” he remembered. She took the jolt surprisingly well. “If that is what we have to do,” she told him, “then we will do it.” 

Goodwin served assignments at Fort Lewis, Washington, and Fort Benning, Georgia, but never got his Ranger Tab, washing out of the school in both 2000 and 2004. After getting promoted to captain, he arrived at Fort Campbell in June 2004 on the division staff and waited for a company command to open up. When he learned that command of Bravo Company (also called the “Bulldogs”) was coming vacant in the summer of 2005, however, he hesitated: “I knew that the division was getting ready to deploy in the fall. I struggled with it. I had to do some searching. But then it was like, yeah, I want it.” 

Typically when a new unit arrives in Iraq, there is a several-week hand off period, known as a “Relief in Place, Transfer of Authority” (R.I.P-T.O.A), with the unit they are relieving. The outgoing unit demonstrates, via “right-seat, left-seat rides,” how they have been doing business in the area, passing along lessons learned, contacts, and other inside knowledge. Many members of First Strike were astonished by what they found. They knew that Georgia’s 48th Infantry Brigade was having a tough deployment. Word was, this National Guard unit was out of their depth and getting shredded. Without enough troops to actively and routinely patrol the roads, they had become easy prey for large, deeply buried I.E.D's that took a long time to set but produced catastrophic casualties. The 48th lost four soldiers to a single device in late July and four more from the same platoon in another, almost identical blast just one week later. Within five months of their May arrival in theater, twenty-one soldiers from the 48th were dead. It was no secret they were being reassigned to a less risky base away from direct combat missions. 

Even so, First Strike’s advance parties were shocked at how degraded the unit was. It is a long and not-so-noble tradition in the military to ever so slightly knock the competence of the unit you are replacing, to say, “They are a good unit, and they did the best they could, but it was probably best we showed up when we did.” The put-downs are usually subtle, even artfully backhanded. That is not the case when many of the men of First Strike describe relieving the 48th.* 

Many soldiers from the 1-502nd concluded that the 48th had given up. They almost never left their F.O.B's. They did not patrol much, and when they did, they would speed around the area in their vehicles and head back as soon as possible.They did not make eye contact with the locals, they did not stop to talk to anyone. When heading to more remote areas, they would practice “recon by fire”—preemptively shooting everywhere to announce their position and scare off anyone in the vicinity. If they were hit by an IED, or even noticed a suspicious rustling in the weeds, they would lay a 360-degree perimeter of fire and get out of there as fast as possible. One 101st soldier told of the time a Guardsman asked him if he wanted to buy his night-vision goggles. Another said some men from the 48th told him how to find a brothel in town and which Iraqi Army soldiers would score him booze and drugs. The 48th men in the guard towers at FOB Mahmudiyah used multiple justifications for their frequent firings at civilians. People standing up in trucks got shot at. People walking too close to the F.O.B got shot at. People driving too slow—or too fast got shot at. 

The living conditions on some of the 48th’s outer bases, meanwhile, had turned feral. While the battalion headquarters seemed to cling to bare-bones but still recognizably human wartime living, at FOB Yusufiyah the men of the 48th were living like animals.Rather than walk the hundred or so yards to a latrine, men would urinate into empty one-liter water bottles. When Bravo Company arrived at Yusufiyah, there were hundreds of cloudy, yellowing piss bottles thrown around in lockers, on top of buildings, or simply corralled into collections on the floor. Boxes of open food from care packages were strewn about, as were rat droppings and gnawed-away panels of cardboard. Feces and other waste clogged the gutters. Discarded food, including slabs of meat, was welded by heat and sand to the floor of the chow hall, while other provisions rotted in open freezers. The insides of the shower trailers were covered in thick green mold. 

In late October, the transfers of authority started nearing completion as the 48th decamped for Camp Scania, a much quieter area forty miles to the south. But it is not as if the Black Heart Brigade had enjoyed anything like a honeymoon period. Even during the right-seat, left-seat rides, soldiers from the 101st were getting mortared, IED’d, or shot at every day. Every soldier has his first combat story, and it usually took place within a day or two of arriving in theater. 

First Strike’s intelligence officer was frustrated by the lack of information the 48th had on the area. Since they had not been patrolling very much, they had little idea who the local power brokers were or what the current status of the eternal tribal brokers were or what the current status of the eternal tribal jousting's was, and no clue about what was going on anywhere west of Yusufiyah. The 48th intelligence shop had done the best it could, but it comprised only two people and was poorly resourced. They had, for example, no signal intelligence system—the monitoring of telephones and other communications whatsoever. First Battalion’s eight-man team started building a database of important people and places, times and severity of attacks, anything of interest, and interlinked it all. Within a month or two, analyses of the accumulated data started spitting out trends and probabilities of attacks. 

As the battalion started to settle in and Kunk focused on his mission to fight the insurgency and support the people, he began to realize just how difficult this was going to be. “There wasn’t much governance going on,” Kunk said. “There wasn’t any infrastructure. People wouldn’t come out when it got dark.” And what little governance there was could not be trusted. Mahmudiyah’s mayor was believed to be corrupt and an insurgent sympathizer. During the weeks the 48th was pulling out, U.S. forces caught him in a car full of weapons and arrested him. Trying to sort out who was who, Kunk embarked on a heavy schedule of meetings with local sheikhs, strongmen, and other claimants to various seats of power. It is a role he would play throughout the deployment. 

Part of Kunk’s job was also to train the Iraqi security forces into competent organizations, another tall order. There was no functioning police force in the whole region. The 4th Brigade of the 6th Iraqi Army Division’s area of responsibility roughly mirrored First Strike’s, with a battalion in Lutufiyah, a battalion in Yusufiyah, and a battalion and headquarters in Mahmudiyah. When the 101st arrived, the Iraqi soldiers were understaffed, half of them did not have weapons, fewer had any training, and most were of dubious loyalty. Many, the Americans’ interpreters noted, had slogans supporting Muqtada al-Sadr written on their rifles. Sorting through who could be trusted, let alone who was fit to fight, would prove a never-ending challenge. Kunk suspected the Iraqi brigade commander to be, if not a Mahdi Army sympathizer, then certainly prejudiced against Sunnis. Two of the battalion commanders, both Sunnis, would die under mysterious circumstances. And even though Yusufiyah was the most dangerous place, Kunk noted, the Iraqi battalion there always had the fewest resources and the weakest leaders. 

The catchphrase order from Kunk to his subordinates was “Go out and get after it,” and that’s what they did. Delta’s company commander Captain Lou Kangas divided his territory into four pieces, dealing one to each of his platoon leaders. 

He told them, “You own this space now. Become the expert in absolutely everything having to do with it. Patrol every inch of it, meet every person, take a census of every house.” 

Within a few days of arrival, Captain Bordwell organized a full Alpha Company patrol of Mahmudiyah. “We just threw it out there,” he said. “The mentality was, if this is going to get ugly, let’s do it early.” 

Down in Lutufiyah, Captain Dougherty also started running patrols and began a census. Patrol leaders were to get names and photos of the inhabitants of every house and to develop a database. On the battalion level, operations officer Major Salome started scheduling missions into seemingly random map grid squares, to keep insurgents and townspeople off-balance and to create the impression that the U.S. forces in the area were far larger than they actually were, “that we were everywhere at the same time,” he said. 

As Goodwin and the rest of Bravo took over the Yusufiyah area in October, he was supremely confident in his team. Goodwin’s first sergeant, Rick Skidis, would be his closest adviser, institutional memory, and overseer of the men. Rounding out Goodwin’s leadership crew was his executive officer, First Lieutenant Justin Habash, and his fire support officer, another lieutenant who coordinated artillery fire into and out of Bravo territory. 

The magnitude of Goodwin’s task weighed on him. He had been entrusted with the safety, well-being, and fight-readiness of 135 young men. He was realistic about the dangers of war, and knew some of his men would probably not be coming home, but he was nonetheless enthusiastic about the job at hand. “I have a great bunch of guys,” he thought to himself. “The ship’s on course. All I have to do is keep it straight.” 

Goodwin’s company, like most light infantry companies, consisted of his headquarters element plus three platoons of approximately thirty-five soldiers each, with each platoon led by a lieutenant who is the platoon leader and a sergeant first class who is the platoon sergeant. It also had a weapons squad, with three machine gun teams of two men each; but before deployment, Bravo’s weapons squad was broken up and the machine gun teams distributed throughout the rest of the company. 

Twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Ben Britt led 1st Platoon. The son of a Texas rancher, he had propelled his high-school football team to the state finals as an all-state tackle. He was an Eagle Scout, an all-region saxophonist, and class valedictorian. He entered San Antonio’s Trinity University in 1999 to play Division III football, but he transferred to West Point the next year because he wanted service and sacrifice to be a part of his life. He thrived at West Point, where he played rugby, majored in economics, and graduated in the academic top 5 percent of his class. 

There is an old joke in the Army: “What is the difference between a private first class and a second lieutenant? A PFC has been promoted.” That sums up the difficult task every platoon leader has establishing authority. While a second lieutenant may have a college degree and some high-class training, these officers are younger than many of the men they are leading, and they often struggle to earn their respect. 

Soldiers can be ruthless in their assessment of lieutenants, but Britt’s men universally said they loved him. A born leader, he was always one of the smartest guys in the room, but he never copped the superiority attitude that West Pointers are often mocked for having. He could talk about the finer points of Keynesian economics, if that was what you were into, or he could just as easily tell you why Tupac was better than Wu-Tang. He was well-read in all of his tactical handbooks, but he always weighed the input of his N.C.O's before making a decision. A big kid with a large round face, he was fearsome when he scowled, yet disarming when he smiled, which was often. Most of all, Britt’s men respected him because he led from the front. There is no quicker way to earn a trooper’s respect than to put yourself at the same risks he is forced to take. “He wanted a piece of the action,” said one of his men. “Command and control? Not a problem. He did it. But he wasn’t satisfied with that. He wanted to be the first guy going in.” 

Britt’s N.C.O counterpart was Phil Miller, a twenty-five-year-old staff sergeant from North Huntington, Pennsylvania. Platoon sergeants are usually sergeants first class, but 1st Platoon’s original platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Rob Gallagher, was one of the few non–Alpha Company men moved to the MiTT team, so Miller —the platoon’s senior squad leader, a go-getter, and one of the only N.C.O's in the platoon with a Ranger Tab—took over. Despite Miller’s considerable youth and inexperience, Lieutenant Colonel Kunk and Sergeant Major Edwards were impressed by what they saw of Miller at N.T.C and they were sure he was up to the job. He was one of the most popular N.C.O's in the platoon, and the guys were delighted when they heard he was taking over from Gallagher, who was widely considered a hard-ass. Small and sinewy, Miller was a strutting peacock with a loud voice. He was a tough guy when he wanted to be, but also a total cutup when he was in the mood for goofing off. Miller jumped at the added responsibility. “Right before we deployed,” he said, “I pulled everyone in, and I told them, ‘I’m going to do everything that I can to bring everyone home.’ That’s a big statement, to say, ‘Hey, everyone that’s standing here right now is coming home.’ But I was confident. I was confident in that platoon.” 

While bravado can be a powerful force, 2nd and 3rd Platoons simply had more-seasoned and more-mature platoon sergeants in charge. When Second Lieutenant Mark Evans showed up at Fort Campbell in May 2005 to take over as 3rd Platoon’s leader, for  example, the first words of advice 1st Battalion Executive Officer Fred Wintrich gave him were: “Blaisdell’s got a good platoon. Don’t screw it up.” 

“Blaisdell” was thirty-two-year-old Sergeant First Class Phil Blaisdell, one of First Strike’s fastest-rising stars and most-respected N.C.O's. A hard-charger and a demanding boss, Blaisdell had formidably high standards yet a surprisingly warm disposition with his men. There was something about the way he operated that made even privates feel important. People did what he said, not just because it was an order but because they wanted to please him. So effective was his charisma that when people did carp about him, they complained he was coated in Teflon. Blaisdell’s position as the battalion’s crown prince was so secure, they grumbled, that he was forgiven for mistakes others got crucified for. He took risks, often dramatic ones, but he was doubly charmed: most of the time his risks paid off, and even when they didn’t, he suffered very few repercussions. 

Unlike 1st and 3rd Platoons, 2nd Platoon was not overflowing with powerful personalities. By contrast, its platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Jeremy Gebhardt, had neither Blaisdell’s magnetism nor Miller’s brashness. If anything, the twenty-eight-year old was a bit taciturn in a culture where leaders tend to be boisterous. But his unassuming style clearly worked for him, earning him a reputation for calm, understated excellence. 

If First Strike’s mission was to win South Baghdad, then Charlie and Bravo, situated on the western and southern borders of the battalion’s territory, were on the frontier of the fight. Bravo’s domain was a fifty-square-mile swath on the battalion’s west side. On the eastern edge of the company’s territory were Bravo’s two anchors. To the north was the town of Yusufiyah and FOB Yusufiyah, the company headquarters that Bravo shared with soldiers from the Iraqi Army’s 4th Battalion, 4th Brigade, 6th Division. The base was not large, only about 500 yards by 250 yards. American operations were almost entirely housed in one building, a gigantic corrugated-tin barn that used to be a potato processing plant. The vast open center space had six loading bays, three on each side. Each platoon got a bay, MiTT Team 4 (a group of soldiers from the 2-502nd) took a bay, one bay was reserved for visitors such as Civilian Affairs or Combat Stress teams, and the sixth bay contained Goodwin’s and his staffs living quarters. In recognition that Bravo was in the hottest area, Kunk centered the battalion’s medical corps in Yusufiyah as well. Goodwin put his headquarters, which the Army calls a T.O.C (tactical operations center), up in front of the potato barn, along with the interpreters and MiTT team offices. Members of the Iraqi Army’s 4th Battalion occupied an identical potato barn two hundred feet away.

The southern anchor of Bravo’s area was the Jurf al-Sukr Bridge (which was usually shortened to “the J.S Bridge” or just “the J.S.B”) and a smaller patrol base nearby right on the banks of the Euphrates located in a former water-treatment plant. The bridge, a large concrete span across the river, had been closed to traffic since the Marines took it over in late 2004. A six-mile-long, two-lane paved road called Route Sportster linked Bravo’s two nodes. One mile south of Yusufiyah on Sportster was the smaller town that the Iraqis called Al-Shuhada (“The Martyrs”) but the Americans, for reasons no one seemed to recall, had always known as Mullah  Fayyad. Bravo was also in charge of a vast expanse of land to the west, which was largely terra incognito. In this area was a sprinkling of smaller hamlets that the soldiers would get to know much better over time—Rushdi Mullah, Al-Toraq, Quarguli Village. But for now, few even knew what these places were called, let alone what was lurking there. 

Like much of the battalion’s area, the terrain was perfect for guerrilla warfare. In the towns, the houses were densely packed, making it difficult and confusing for the Americans to find their way, especially when they were in a hurry. Outside the towns, there were acres of empty farmlands, affording ample privacy and plenty of places to hide weapons, bomb materials, equipment, and people. There were few paved roads, making it difficult for heavy vehicles to maneuver. And hundreds of interlacing irrigation canals diced up the land like a maze. It was easy to get pinned between two canals with only one avenue of escape, or to see an enemy just fifty yards away but have no way to get to him. Elephant grass and reeds ten or more feet high lined many of the roads, allowing insurgents to skulk about with unnerving ease. Thanks to the canal system, the land here was greener overall than might be expected, but there were still stark contrasts in a tightly concentrated space. Down by Quarguli Village on the banks of the Euphrates, the land is extravagantly lush, an idealized oasis. But just a half-mile in any direction are flats of crumbly brown, cracked earth. 

To the north of Quarguli Village, which is strung along a route called Malibu, lay the massive, abandoned Russian Thermal Power Plant construction site. Until the last months of First Strike’s deployment, however, the power plant was a no-go area for U.S. troops. “We couldn’t get in the power plant under policy constraints until June of 2006,” said Colonel Ebel. “We were restricted because of some diplomatic arrangement with Russia, at least that was the interpretation through the staff channels, all the way down to us.” Not surprisingly, it had become a stronghold for insurgents, practically a FOB of their own. 

On his early rides out around the area, Kunk saw the first glimpses of what he needed to do. Riding along with the 48th, he would hear them say, “We don’t go down that road. That road? We don’t go down that one either.” Whenever they hit a catastrophic IED, the 48th would declare the road “black” (off-limits to military traffic) and never drive down it again. As a result, they had to take tortuous, detour-filled routes to get anywhere. 

“I asked, ‘Why don’t you go down Sportster?’”Kunk remembered. “They said, ‘That is where the bad guys are, and you’ll get killed if you go out there.’ They hadn’t gone down there in many, many months. The enemy was dictating the fight. We had to change that. It was going to be tough, but we had to take Sportster back, and then we had to hold it.” 

Upon Bravo’s arrival at Yusufiyah in October, Captain Goodwin split his three platoons into three duty rotations, each twenty-one days long. One platoon would go down to the J.S.B, secure that territory, and run patrols and missions from there. Another platoon would be responsible for holding down FOB Yusufiyah. They would pull guard and act as the company’s Quick Reaction Force (Q.R.F) if another Bravo element ran into trouble. If Goodwin spotted something on the J-Lens, the company’s eye-in-the-sky camera observation system, he might send them out to investigate, and they would also run support and supply convoys up to Striker or Mahmudiyah when necessary. The third platoon would be the company’s “maneuver platoon.” Also operating out of FOB Yusufiyah, they would conduct ambushes, over-watches, snatch and grabs, searches, and presence patrols, as well as outreach and contact with the local populace. Every twenty-one days, the platoons would rotate. Of course, no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. 

* Many of the men of the 1-502nd said they would have been far more polite about the 48th if, when the 101st started making headlines in the summer of 2006, they had not read an Atlanta Journal-Constitution story with quotes from 48th commanders implying that they had done a better job and that the 101st was handing back the gains they had made. Feeling such comments to be a knife in the back, in addition to an outrageous aggrandizement of the 48th’s accomplishments, many from First Strike acknowledged that they felt no impulse to cover for what they considered an incompetent Guard unit that they believed had surrendered its territory to the insurgency

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1st Platoon at the JS Bridge