BLACK HEARTS: ONE PLATOON'S DESCENT INTO MADNESS IN
IRAQ'S TRIANGLE OF DEATH
BY JIM FREDERICK
BY JIM FREDERICK
5
1st Platoon at the J.S Bridge
GOODWIN DECIDED TO send 1st Platoon down to the J.S.B for the first
rotation. Why? “First comes before second,” he said. “No other
reason than that.” Following the advance teams, much of Britt
and Miller’s 1st Platoon helicoptered in to the J.S.B in early October.
Living conditions were grim. The J.S.B patrol base was dominated
by three main buildings surrounded by a ten-foot-high cement covered
cinder-block wall. A mortar team stayed in the plant itself, which is where the platoon set up its T.O.C. Most of the soldiers
slept in a dingy basement of one of the other main buildings, a
place they called the Bat Cave. And leaders stayed in a third,
smaller building.
There was no chow hall or any kitchen to cook meals. All the
food was either the Army’s cook-in-pouch combat rations called
M.R.E's (meals, ready to eat) or hamburger patties or steaks they would grill themselves. Their first barbecue was made from a storm
drain—they had cleaned it by burning it with diesel fuel—placed
on top of an oil drum. There were no dishes or cutlery, so if they
grilled, they either saved the M.R.E plastic ware or gnawed on
hamburger patties with their bare hands. There was no electricity,
no lighting that wasn’t battery-operated, no air-conditioning during
the day and no heaters at night.There were no showers, no toilets,
and no Porta-Johns. There was no running water of any kind—
ironic, they noted, considering the place was a water-treatment
plant. Soldiers defecated in “WAG Bags,” small green garbage bags with solvents inside that were tied off and then thrown in a pit and
burned once a day. Often the smoke would blow back into the
guard areas, bathing the men in odors of smoldering plastic, feces,
urine, and trash.
Besides holding down the J.S.B patrol base itself, their other major duty was to secure something called an Armored Vehicle–Launched Bridge (A.V.L.B), a metal span that Army engineers had placed over a bend in a canal that joined the J.S.B frontage road to Route Sportster and provided access to both north and west. The bridge was narrow and the banks of the canal it crossed were steep. It was a lonely outpost, three-quarters of a mile from the J.S.B. There would be frequent controversy over the best way to secure it—and what the word “secure” meant—but generally, 1st Platoon adopted the staffing rotation that the 48th employed: three to four soldiers parked in a Humvee off to the side of the road, near the canal, twenty-four hours a day. During the daytime, it was not uncommon for the bridge to be guarded by just two soldiers in a truck. Everyone who looked at it knew it was a dangerous position. There were angles of attack from virtually every direction but bad defense sight lines, and virtually no barriers, man-made or natural, to slow any approaching vehicle. It could not be directly defended by the J.S.B base because it was barely within that outpost’s visible range and well beyond effective rifle range. Most of the men started calling the A.V.L.B what the 48th had called it: the Alamo.
Besides guard duties at the J.S.B and the Alamo, 1st Platoon kept patrols to a minimum early on because building up the site’s defenses was unquestionably the priority. The 48th had stationed only about a squad of men out there and they hadn’t fortified the place. There was no high gun position and there were big holes— literally blasted-out gaps—in the perimeter wall that anyone could have walked through.
“From the moment those guys hit the ground down there, it was, ‘What the hell is this trash heap? How are you supposed to defend this place?’” said Bravo’s executive officer, First Lieutenant Justin Habash. “The duration of 1st Platoon’s first rotation was work. Manual labor.” First Platoon filled sandbags, from sunup to sundown. It was dirty, demoralizing physical labor that quickly devolved into sheer exhaustion. To build a rooftop gun perch, soldiers would load rucksacks with as many sandbags as they could carry and trudge up several flights of stairs. There was a profound
lack of equipment. They had only two hammers. They had only
two pairs of gloves to string concertina wire. They had no saws.
They had to use their Gerber hand tools, essentially high-end Swiss
Army knives, to cut two-by-fours and planks of plywood.
Staff Sergeant Miller had no doubts about 1st Platoon’s abilities,
but there was no denying they were a young and inexperienced
group. There had been a lot of turnover after Operation Iraqi
Freedom 1 (O.I.F 1). Many of the N.C.O's were in leadership positions
for the first time. Obviously, many of the youngest soldiers were
hardly men at all—eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-old's. But
in this platoon, even some of the older guys with ample time in the military had had little time in the infantry.
Forty-one years old, 1st Squad’s leader Staff Sergeant Travis
Nelson enlisted in the Army before some of his soldiers were born,
but he’d been an infantryman only since he re-entered active duty
just over a year before this deployment. Born in Cullman, Alabama,
he entered the service in 1982 and served twelve years as a tanker.
During the Gulf War, absolutely everyone who talks about Nelson will tell you, he was part of the longest tank-to-tank kill in history. Men in the platoon lovingly called Nelson “Gramps” or “Old Man
River.” Old as he was, Nelson never dogged it during a run or PT
(physical training). He always hung in there and sometimes bested
kids half his age.
Nelson’s wife, Shelly, was always amazed when a young soldier mentioned to her that Travis was a tough boss. To her, at home, he was as cuddly as a puppy dog. She mailed him a steady stream of
care packages filled with Marlboro Lights and Red Diamond single serve
coffee sachets. Nelson was willing to endure many hardships,
but he was not willing to forgo freshly brewed coffee. Back home,
Shelly and he had become especially good friends with Miller and
his wife. The two couples would spend long nights playing Spades
and the men would go fishing all the time. Not long before the
division headed out, Shelly was sitting out on the front porch of her
home and she told Miller to bring Travis home safe to her.
“The old man will be home,” Miller said. “I promise.”
Nelson’s Alpha Team leader, and thus the squad’s second in command, was Sergeant Kenith Casica. A thirty-two-year-old native of the Philippines, Casica grew up in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He met his wife,Renee, in high school when he was seventeen and she was fourteen. She got pregnant and they got married two years later. He worked at McDonald’s, delivered papers, and poured concrete. Sick of dead-end jobs, he joined the Army in 1996 to give his family a better life. Ken and Renee ultimately had three kids. While he enjoyed the Army, he was looking beyond it. He ran an Amway business and wanted to go to college, become a registered nurse, and someday get his U.S. citizenship. Casica was, everybody says, the nicest guy they had ever met. A lean six foot three and handsome, with a big, broad smile, he made his home one of the unofficial clubhouses for the platoon, especially for the younger
unmarried guys. They were always welcome to come over, hang out, and have a beer.
Casica’s unflappable friendliness extended to Iraqis. When he was in OIF1, also with Bravo Company, he was always the most outgoing to the Hadjis (or simply Hadj), as soldiers universally called Iraqis. He learned an impressive amount of Arabic during his first deployment. He had mastered the common Middle Eastern and Asian resting position back on one’s haunches that soldiers called “the Hadji squat,” and he had even bought a dishdasha, the white flowing Middle Eastern garb that soldiers call a “man dress.” Because of his dark complexion, Iraqis often thought he was an Arab and locals warmed to him instantly. He didn’t just talk about helping Iraqis, he actually did it. He’d use his own money to buy extra cases of soft drinks, or sometimes he’d “find” a few extra during a resupply mission, which he would give to a couple of Mosul boys who had a roadside beverage business. He helped them build their stand out of broken-up shipping pallets and other street jetsam. It looked just like Lucy van Pelt’s psychiatry office from Peanuts. The hand-lettered sign he helped paint declared the name of the watering hole: “The Thirsty Goat.” He retained his optimism about the Iraqis even after he was injured by an R.P.G (rocket propelled
grenade) blast in O.I.F 1 that sank shrapnel fragments deep
into his shoulder blade. His platoon mates frequently ribbed him
about just how buddy-buddy he was with the Iraqis. They called
him a Hadji Hugger or Hadji Fucker, but he didn’t care. If the point
of being here was to help the people, he said to anyone who gave
him a hard time (which was often good-natured, but sometimes
not), then let’s help them. Because otherwise, what the hell are we
doing here?
A kid desperate for a father figure, Private First Class Jesse
Spielman was exactly the sort of 1st Squad trooper to flock to
Casica’s house. The twenty-one-year-old was born in Chambersburg,
Pennsylvania, to a teenage mom. Spielman’s grandmother was
concerned that her own daughter was not fit to raise the child and,
after some ugly legal wranglings, she assumed custody of the boy when he was seven. Beyond that rocky beginning, Spielman’s
grandmother remembered him as a sweet child who was eager to
please. One of Spielman’s uncles gave him an Army camouflage
outfit when he was eight or nine years old and from then on all he would do was play Army man outside. Sometimes his grandmother
had trouble getting that getup off of him long enough for her to wash it. He joined the Army in March 2005 and became a member
of the 101st in August. He married just before deploying, his bride wearing a T-shirt that said, “I love my soldier.” His superiors found
Spielman to be a quiet kid, hard to draw out, but a competent
trooper who was easy to lead and eager to advance. If there was a
cleanup call or some other random task to accomplish and his
squad mates were resting, he’d just do it himself. When an N.C.O would tell him to wake his buddies up and spread the work, he’d
say, “Naw, let ’em sleep.”
Private Steven Green was one of those squad mates Spielman would let sleep. Growing up in Midland, Texas, Green was always
the odd kid, the outsider, the strange child on the margins always
picked last for kickball. Though highly intelligent, he was
bowlegged and uncoordinated. He bumped into things, and he had a drooling problem that lasted well into the 8th grade. According to
court records, he was an unwanted child, his mother did not
hesitate to tell him. She simply never bonded with him, never grew
to love him. She called him “demon spawn” and constantly
compared him unfavorably with his brother, Doug, who was three
years his senior. Working nights at a bar, she was a neglectful mother who let her children fend for themselves. Doug was, not
surprisingly, unable to cope with the responsibility of being a
surrogate parent from as young as age seven or eight. He subjected
Steven and their little sister to frequent, brutal beatings, sometimes
requiring trips to the hospital and once breaking several of the girl’s
fingers.
Green’s parents divorced when he was eight and he lived with his mother until she kicked him out of the house at age fourteen.
Diagnosed with A.D.H.D and low-grade depression as an adolescent,
he bounced around various family members’ homes for the next
few years. Desperate for attention, he did win a few friends in high
school by being the class clown. He would entertain at pep rallies
by doing a spastic chicken dance and smash dozens of soda cans on
his forehead during lunch. After he dropped out of high school in
the 10th grade, trouble followed him wherever he went. Smoking
cigarettes, drinking booze, and walking around with marijuana are
fairly common activities for teenagers, but Green managed to get
caught, arrested, and convicted for each of those things by the time
he was nineteen, spending a few weeks in juvenile detention for
one and a few days in jail for another.
Along the way, he had developed some pointed ideas about
society, culture, religion, and race. He decided to join the Army in
early 2005, not just as a way out of his rut but as a means to
participate in what he saw as the latest flare-up of a centuries-long
struggle between Western civilization and Eastern barbarism. “This
is almost like a race war, like a cultural war,” he said about 9/11,
the March 2004 Madrid train bombings, and the now lengthening
conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. “And anyone who is my age who
is not going to go fight in it is a coward. They can say it’s about this or that, but it’s really about religion. It’s about not even which
culture is going to rule the Middle East, but which culture is going
to rule the West. I felt like Islam is, was, and always will be like
fascism.” [confused young man DC]
Green spent several months obtaining a high-school
correspondence diploma and the Army granted him a “moral waiver” for his prior convictions. With the Army strapped for
personnel, it granted such waivers to almost one in five recruits in
2005, an increase of 44 percent over prewar levels. After graduating
from basic training, he headed to Fort Campbell in July 2005.
Green was not a terrible soldier—in fact, he would be promoted to
private first class relatively quickly, in November—but here, as in
school, he developed a reputation for not being quite right in the
head. There was no doubt he was smart, and he read far more widely than is typical for a soldier. One lieutenant was surprised to find Rousseau’s Social Contract on his bookshelf. But he was a
racist, a white supremacist, and a misanthrope. He remained
socially awkward and unable to control his emotions or impulses.
He was also an incessant monologuist, with no internal editor, who
launched into the most ridiculous and offensive tirades about
“niggers,” about Jews, about northerners, about foreigners, about
anyone. He did have some friends, but much of the platoon viewed
him less as a class clown and more as the village idiot—
occasionally entertaining as spectacle, but best kept at arm’s length.
Second Squad was a much more low-key operation than Bravo’s
other squads, and that suited squad leader Staff Sergeant Chris
Payne just fine.To the best of his ability, Payne pursued a no-drama
policy in his personal and professional life. It was part of the
reason, the twenty-four-year-old said, he had advanced fairly
quickly in his career: he tried not to get bothered by the things that
other people wasted their time getting upset about. The politics,
the power games, the backbiting—he just blocked them all out and
did his job. Some of his men said that this remote and detached
attitude sometimes lapsed into inattention that put out sized
responsibility on his subordinates. Payne countered that training his team leaders to step up was part of a squad leader’s job.
The team leader whom Payne relied upon most was Sergeant John Diem. By most other soldiers’ definition, Diem would appear to be a textbook dork. He was not physically imposing and he did not have a commanding voice. He had thick glasses and reddish curly hair. He played a lot of Xbox, read Japanese comic books, and was a role-playing-game enthusiast. But Diem had fought in O.I.F.1 and he had ascended to a leadership role by virtue of hard work, accomplished technical proficiency, and an obvious, overwhelming intelligence. He always got the job done, and he also had a steely will. Easy to underestimate, he was impossible to intimidate, and he was not afraid to tell subordinates and superiors alike truths they did not want to hear.
Upon taking leadership of 3rd Squad, thirty-four-year-old Sergeant Eric Lauzier resolved to turn his crew into the toughest, hardest, tightest squad in the company, if not the whole battalion. Lauzier was aggressive, manic, task-driven. He was Sergeant Miller’s go-to guy.Captain Goodwin came to think of him as his Clydesdale, who would just pull and pull and pull until he reached the goal, or broke down trying. Whether it was his maps or his green, cloth covered notebook that every Army NCO and officer carries around, or even his underwear, Lauzier signed almost everything he owned with his name followed by the initials “B.M.F”—Bad Motherfucker.
This was his second stint in the military. He’d been a Marine in the 1990's. Dissatisfied with civilian life, he sought to reenlist in 2001. The Marines wanted him to complete boot camp again as a private, but the Army said he could keep his rank and head straight to Fort Campbell. He was a specialist with Bravo during the invasion (and he would be promoted to staff sergeant in December 2005), making him the only squad leader in 1st Platoon with O.I.F.1 experience.
That campaign, especially the invasion, felt like everything Lauzier thought war would be: entire companies of men following slow-moving tanks as they advanced on a defined enemy. He remembered his first kill, the pink mist of impact, the way the man’s body dropped—instantly—drained of all vitality, hitting the
ground with a thud. Lauzier remembered the electric, elemental
frisson of realization that he was still alive, and that other guy, that
guy was now dead because of him. He remembered all of them, five confirmed kills, including one rare hand-to-hand kill in Mosul.
He still thought a lot about those five men, often when he didn’t want to.
Lauzier did not head out on his second tour to make friends with
Iraqis. He was going to Iraq to put the hurt on the enemy. And
don’t let anybody lie to you, he cautioned: All throughout the
deployment, nobody was talking about counterinsurgency the way
they might be now. That suited him just fine. Hearts and minds
didn’t work in Vietnam, he often said, and it wasn’t going to work
here.
Lauzier was emphatic in wanting his men to be the best and he
rode them hard. He made his guys do extra PT, extra drills, extra
book study. He rarely slept and he consumed almost a case of
energy drinks a day. After O.I.F.1, he had washed out of Special
Forces selection because he botched a land-navigation test, a failure
that irked him. From then on, he made map and compass skills a
priority for himself and his squad.
Despite the French half of his ancestry that contributed his last
name, he identified much more with the Italian side of his heritage. Woe to the smart aleck who asked, “How you doing, Sergeant Lozjay?”
because that kid was going to be doing push-ups for hours.
Some of the senior N.C.O's called him Lolo, but the younger guys were strictly forbidden from calling him that too. He had several
tattoos, including the face of the Joker on his left forearm, the
phrase “Laugh Now, Cry Later” on his left calf, a memorial to a
fallen friend from O.I.F.1 around his right wrist, and “Machine 0311”
around his left (“0311” is the Marine designation for infantryman
and “Machine” an expression of his indefatigability). Lauzier looked
around at his squad and he liked what he saw. He had more O.I.F.1
veterans than anyone in the platoon, and they were some pretty
tough customers.
The toughest customer of them all was Sergeant Tony Yribe, a walking, talking G.I. Joe action figure and Lauzier’s Alpha Team
leader. He’d joined the Army just eight days after 9/11 and had
already served tours in Germany, Kosovo, and Iraq during O.I.F.1 with the 1st Infantry Division before transferring to the 101st in
January 2005. Though only a team leader, he radiated a powerful
charisma that made him by far one of the dominant personalities of
the platoon. Some say he surpassed the squad leaders and the
platoon sergeants as the real seat of power in the platoon. The
younger guys flocked to him, wanted to be like him, idolized him.
He could be brusque and intolerant of those he did not like or
respect, and extraordinarily loyal and kind to those he did, which made being a member of his inner circle particularly sweet.
No small part of Yribe’s persona was his fearlessness in combat. If
the situation was getting dicey, he was not afraid to pull the trigger.
He saw a lot of fighting during his first deployment, and that
experience had hardened him greatly. He had a tattoo of a Glock
9mm pistol on his right hip and the word “Warrior” in a semi-circle
around his stomach. Lauzier called Yribe his linebacker because of
the way he would just blow through doors and lay dudes flat. Yribe
had an uncanny knack for being where the action was. “I would
joke with him that if something bad was going to happen, I could
count on him being there,” said Goodwin. Yribe saw no need to
apologize for this. He just refused to take any shit, especially from
Hadj. If you had to use force to get their attention or win their
compliance, he argued, then that was what you had to do. And if
anyone thought it could be any other way, well, then, he was quite
certain they hadn’t spent very much time on the line.
One of the guys most completely under Yribe’s spell was
Specialist Paul Cortez, who had recently transferred to the Deuce
from the 4th Infantry Division. With wide-wingspan ears and a
pronounced widow’s peak, he resembled a post adolescent Eddie Munster. Living in motel rooms around Barstow, California, with
his drug-addict mother for most of his childhood, Cortez was taken
in by the parents of a school friend around the age of fourteen.Under his foster parents’ care, he flourished, pulling his grades up
and finishing high school. When he turned eighteen, they discussed
his options. College wasn’t realistic, and technical schools were
expensive, so Cortez joined the Army.
Cortez had driven a Bradley Fighting Vehicle with the 4th
Infantry Division during O.I.F.1, and when he arrived at the 101st
Airborne, he was originally assigned to Payne’s squad. But Payne
couldn’t deal with him. Cortez had potential, Payne thought, but his work was inconsistent. For two, three weeks, even a month, he
could be a good soldier with real leadership potential, and then
he’d mess things up again, get into a fight, get busted for weed, or
drink himself into the hospital. He had a nasty streak, too, and a
chip on his shoulder. He was obsessed with proving himself better
than others, but he was rarely more than average at anything he
did. When given a challenge, sometimes he would rise to meet it,
but just as often he would quit in a heap of complaints and sulks.
“You take him,” Payne told Lauzier. “See if you can do something with him.” Lauzier could and did, finding him to be a classic “field
soldier”—someone who doesn’t do well in garrison but excels on
the front line. In a lot of ways, he was exactly what Lauzier wanted.
Specialist James Barker was an even better example of a field
soldier. Just five foot six,Barker was a natural outside the wire, one
of the best combat soldiers Lauzier had ever seen.Childhood friends
from Fresno, California, described Barker as a mischievous, lovable
dork nicknamed Bunky who hung out mostly with girls. But as he
grew older, darker traits emerged. His father died when he was fifteen and Barker fell into a depression. He joined a gang, drank,
did drugs, and dropped out of school. He finished high school in
2001 at a continuing education program and had a son with a girl
he met there.
He married and joined the Army in March 2003, he said, because
he couldn’t hold down a job. Almost immediately, his marriage
started to sour. As he was relocating to Fort Campbell, an N.C.O
helping with the move reported Barker for being abusive to his wife and child. Barker said he grabbed his son to prevent him from falling down the stairs, but all the NCO saw was rough treatment.
Barker was forced to go to anger management classes, which
delayed his first deployment to Iraq by several months. After
spending October 2003 to February 2004 in Mosul, he returned
home, where his marriage continued to unravel even though his wife was having their second son.
Rounding out 3rd Squad were a handful of younger soldiers whom Lauzier and Yribe worked mercilessly. Being in 3rd Squad, they declared, was a privilege, and they hazed the hell out of new privates before accepting them. Twenty-two-year-old Private Justin Watt, from Tucson, Arizona, was among the newest arrivals. He had dropped out of high school to take a job with a dot-com during the Internet boom, but it went under in eighteen months. He got his GED and tried a few semesters at a technical college in Tempe, but that didn’t work out so well. He was struggling to find his role. He was a computer enthusiast who wasn’t a geek; the smart kid who wasn’t a student; the athlete who wasn’t an all-star.
He just wasn’t inspired, so he took a job as a blackjack dealer at a casino in Tucson. The money was good and, around the same time, he’d fallen in love with a girl. They were going to get married and they had a plan. He’d go back to school, get a degree, and pursue a career in casinos. No doubt it was a growth industry, but he was conflicted. At its root, gambling is a shady, depressing business. As he was questioning whether he really wanted to be a part of all that ugliness, his girlfriend dumped him, causing a total reappraisal of his priorities. He’d always admired his father, who was an Army airborne combat engineer during the late 1970's. The war in Iraq did not look like it would be ending soon. Joining the Army, especially now, he decided, would be a chance to test himself, to take the harder route for once, to be a part of something big.
Yribe and Lauzier had months of fun tormenting the small new private. But Watt never quit. He had made a promise to himself that this was the one time in his life he wasn’t going to wuss out, and, after thousands of push-ups, miles of running in place, and hours of repeating some stupid phrase or self-insult—“I am the fucking new guy, and I am gay”—it wasn’t long before he was a fully accepted member of the squad. They never stopped teasing him, but the tone had changed. It wasn’t a tryout anymore, it was just good-natured ribbing, and Watt was as proud as he had ever been.
Soldiers on guard at the JSB heard a volley of fire and several grenade explosions.
“That’s the Alamo!” Platoon Sergeant Miller yelled. “Get up! Get up! Get the fuck up!” Men started piling their gear on. There was no officially designated Quick Reaction Force (Q.R.F) yet, so everybody scrambled into the armored personnel carrier. When about a squad’s worth of men had loaded, it took off with Cortez driving. Roughly halfway there, the shooting stopped. They arrived, unloaded, and assessed. All of Yribe’s men were fine.The insurgents had beaten a hasty retreat. Miller took Lauzier and half of 3rd Squad to search the nearby hamlet that the shooters would have had to pass through. The soldiers kicked in doors and questioned the locals, but they all professed ignorance.
First Platoon was usually up and working by 6:00 or 6:30 a.m., filling sandbags or fortifying other positions until sundown.Between those duties, patrols, and guard rotations, soldiers were lucky to get more than four hours of sleep a night. Miller was appalled at the lack of equipment and lack of support 1st Platoon received from the very first day. They were dependent on airdrops for everything. He would get on the radio every few minutes to request new supplies. You name it, they called for it: sandbags, food, ice and coolers. Two minutes later it was cots, wood, water, charcoal, and lighter fluid. Two minutes after that, shovels, pickaxes, hammers, and hoes. Finally, Goodwin said no more calls. Keep a list, for chrissake. For weeks afterward, it became a running joke. Anytime Goodwin saw Miller, he’d say, “Need anything? Need anything? Need anything?” Miller didn’t find it funny. He was annoyed that getting his guys even the bare minimum of equipment seemed to be such a low priority.
Working like coal miners and just as dirty, most of the men stripped down to their T-shirts while they were filling sandbags or doing other manual labor. Being “away from the flagpole” had its benefits. Britt and Miller didn’t sweat the finer points of uniform discipline. They were familiar with the theory why strict adherence to uniform regulations is important at all times: If you get the little things right, it shows an attention to detail, a seriousness, and a vigilance that results in greater self-respect, situational awareness, and, ultimately, safety and combat effectiveness. That’s all well and good, they reasoned, but with all the work they were doing on such little sleep and having so few of the necessities like, say, enough water to drink, if a soldier didn’t feel like shaving for a day or two, that was fine with them.
But it was not fine with battalion command. Senior leaders started circulating First Strike’s territory within the first few days of arrival and Kunk or Edwards began visiting the J.S.B every few days. They did not like what they saw. “Supposedly they weren’t fortifying their positions fast enough,” said Bravo Executive Officer Habash. “The Colonel came to the F.O.B and just destroyed Captain Goodwin over the conditions of the J.S.B. They’re working their asses off to fortify this place, and to have your battalion commander come down and destroy you over not doing enough was frustrating.”
But Kunk wasn’t just annoyed at what he perceived to be lack of progress. Hard work or not, he and Edwards concluded 1st Platoon was awfully quick to decide that the rules didn’t apply to them.The men looked like slobs and were sauntering around not just in their T-shirts but in T-shirts with the sleeves cut off And flip-flops?! There was trash everywhere. They told Miller and the other N.C.O's to get their acts together and knock their men into line. Miller and the squad leaders tried to explain that if they had seen what the place looked like before, they’d understand how clean it actually was, how many improvements they had made, and how they were doing it all without any equipment or support. In fact, they thought they were doing a hell of a job. “I wasn’t concerned about the small shit,” said Miller. “Your boot’s unbloused? Who the fuck cares? Last time I checked, that fucker ain’t gonna stop you from getting shot in the face. But me putting up nine hundred fucking strands of wire is. The guys had their sleeves rolled up. Whoopie. It’s a hundred and twenty fucking degrees out here. Maybe they saw that as lack of leadership because I didn’t make them keep their sleeves rolled down.”
That’s precisely the way Kunk and Edwards saw it. Being far away was no excuse to let standards slip. If anything, they insisted, it made enforcing standards even more important. What really made Kunk mad was the feeling that he wasn’t being taken seriously. “There was always a reason why they couldn’t do something,” he said. “I would put out instructions, I would be gone for a day, get back out there, and they wouldn’t be doing what we had talked about. Sergeant Miller and different people wouldn’t write stuff down. And I’m like, ‘Look man, I’m not saying this for my health. I’m saying this for a reason.’”
But to Miller, there was a very good reason they couldn’t do things as quickly as Kunk wanted: Battalion was not providing the tools they needed to do the job right. “I asked for engineer support,” he said. “Couldn’t get it. Couldn’t get any backhoes or any of that stuff down there. My big question was, ‘I know they’re here, so what’s the issue?’ And I didn’t get any clarification on that.”
A few days after the first attack on the Alamo, it got hit again, from the same direction, but this time in the late afternoon and with a rocket-propelled grenade (R.P.G). The R.P.G didn’t hit anything, but 1st Platoon was better prepared to react. They had a Q.R.F ready to go, which found an I.E.D made of three 155 mm artillery rounds on the road leading to the Alamo from the other side. (One 155 mm shell weighs about a hundred pounds and, when fired conventionally, has enough destructive force to severely damage a tank.) A squad moved into Quarguli Village. They started kicking in doors, searching houses, looking for the men or man who just shot at them and laid that I.E.D. In a chicken shack out back of one of the houses, they found a man with an AK-47, detonation cord, and what looked like an I.E.D trigger. They zip-tied his hands, put a sandbag over his head, roughed him up a little, and brought him back to the J.S.B to be picked up.
Watt remembered everybody standing around the man nonplussed. He was a skinny little wretch, 150 pounds tops, with muddy feet and no shoes. This was the enemy? How disappointing. But finding a clear suspect like this proved to be a rarity. Most of the time, they wouldn’t find anything. They would receive fire, return fire, and by the time they could get a search party together, the insurgents would be gone, and the locals would claim ignorance, not just about where the bad guys might be, but often that they had even heard shots. The men started calling their enemy “the ghosts.”
Up at F.O.B Yusufiyah, Goodwin and the rest of the company were also trying to settle in. The battle rhythm, it quickly became clear, was going to be unrelenting. It was a rare day when no member of Bravo got attacked by the enemy in some way. This was true throughout the entire brigade’s sector (four 2-502nd soldiers died in an I.E.D strike on the unit’s first full day in charge of the area), but,over the year, Bravo always had a little bit more, sometimes a lot more, going on than everyone else in First Strike. Days with multiple, even ten or more, significant violent events were commonplace.
From the start, Kunk was unsympathetic to the notion that Bravo should be given any special treatment. Captain Goodwin, First Lieutenant Habash, and First Sergeant Skidis attempted to explain that their environment was more chaotic than Mahmudiyah’s, but that got no play. “Don’t think you have it any worse than anyone else” was one of Kunk’s common refrains. Bravo’s leadership couldn’t figure out if this was a motivation technique or if Kunk really thought it was true. “If Kunk really believed that, then he had to be crazy. Or supremely out of touch,” said Habash. “When we tried to say that we weren’t like Alpha and Delta, with all our troops inside the wire, sleeping peacefully at night, Battalion reacted like we were just making excuses.”
Kunk railed that Bravo was not getting the job done. Even the way they filed their daily reports was deficient. Battalion wanted highly detailed updates every day about everything that happened in each company’s sector. Alpha and Delta platoons at Mahmudiyah could go on patrols and then debrief company leadership in detail, in person, down to the color of every car they had searched. It wasn’t that simple for Bravo. “When you’re spread out and half of your reports are coming via the radio, the transmissions are unavoidably less complete,” commented Habash. “I understand what Battalion was trying to do. But there was a certain level of reality we needed to confront.” But every time he attempted to explain why Bravo’s reports were more fragmented, he said, “they thought I was blowing smoke up their ass.”
Those reports should have been the company commander’s job, but Habash started doing them because almost immediately, Goodwin seemed overwhelmed. It wasn’t more than a week or two into the deployment that the officers and N.C.O's around FOB Yusufiyah noticed something odd, and disconcerting: Goodwin never left the T.O.C. Twenty, twenty-two, even twenty-four hours a day, you could find him by the radios trying to keep tabs on the entire company’s operations. Sometimes he would skip meals. Often, soldiers would find him passed out, in the middle of the T.O.C, sitting in a folding director’s chair he liked to use, with a poncho liner pulled over his head. “I just thought it was the growing pains of starting up,” said 3rd Platoon’s Second Lieutenant Mark Evans. “I thought surely as we got more settled, he’d start to go to sleep. You’d just say to the guy, ‘Sir, you look like hell. You’ve been here for four days.’”
Beyond the relentless pace and the incessant violence, working with the Iraqis was maddening. “Take whoever was supposedly the mayor,” said Goodwin. “The locals tell you, ‘This is where he lives.’ So you go to the house. ‘Where is he?’ ‘He’s not here.’ ‘Well, does he live here?’ ‘No.’ ‘So where is he?’ ‘I don’t know.’ You know, you could be talking to the guy’s brother. Hell, you could be talking to the guy himself. One of the big questions: ‘Where’s so-and-so?’ ‘He’s in Baghdad.’ ‘What’s he doing in Baghdad?’ ‘He’s looking for work.’ That happens all the time. Or, asking somebody: ‘Do you speak English?’ There are two answers. Either ‘No’ or ‘A little bit.’ Sometimes ‘No’ means they are fluent, while ‘A little bit’ means that ‘A little bit’ is the only thing they know how to say. You never know what the real answers are. I would send squads out, saying, ‘You need to go find this guy.’ They would come back. ‘Where is he?’ ‘He’s in Baghdad looking for work.’ It became a running joke. One of the things I was trying to work on, and one of the things that I didn’t accomplish, I was trying to find out where everybody lived. Basically trying to build a phone book. But in a town that size it’s kind of hard, especially when half the people were squatters.”
Men up and down the ranks echoed similar frustrations. First Platoon’s Tony Yribe, who had been deployed before, didn’t trust the Iraqis at all. The ones who were insurgents would lie, the ones who supported insurgents would lie, and even the ones who didn’t also lied, all the time, for seemingly no purpose or gain. He described a common scene: “We went to a house because they had a boat, and there were supposed to be no boats along the river. And I was like, ‘Whose boat is that?’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, it’s my brother’s.’ And I’m like, ‘All right. Who lives on the other side of this house here?’ He’s like, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ So we go over there, and we’re like, ‘Hey, whose boat is that?’ ‘Oh, that’s my brother’s.’ ‘Where does he live?’ ‘Right over there.’ Where we just came from. There’s a big pile of hay nearby. And I said, ‘Hey, what’s in the haystack?’ And he said, ‘Nothing.’ And I was like, ‘Lieutenant Britt, you see what I’m saying? This is exactly what I’m saying. That guy lied to you. And now this guy is lying, too.’ Of course, we pulled out an AK and some rounds hidden in the haystack. I ended up grabbing the Hadji over my head and I threw him down. We kept searching and there was a fucking mortar pit behind his house. It had a base plate, it had defilade. You could see the white line measuring marks. And guess what they were aiming at? The J.S.B. Wherever you’re from in the United States, if your neighbor’s up to something, you’re going to know. And that’s how they are. Everybody that you see knows or has participated in some kind of insurgency, or if they haven’t participated, then they’ve supported it in some way. And I told Britt, ‘You’ve got to think that way.’”
The Iraqi Army (I.A) was as frustrating as the locals. It was well known around the battalion that Yusufiyah’s I.A unit was the weakest in the sector. To many of the men, they were worse than useless: they were dangerous. In a diary entry, a squad leader in 2nd Platoon wrote about his frustration at being sent out on patrol with a squad of Iraqi soldiers on a particularly dangerous stretch of road. “The Iraqis were weak, they were tired and wanted to quit about two clicks into it,” he wrote. “I told them to suck it up and continue to walk or I’m gonna throw them into the canal. I told my interpreter to tell them that they need to learn to fight for themselves or they are gonna get whacked when the Americans leave. One of the I.A's even took out his bulletproof plate and threw it in the canal because he said it was heavy and it hurt his back. Then an Iraqi sergeant gave his weapon to the interpreter and told him to carry it because it was too heavy. I will request to never go on another patrol with them.”
The biggest concern of the deployment quickly became apparent, however: the perfect terror instrument that is the I.E.D. In their vernacular, “getting blown up,” say many of the soldiers, is by far the craziest and scariest experience of their lives. They dare you to imagine what it is like: You are driving along, handing out Beanie Babies or patrolling a road or bringing water to people, and then, boom, a violent jolt of heat, light, and force upends your universe. There is no warning and there is nothing you can do except hope you don’t die. And it doesn’t happen once, it happens over and over and over again. So, obviously, it doesn’t take long before every time you roll outside the wire, you are terrified, truly terrified that you are going to get hit. And which is worse? Getting hit or the anticipation of getting hit, the pain and damage being done to your body or the feelings of inevitability and helplessness that come before? Because that uncertainty is as pure a torture as has ever been invented.
“It’s like someone has a gun to your head and you don’t know whether they’re going to kill you or let you live,” remembered one soldier. Even in a firefight, as scary as those can be, at least you feel like you have some control over your destiny, which is why, let’s be honest, they can also be exhilarating. You can fight back, there are people to engage, and even though some Americans might get shot or even die, an undeniable confidence remains because you seriously doubt that a bunch of insurgents, even a large group of them, will beat a group of Americans in a straight-up firefight. But I.E.D's? They are inescapable, they are frightening in an almost unimaginable way and they begin to weigh on you.
Every ride in a Humvee, every one, is an exercise in terror.You’re riding, with your butt cheeks and fists clenched, doing deep breathing to get control of your heart rate and your nausea the whole time, waiting for it, waiting for it, waiting for it. And still, when it happens, it is still the most surprising thing in the world. One fraction of a second, everything is normal, and the next, well, it depends, but it is definitely not normal. Depending on the size of the bomb and how closely it detonates, any combination of light,heat, pressure, dirt, fire, metal, wind, and noise will hit you in a way your body can never be prepared for. Sometimes you remember every millisecond of the thwomp of that elemental combination blast. Other times you black out for those crucial few seconds, come to with your body in any number of surprising contortions, and wonder, what, what happened? How long ago did it happen? Am I okay? Is that other guy okay? Are we all okay? And if you are not cut and bleeding, you’re probably still hurt in some way. You might not be able to hear for hours, and you might not hear right for days. Your vision might be blurry. And the headaches, there will be headaches, because you can’t knock around your brain like that without there being some after effects. And if you are not injured but the vehicle can not be driven, you should settle in, because you have to cordon off the area and there’s a good chance the wrecker is not going to show up for several hours. And while you are sitting there, the anger builds as you review what just happened. Somebody, not far from this spot, someone right around here—it could be him, or him, or him—just tried to kill you. Who of these motherfuckers just tried to kill you? If you conduct a search and are a combination of lucky and good, you might find a guy or two who have incriminating evidence on them. And then you can lay into them, have a momentary lick or two of revenge. But otherwise? Nothing. There is nothing you can do. There is no release for the anger and the adrenaline coursing through your veins. And look around. There’s a man on a cell phone, a lady putting out some washing, a kid walking down the road, and you just cannot figure it. How can none of these people know anything about what just happened here? All of them said they have no idea. How could they not know? Of course they know. Somebody tried to kill you, he got away, and all of these people know something, yet they aren’t saying anything. How could you not want to kill them, too, for protecting the person who just tried to kill you? How would you contain that rage?
On October 25, less than a month into its deployment, Bravo took its first serious I.E.D casualty. Led by Second Lieutenant Mark Evans, 3rd Platoon was running a heavy schedule, at least three or four separate patrols that day. They had already been on a 3:00 a.m. patrol when, at 11:00 a.m., they headed back outside the wire from F.O.B Yusufiyah. Evans was in the first of four Humvee's in an eighteen-man patrol, driving down Mullah Fayyad highway when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a rag tied to a power line that he had never seen before. Great, he thought, that’s a marker for an I.E.D. Before he had time to complete the realization, an I.E.D exploded near the No. 2 truck. Everybody got on the radio as they checked men and machines. You good? You good? they asked one another. Okay, we’re all good. Everybody was fine, except for the gunner. His bell was rung a little, but he’d be okay, so they pressed on.The patrol headed back to the F.O.B.
Later in the day, Evans got assigned to inspect a site where insurgents had previously fired mortars at the FOB. He generally regarded these as a waste of time. Sometimes there was evidence, or it really was someone’s backyard, but most of the time the enemy mortar teams were good about cleaning up all of their equipment or any other trace that they had been there. More often than not, Evans and his men would go out, look at an empty field, and return, which is what happened this time. But driving back, Evans saw a guy on Route Peggy, just hanging out around his car. As soon as the convoy slowed down, the Iraqi got into his car and sped away. Evans had his gunner fire a warning shot, and the man stopped. He spoke excellent English and his car was clean. Both of these facts were out of the ordinary, but not exactly suspicious, either, so Evans let him go. As the convoy started up again and turned at the next intersection, 3rd Platoon’s second IED of the day went off. Again, after a quick check of everyone, there were no injuries. Evans decided to dismount everyone and search the area. The men fanned out, looking for wires, blast fragments, witnesses, anything. Walking up to the crater in the center of the road, which was about twelve feet wide and four feet deep, he saw some wires, which he figured must lead to the trigger position. He had removed his protective eye shields to get a better look at them, and he was getting ready to call some men over to help him investigate, when he had the distinct sensation he was being watched. He stood up to find who might be looking at him. There was another I.E.D still buried next to the crater he was inspecting, and he was standing on top of it. The trigger man closed the connection and Evans’s third I.E.D of the day exploded.
He felt no pain. Just the sensation of wind on his face, and then what felt like a bad sunburn. Evans couldn’t tell at first if he was standing anymore (he had been knocked off of his feet, several feet in the air, and was now lying on his back), but, to himself, his thought process was calm and rational.
“As long as I have all my fingers and toes,” he told himself, “everything’s going to be okay.” He couldn’t see a thing, but he was much more concerned about accounting for his digits than the fact that he had been blinded. He counted his fingers and wiggled his toes. “All right, I’m good,” he thought and sank serenely into a kind of catatonia. For some time, his sightlessness did not bother him very much.The medic ran over and started applying an IV to Evans, telling him he was going to be okay.
“Am I burned, Doc?”
“Oh no, sir, you’re fine,” said the medic, lying. In fact, he was badly discolored, his neck was bleeding, his eyes were swollen shut, and he had several broken bones in his face—he looked much more like he’d smashed his face on a car windshield than he’d been hit by an IED. Another soldier had been knocked off of his feet by the blast, too, but he did not have a scratch on him.
Evans had entered a very placid state of shock. His primary thought was that tonight he was guaranteed a good night’s sleep, a prospect that pleased him very much. When they returned to the FOB and prepared for the medevac helicopter, Evans still wasn’t registering just how seriously he had been injured. Probably because he couldn’t see how disturbing his bloody and disfigured face was, he wasn’t grasping why everyone was freaking out. In his mind, everybody just needed to chill out.
When they loaded him into the helicopter, the medevac guys were all business. They kept asking him his Social Security number, his birth date, his hometown. He was pretty sure he was speaking coherently, so what was this all about? he wondered. Was this supposed to keep him from falling into shock?
“My birthday is the same as the last time you asked,” he finally said. They put a heart-rate clip on his finger. He held his breath, and the thing started beeping.
The paramedic started rattling around in his bag and yelling, “Come on, buddy! I need you to breathe, buddy!Come on!”
“Hey dude,” Evans said, “I’m just messing with you. I’m fine.” The medic was not amused. Evans was flown back to the States.* Bravo Company had just lost its first platoon leader.
* Back in the United States, doctors determined that his corneas were so scratched and one retina was so badly detached that it took three weeks and scores of experts’ consultations before anyone was sure he would be able to see again. After surgeries to both eyes and six months’ recuperation, Evans made a full recovery and is still serving in the Army.
While Kunk and the rest of the battalion leadership already had their concerns about Bravo’s 1st Platoon, an early major noncombatant injury ensured that the unit registered quickly in brigade commander Ebel’s mind as well. As a part of routine hygiene and maintenance down at the J.S.B, some unlucky private would have to burn the platoon’s WAG Bags and other accumulated garbage in a large pit every day. It was common practice to use diesel fuel to speed the process. Diesel is ideal because it burns slowly and is less volatile than other types of fuel. On October 28, the private in charge of the pit-burning detail did not douse the waste with diesel but used JP-8, the Army’s standard kerosene based vehicle fuel, which, like gasoline, is highly combustible.
He leaned over the open pit, looking down as he threw a match. Whoomph! A geyser of flame and green and black and brown debris shooting thirty feet high engulfed him. Soldiers scrambled out of the way of the incoming shit as burnt, runny plastic remnants cascaded down like a fecal fountain. When the flame died down, the private was still standing there, blackened and crusted like Wile E. Coyote when one of his inventions blows up. His shirt was gone —it had been blasted off of him—and his hair and eyebrows were burned off. His skin was literally smoking. And he was in tremendous pain.
Paul Cortez, who was out on patrol a mile or two away, called back on the radio, “Hey, did you guys get hit? We saw an explosion.” Several soldiers, already laughing their asses off found Cortez’s call utterly hilarious. Others, however, realized the seriousness of the situation, that the soldier was covered in second and third-degree burns. He was so badly hurt, in fact, that he had to be medevaced out and ultimately sent home. Kunk and Edwards were apoplectic. The first major casualty that 1st Platoon suffered was not just a completely preventable noncombat injury but a humiliating one at that: a soldier blew himself up with a pile of shit.
Once Ebel learned what had injured the Bravo soldier he was visiting in the Camp Striker hospital burn unit, he was dismayed as well. And when Ebel saw Miller after the accident, which was the first time the two had ever met, the initial impression he had was that the young platoon sergeant was immature and overconfident and had failed to appreciate the enormity of what had just happened: a classic case of a poorly led, poorly supervised soldier.
Miller was not aware that opinion of him was already turning. He readily accepted his reamings from Kunk and Edwards, and a letter of reprimand from Ebel, over the burned soldier because, no question, there was a lapse of discipline. But he also said he got a lot of praise and left his first J.S.B rotation believing everybody thought he had done a good job. “I’d probably personally talked to Colonel Kunk four times, including the ass chewing for the accident and one other time he was unhappy about us being sloppy,” he recalled. “But the other two times he stopped by, he said we were doing great things, telling us, ‘You guys are doing a good job. Keep it up.’ So I felt comfortable at that point. I felt real comfortable.”
After toying with the Sportster problem since the moment they got there, Goodwin and Kunk decided the time had come to secure it for good. On October 30, 2nd Platoon, which had been sent out as the original Quick Reaction Force (Q.R.F) for the I.E.D hit, took over a house on the northwest corner of Sportster and Peggy. It was a large, square, two-story home on the southeast corner of Mullah Fayyad with storefronts on the two street-facing sides and living areas in the back and on the second floor. This house would come to be known as T.C.P (traffic control point) 1.
A day or two after that, with the help of an Iron Claw IED sniffing team, Bravo mounted an all-day clearing mission of Sportster. But everybody already knew that once you cleared something, if you turned your back, insurgents could reseed a road in a matter of hours. In order to keep Sportster clear, they had to hold it. So Goodwin started dropping Humvee's with fire teams at one- or two-mile intervals down the stretch.
“We just started parking vehicles on the road, telling them, ‘Stay here until properly relieved,’” said Goodwin. But the ideal relief, in the form of Iraqi soldiers manning the checkpoints, never came. Kunk intended the T.C.P's to be a way for the Iraqi Army to take more responsibility for this sector, but, especially this early in the deployment, they simply refused to operate in so dangerous an area. In Mahmudiyah and Lutufiyah, Kunk had more success persuading the Iraqi Army to participate, but, he says, “anything on the west side, Yusufiyah, Mullah Fayyad, Sportster, they would say, ‘Ali Baba is there. The bad guy is there.’” Kunk’s idea thus became to use the T.C.P's as a stair step. Build them with U.S. forces and then, as the I.A gained confidence, slowly hand them over.
The vehicle drop positions, over time, would evolve and harden into T.C.P positions 2, 3, and 4. “We thought it was going to be a seventy-two-hour mission,” said 3rd Platoon’s platoon sergeant, Phil Blaisdell. “Seventy-two hours turned into like six days. I had a beard. And all of a sudden it was permanent. We started getting concertina wire down there. And I’m like, ‘Good God, what are we doing?’” The numerical designations and configurations of the T.C.P's would vary slightly throughout the year. A fifth T.C.P would open on the northwest corner of Mullah Fayyad, and a T.C.P.6 would ultimately open between T.C.P.2 and T.C.P.3. Bravo Company was now in the road checkpoint business, and by the end of the deployment, the stair step strategy had resulted in the Iraqi Army claiming full control of only one checkpoint on Sportster.
Across the battalion, the T.C.P's were controversial. It was far from unanimous that they were a good idea. The T.C.P's were static positions, and they were not well defended. They were not patrol bases, but outposts in true enemy territory with no more—and usually far less—than a squad manning each one. T.C.P.1 and T.C.P.4 had buildings where troops could eat and have some form of downtime, while T.C.P.3 had not so much a building but, as Goodwin put it, “a bunch of cinder blocks piled together in an organized manner.”
In the first incarnation of T.C.P.2, troops lived out of two Humvee's, including trying to sleep in them, for days at a time. Early on, there were no HESCO Barriers, large six-foot cubed mesh baskets that when filled with dirt by a backhoe provided admirable protection from gunfire but when empty were no better than a chain-link fence. When HESCOs did arrive, there was no heavy equipment to fill them.
Even with each one so thinly manned, the T.C.P's were also a drain on the company’s combat power. Manning the T.C.P's consumed a whole platoon. Bravo’s initial staffing philosophy—one platoon at the J.S.B and two platoons at Yusufiyah, with one to be home guard and one to run maneuver operations—was out the window. Goodwin worried about the staffing pressures the T.C.P's were putting on his company. Between guard rotations, scheduled and unscheduled patrols, and sleep, the “troops-to-task” math was already not adding up. “The first time I requested more men in November, I was, I don’t want to say joking, but we’d sit down at a Commanders’ Update Brief, and it would be like, ‘What do you need?’ And I would say, ‘I need a platoon,’” Goodwin remembered. “‘No, really, what do you need?’ ‘Well, I need water, and I need this, and I need that. And a platoon would be nice.’ I know the battalion is short on manpower. The brigade is short. But I need another squad or four to keep doing what I’m doing, to give my guys a break.”
This frustration was echoed at every level. “Before,” said 2nd Platoon’s platoon sergeant, Jeremy Gebhardt, “if you were a platoon back at the F.O.B, you rotated with another platoon, so when they patrolled, you got some downtime to catch your breath. Once a platoon’s on T.C.P's, you’ve lost that completely. You look at it on paper, and you’re like, ‘Okay, this can work.’ But even when guys are just sitting at the T.C.P, there’s several hours per day just doing patrols around your area that aren’t factored into what’s on paper. Then, at that point, you start seeing guys getting strung out, and you start getting concerned for how they are holding up. That was a yearlong struggle trying to convince the battalion level of this. But it all came back to, ‘Hey, you’ve got this many guys. It takes this many to do this.’ And that was it.”
Second Platoon’s platoon leader, Lieutenant Jerry Eidson, said his faith in his superiors evaporated once he took stock of the T.C.P mission. “It was ridiculous,” he said. “We were a company spread out trying to operate like we were a battalion. Nobody in my platoon had any confidence in our command structure at all after that.”
Kunk maintained that the strategic importance of Sportster left him no choice. “It had become a superhighway for the insurgents to get into Baghdad, so we had to take it back,” he proclaimed. In that regard, the Sportster plan fit with Ebel’s strategy for the brigade as well. Sportster, in Ebel’s words, became “the base of the anvil” upon which the rest of the brigade, and special operations forces, would continue to hammer the insurgent hideouts to the west. “The risk was, if we gave that up, we would have released an avenue where the enemy would skirt around,” he said.
But many others dismiss the idea that Sportster, when open, was an insurgent superhighway or, when occupied, acted as a barrier to infiltration. They point to a number of routes on a map that circumvent Sportster on the way to Baghdad or Mahmudiyah. “It was obvious they were still coming into my A.O across Sportster,” said Alpha commander Jared Bordwell. “They just didn’t have T shirts that said ‘Insurgent’ on them when they did. I don’t think we needed to own Sportster. It didn’t do anything except give the insurgents a static target and allow soldiers to get complacent and do stupid things.”
Others maintain that even if securing Sportster as a resupply route to the J.S.B was important, it could not be done with so few men. Charlie Company First Sergeant Dennis Largent believed this was obvious from the beginning. “Bravo couldn’t do shit in their own sector because they were tied down to those T.C.P's,” he said. “As early as November we saw that Bravo Company was getting attrited. They needed some help. That’s where the fucking fight was. It wasn’t in Mahmudiyah with the sewer project or whatever. The focus of that battalion sector should have been clearing out Yusufiyah. Cleaning house in there so that that company would stop getting attrited.”
A major component of the Sportster effort was psychological, an affirmation that the enemy never tells the U.S. Army where it can and cannot go. “The taking of Sportster was a big moment, because that sent a clear message to the enemy that we were not going away,” Kunk explained. “We said early on, ‘We are taking it back and we are keeping it. And we are going to own it. And not only are we going to own that, we are going to go anywhere we want to go because we are going to dictate everything.’”
But some officers wondered if this idea of freedom became too much of a priority for its own sake than one that served a larger mission. “Colonel Kunk put his name out there by saying ‘We will own that road,’” explained Bordwell. “Well, in Iraq when you say ‘I am going to own something,’ that means your feet are on it ninety nine percent of the time. So he bought something by saying that. And no one did the math on what it was going to take and what we were going to sacrifice in order to own that piece of property.”
On November 2, Sergeant Major Edwards was making a routine battlefield circulation. First Strike had been in theater just over a month. One of Edwards’s priority stops, on the orders of Ebel, was to go to the J.S.B and impress upon Miller the seriousness of the burn-pit incident. The Personal Security Detachment (P.S.D), the convoy unit that escorted Kunk or Edwards wherever they went, was another battalion-wide tasking, and each company had to provide a handful of soldiers for the effort. Bravo had detailed several, including Specialist Josh Munger and Private First Class Tyler MacKenzie.
As Edwards was chewing out Miller, the guys from 1st Platoon had a chance to catch up with Munger and MacKenzie and the rest of the P.S.D hanging out at the motor pool, just to gab and get the scoop on what life was like for the rest of the battalion. MacKenzie was Justin Watt’s roommate back in the barracks at Fort Campbell and one of his best friends. Once, before deployment, MacKenzie told Watt that he was confident he wouldn’t die in Iraq because he had never won anything in his life, even a raffle, so why should he win the biggest, baddest, anti-lottery of them all? Nah, he assured Watt, he’d be fine.
Heading back to Mahmudiyah, the PSD traveled along Route Temple in Charlie’s area. Around 12:45 p.m., the lead vehicle of the four-truck convoy crossed a large earthen bridge known as Bradley Bridge, so named because it was where a catastrophic IED had hit a Bradley Fighting Vehicle during a previous unit’s deployment. Here, the lead Humvee met the same fate. An intelligence report later said that insurgents had posed as contractors and dug in a gigantic IED with heavy construction equipment months before. The explosion was enormous, completely obliterating the Humvee, leaving it a smoking and twisted heap of metal.
First Lieutenant Tim Norton was on patrol with a group of Charlie Company soldiers when they heard the explosion. Norton was assigned to the Lutufiyah MiTT team, but before deployment he had been a Charlie platoon leader. Since Charlie was based out of Lutufiyah, and Norton was a devoted child of the People’s Army, he would hang out with, and patrol with, his old Charlie guys every chance he got.
The twenty-three-year-old from Mansfield, Massachusetts, was the Distinguished Military Graduate ROTC cadet at Providence College in 2004, a history buff, and a proficient violinist who could identify most songs on a classical radio station within a few seconds. Straight out of Ranger School, he headed to Charlie, where he benefited enormously from the mentoring of his platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Lonnie Hayes, one of the best N.C.O's in the battalion. Norton was assigned to the MiTT team when somebody discovered he had studied Arabic in college. He had vigorously resisted being moved away from his men on the eve of battle, but it was futile. He was making the best of the MiTT beat, but he far preferred what he was doing now, out patrolling with the Cobras, and he did it every chance he got.
With the explosion only a few miles away, the Charlie soldiers got a call to head straight there. Reports from the scene were fragmented, but it was clear there were dead and wounded, and medevac choppers started spinning up. Munger, along with Specialist Benjamin Smith, had been thrown more than twenty feet from the vehicle and were likely killed instantly. Sergeant Cory Collins was injured but MacKenzie was missing: he was simply gone.
Norton and the Charlie guys arrived about ten minutes later. This was Norton’s first experience of combat, and he was surprised at how disorienting it was. The Humvee was obliterated. The entire engine block had been detached and thrown clear of the rest of the assembly. The chassis looked like a scale model of a roller coaster that had been set ablaze. A door had been tossed more than three hundred feet. The roof and gun turret landed in the canal and there were no tires left, just fist-sized scraps of rubber.
Most of the men in the other three vehicles had taken up defensive positions, while the medic and a few others ran to the canal to try to find their men and treat any survivors. Some seemed to be walking around almost aimlessly in a state of shock. Sergeant Major Edwards himself was in a daze. Several men were firing on suspected trigger locations to the north and west. A .50-caliber machine gun, which fires rounds several inches long that can rip through solid concrete, started banging away at the houses from atop one of the intact Humvee's. Its barrage lasted probably only a minute or two but it seemed like an hour, with soldiers tearing through ammo. Once the fire stopped, Norton coordinated with the P.S.D leaders and sent some patrols out, sweeping the area. Soldiers started picking up smaller pieces of remains and searching for MacKenzie. Other soldiers followed the IED’s still-intact command wires back to a chicken coop about three hundred yards away. In the coop was a sand-table model of the area for the trigger man to plan his detonation. In a nearby house, they found four Iraqis and they sprayed their hands with Expray, an aerosol-based field test that diagnoses a range of explosives chemicals depending on what color the spray turns upon contact with a surface. Two of the men “popped,” in the soldiers’ parlance, for a positive reading. (Later, there would be serious doubts about Expray’s reliability in some contexts. Specifically, the spray turns pink in the presence of nitrates, which are a common ingredient in explosives. But in Iraq, fertilizer also has a heavy nitrate content. So, getting caught literally “red-handed” here might mean that a person had been working on a bomb—or was an innocent farmer. The margin of error is so large, for example, that Expray test results are not admissible in U.S. courts. At the time, however, “popping” during an Expray test was considered ironclad proof of being an insurgent.)
Using the P.S.D’s interpreter, a couple of N.C.O's began to question the suspects. The Charlie guys had to pull one of the P.S.D soldiers away from the detainees. He was shouting, hysterically upset, going for his pistol, screaming and swearing at them about his dead friends. Whoa, dude, you gotta back up, they told him. All you guys gotta back up, or you’re gonna do something you regret. A wrecker convoy and Q.R.F that had been dispatched to recover the Humvee carcass hit a pressure-plate-triggered I.E.D just fifty feet from the original blast site around 3:00 p.m. The explosion lifted the thirty ton wrecker’s rear end several feet into the air. This time, a gun battle erupted as the Americans started taking fire from several buildings to the west. Two fire teams headed out to flank the new shooting positions, and Norton and Hayes and a couple of other soldiers, trapped just o- the bridge and out in the open, started unloading their weapons in counter fire.
Time slowed down drastically for Norton. While he was fighting, he had time to contemplate the bullets landing all around him. Each one kicked up a pool of dust just like a raindrop did. If he didn’t know any better, he mused, he would swear it was raining. And then he thought that this was a moment they tell you only happens in Hollywood, but here they were, and it was happening. Norton and Hayes were standing back to back and completely exposed, blazing away with their guns like they were Butch and Sundance, taking fire from three, maybe four shooters—and they weren’t getting hit. It was surreal. The combined firepower of their position and the flanking soldiers ran the shooters off.
Ebel and Kunk and a variety of relief elements arrived shortly after, not that anyone was happy to see them. It is a universal complaint: No matter how much soldiers and junior officers lament the lack of senior leadership presence on the ground during day-today operations, the one time when they are uniformly not wanted is the one time they can be guaranteed to show up—in the aftermath of a catastrophic loss. The search for MacKenzie continued. It was Ebel, chest high in the canal water, who pointed to the culvert where his body had likely gotten caught and pulled underwater. At about 6:00 p.m., they finally recovered his remains.
With many relief units now in place or on their way, Charlie and the P.S.D got sent back to their bases. Norton’s adrenaline flush was receding, and it was a hollowing experience, a bottomless pit of exhaustion. Not despair or sadness, elation, relief, or any other emotion, just exhaustion. He had a shower and headed to the chow hall. They were serving chicken wings. He had never looked, really looked, at them before. Flesh. Bones. Red sauce. All in a pile. He stared at them, dozens of heaped little carcasses. He decided to have a granola bar instead.
After the cleanup was finished, Charlie commander Captain Dougherty was ordered to guard that intersection. The insurgents, Kunk maintained, were counting on the 101st to do what the 48th would do—withdraw. It’s great to make that kind of stand, Dougherty replied, but who’s going to provide the men to staff it safely? He and Kunk fought hard about this position. Dougherty believed in force demonstration as a deterrent. He put fifteen men in three trucks on it. “It’s the difference between looking like a chuck wagon and a war wagon,” Dougherty said. When he then complained that he did not have enough soldiers for regular missions, and battalion leadership told him to pull some men off the bridge, he and First Sergeant Largent dug through the thousands of regulations from division headquarters and pointed to the one saying that all convoys had to have three vehicles. “That was the last we heard about it for a while,” recalled Largent. This impasse was laid to rest within a few months without a full confrontation,however, because the Iraqi soldiers in Lutufiyah were more competent than any in the rest of the region, and they were able to take over the Bradley Bridge position fairly early.
Since the Personal Security Detachment had been pulled from every company, the deaths of Bravo’s MacKenzie and Munger and Alpha Company’s Smith hit the entire battalion hard. Most soldiers can pinpoint three times when their war began. The first is the day they arrived in theater, the second is the day when the enemy first did violence to them, and the third is the day they lost their first comrade. For many in 1st Battalion, November 2 was their entree to the third and most painful day of war’s stutter-step beginning. “It affected everybody differently,” said Private First Class Chris Barnes. “I was pretty angry. It scared a lot of people. Some people were mad. Some people were in tears.”
Two days later, Charlie was dealt a blow. At about 8:45 p.m. on November 4,Charlie’s executive officer, First Lieutenant Matt Shoaf, was leading a three-truck convoy from MacKenzie, Munger, and Smith’s memorial service on FOB Mahmudiyah back to Lutufiyah along Route Jackson. He was in the front passenger seat and Staff Sergeant Jason Fegler was driving. Most of the soldiers were having trouble seeing; their night-vision goggles were whiting out due to the oncoming headlights.
Shoaf saw a spotlight flicked on up ahead and Fegler flashed his back. One of the trucks behind him reported receiving small-arms fire from the right. Others would later say the fire was coming from the left. In sworn statements, several men were very specific about the color of the tracer rounds or the angle of fire they witnessed from rooftops on both sides of them. Shoaf’s gunner saw some flashes to the left and fired at the rooftops. Shoaf was waiting for a report back, leaning down to grab something off the floor or adjust a dial, when rounds, big ones, started hitting his truck from straight ahead. Even though Humvee windshields have bulletproof glass, these large-caliber rounds smashed straight through. Shoaf, already leaning over, ducked under the windshield as best he could as the bullets riddled the truck’s interior, shredding metal, glass, and canvas. Shoaf’s gunner dove into the belly of the truck as bullets penetrated the turret shield. One bullet nicked the lip of the chest plate of Fegler’s body armor but kept going straight to his heart. The two Humvees behind Shoaf’s got hit as well. One bullet hit the gunner of a rear Humvee and he slumped over. Another soldier, Sergeant Juan Hernandez, pulled the hit gunner down and took his place. Hernandez got one burst of rounds off before he too was hit in the left shoulder. The lead truck, pocked with no fewer than three dozen bullet holes, rolled to a stop off the side of the road. Fegler managed to put the truck into park before he fell face-first unconscious into the steering wheel. Shoaf was wounded and in shock. He had been hit in the shoulder and his face had been torn up by flying glass.
In a mad blur to get out of the kill zone, the back Humvee's didn’t realize that their lead truck had pulled off. They floored it, speeding the final few miles to get to F.O.B Lutufiyah. The two Humvee's pulled into the F.O.B. Both gunners were badly hurt, bleeding profusely. Captain Dougherty called in a medevac to the F.O.B and tried to figure out what was going on. Where was Shoaf? Where was the lead vehicle? The men in the Humvee's didn’t know.
Left out on Route Jackson, Shoaf and the other soldiers in the truck were having trouble piecing together what had happened to them and what they were going to do. Four of them were slightly or seriously injured, but Fegler was in critical condition. They tried to treat him, but they didn’t have anything but a small first aid kit and though he still had a pulse, Fegler was completely non-responsive and quickly bleeding to death. Their Humvee didn’t work, the radio was out, it was pitch-black, and they were injured and alone on the side of a large but lightly traveled highway due to a nighttime curfew. Shoaf spotted an Iraqi checkpoint two hundred yards away and started running for it.
The leader of an Iron Claw platoon from the 2-502nd was listening to the radio network, which had just erupted with chatter.His crew had come south from Camp Striker several hours ago and was checking Jackson for I.E.D's. It was weird, though, they had just had a very close call not a minute or two ago. The gunner of his rear vehicle had spotted a couple of pairs of headlights coming up fast on him and he tried to elicit a friendly response by signaling with a flashlight twice. When he got no response, he fired a warning burst with his M249 machine gun. When the headlights still kept coming, he switched to his heavier .50-cal machine gun. He fired one more burst of warning shots and then opened fire with shots to kill right between the headlights, tearing through all of his .50-cal ammo. The headlights receded, the threat was neutralized, and they kept driving.
There was a rush of confusing cross talk on the various radio networks. A Charlie Company Humvee had hit an IED, one transmission said. There is a disabled Iraqi vehicle on the side of the road, said another. An Iraqi checkpoint was protesting that coalition forces were firing on them, said a third. It took a while for people in company and battalion headquarters to work out what one soldier from the Iron Claw convoy had been telling his truck commander from the beginning: They had just shot up an American Humvee.
“The two Humvees that just sped past us,” he said. “They were part of the U.S. convoy we just fired on.”
Shoaf ran toward the Iraqi Army checkpoint, yelling in English as he approached, hoping that he wouldn’t get shot. In pidgin Arabic and hand gestures, Shoaf, soaked in Fegler’s blood, convinced the Iraqis to load up a truck and return with him to pick up Fegler. Bleeding himself, and struggling to remain lucid, Shoaf somehow got the radio working again long enough to contact Charlie headquarters. An air medevac to the site of the shooting was denied because they did not have a precise location, so Dougherty launched a Quick Reaction Force to go find them. Shoaf and Dougherty decided they should get the Iraqis to drive to Mahmudiyah instead of Lutufiyah because the two bases were almost equidistant and the larger FOB had better medical care.
But they could not leave without an American escort. “It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do,” said Shoaf. “If I sent an unmarked Iraqi civilian truck with no radio to the gates of Mahmudiyah, it would’ve been destroyed. I had to sit there and wait and watch Sergeant Fegler bleed more while our guys came to get us.” After what seemed like an eternity, but was really only fifteen or twenty minutes, the Q.R.F unit rolled up. Fegler no longer had a pulse. In the meantime, Dougherty called Mahmudiyah to tell them that a U.S.-Iraqi convoy was going to be barreling up to the gate soon.
“One truck is an IA truck,” he told Mahmudiyah. “It has multiple litter-urgent [critical] U.S. pax [passengers] aboard. Do not, repeat, do not shoot that truck.” The good news was that no one tried to shoot up the evacuation convoy. The bad news was there was no one to escort them to the aid station. There was no one manning the front gate whatsoever. The lead evacuation vehicle drove around the FOB for a few minutes trying to figure out where to go. Finally, the driver stopped to ask for directions. Thinking that they had arrived at the aid station, the soldiers in the back vehicle began
unloading Fegler. Not knowing what the rear vehicle was doing, and with accurate directions in hand, the lead truck then drove off, leaving the soldiers in the rear to carry Fegler the final seventy-five yards to the medics. Although an autopsy ruled that no amount of medical attention could have saved Fegler’s life, it took, in all, about forty minutes to get him the four miles from the accident site to Mahmudiyah.
Around this time, the Iron Claw convoy arrived at FOB Lutufiyah. Word was circulating at all levels about what had happened, and some of the Charlie men were getting heated.
“They fucking shot up our guys!” some of them yelled. “They killed our own dudes!”
Dougherty called the Iron Claw platoon leader into his office and said to him between deep breaths, “I know this was an accident, but there is a lot of anger here right now. So you and all of your guys need to be out of here and out of the way. You guys need to go to your trucks and stay there.”
In all, six Charlie Company soldiers were hurt and Staff Sergeant Jason Fegler died. Extensive investigations followed. The Iron Claw gunner was exonerated for following proper escalation of force procedures even though there was no standard, brigade-wide night recognition signal in place at that time. If anything, the reports found areas of fault with the Charlie convoy for using closed radio frequencies and because they had taped their Humvee's headlights square to look more like Iraqi vehicles—a tactic that has obvious benefits and drawbacks. The investigating officer found only U.S. shell casings along the route and did not find any bullet holes on the vehicles’ sides and rear, concluding that there had not been any insurgent fire that night. Kunk refused to recommend any of the Charlie men for Bronze Stars with Valor medals or any other awards for their actions because he concurred that there was no enemy fire at all that night—something that the Charlie men involved in that incident passionately claim there was. “All the written reports saying there were no enemies involved? That’s bullshit,” said Shoaf. “We started shooting because there were some dudes shooting in our direction before any of this occurred.”
Fegler’s memorial was held on November 11 at FOB Mahmudiyah. The battalion typically held a memorial service within a week after a soldier died. They were simple but emotional affairs. Kunk would say a few words, the company commander would say a few words, there would be a few Bible readings, a few hymns, a friend would give a remembrance, and the chaplain would give a homily. Soldiers, two by two, would pay their respects to the classic soldier memorial erected on a dais—the soldier’s helmet perched atop his rifle, its barrel stuck to the ground, with his dog tags hanging from it and his boots in front. The hardest part for most soldiers was the final roll call, when the first sergeant would call the names of the platoon’s soldiers and they would shout back, “Here, Sergeant!” Until he got to “Fegler! … Staff Sergeant Fegler! … Staff Sergeant Jason Fegler!” Anyone who had resisted crying until now was usually in tears.
Transportation from MacKenzie, Munger, and Smith’s memorial had been the occasion of Fegler’s death. And, like a daisy chain of carnage, transportation from Fegler’s memorial became the setting for another major casualty. As the Bravo Company convoy mounted up following the memorial, Executive Officer Habash asked First Sergeant Skidis if his truck had an extra slot. Sure, get in, Skidis said. Habash headed for the front right passenger seat, the customary place for the man with the highest rank. But the left rear door on this truck didn’t open, he remembered, so he climbed across the truck’s interior to that seat. Skidis took the front right spot.
Just before 10:00 p.m., the Humvee hit an I.E.D on Route Fat Boy just north of Yusufiyah. There was heat, flash, and confusion. Habash remembers everything going white and then black, and, for a moment, none of his senses were working. Unable to process any data, he asked himself, “Am I dead?” Reality reasserted itself within seconds, however, as he saw and smelled the cab, which was filled with smoke.
The driver was yelling, “What do I do? What do I do?”
Between his screams of pain, Skidis yelled, “Just go! Go! Just drive!” Safely past the kill zone, they assessed quickly that no one was mortally wounded, but the truck was on fire.They stopped and extinguished the flames, pulled security, and a Q.R.F from Yusufiyah came to relieve them. One soldier had a sprained wrist, but the blast had pulverized Skidis’s calf. He was in excruciating pain. The explosion had not penetrated the door, but the concussive force of the shock wave was so powerful, the door wall hit Skidis’s leg like a hammer, and now his lower leg was swelling fast. The head medic diagnosed it as compartment syndrome, a serious condition in which so much blood is pouring into the relatively inelastic leg muscles that surgery is required to relieve the pressure. Skidis was medevaced to Baghdad and then home, where he would endure seven surgeries to regain almost 100 percent use of his leg. Less than three weeks after Bravo had lost one of its platoon leaders, its senior enlisted man was out of the fight too.
next
Communication Breakdowns 139s
Rounding out 3rd Squad were a handful of younger soldiers whom Lauzier and Yribe worked mercilessly. Being in 3rd Squad, they declared, was a privilege, and they hazed the hell out of new privates before accepting them. Twenty-two-year-old Private Justin Watt, from Tucson, Arizona, was among the newest arrivals. He had dropped out of high school to take a job with a dot-com during the Internet boom, but it went under in eighteen months. He got his GED and tried a few semesters at a technical college in Tempe, but that didn’t work out so well. He was struggling to find his role. He was a computer enthusiast who wasn’t a geek; the smart kid who wasn’t a student; the athlete who wasn’t an all-star.
He just wasn’t inspired, so he took a job as a blackjack dealer at a casino in Tucson. The money was good and, around the same time, he’d fallen in love with a girl. They were going to get married and they had a plan. He’d go back to school, get a degree, and pursue a career in casinos. No doubt it was a growth industry, but he was conflicted. At its root, gambling is a shady, depressing business. As he was questioning whether he really wanted to be a part of all that ugliness, his girlfriend dumped him, causing a total reappraisal of his priorities. He’d always admired his father, who was an Army airborne combat engineer during the late 1970's. The war in Iraq did not look like it would be ending soon. Joining the Army, especially now, he decided, would be a chance to test himself, to take the harder route for once, to be a part of something big.
Yribe and Lauzier had months of fun tormenting the small new private. But Watt never quit. He had made a promise to himself that this was the one time in his life he wasn’t going to wuss out, and, after thousands of push-ups, miles of running in place, and hours of repeating some stupid phrase or self-insult—“I am the fucking new guy, and I am gay”—it wasn’t long before he was a fully accepted member of the squad. They never stopped teasing him, but the tone had changed. It wasn’t a tryout anymore, it was just good-natured ribbing, and Watt was as proud as he had ever been.
6
Contact
AS 1ST PLATOON moved into the J.S.B sector, the insurgents didn’t
waste any time testing their new neighbors. Only two or three
days after 1st Platoon’s arrival, Yribe and two other men were
guarding the Alamo in a gun truck. It was dark and quiet, almost
one-thirty in the morning, when Yribe heard rustling in the reeds.
Animals? People? There was no good reason for a man to be out
here at night. He looked around nervously, but he couldn’t see
anything. Then his vision sharpened, and silhouettes of crouched men skittered against the night sky. Jesus Christ! Two, maybe three
shadows, definitely people. They were trying to sneak up on him.
He opened fire. His two soldiers followed suit. Soldiers on guard at the JSB heard a volley of fire and several grenade explosions.
“That’s the Alamo!” Platoon Sergeant Miller yelled. “Get up! Get up! Get the fuck up!” Men started piling their gear on. There was no officially designated Quick Reaction Force (Q.R.F) yet, so everybody scrambled into the armored personnel carrier. When about a squad’s worth of men had loaded, it took off with Cortez driving. Roughly halfway there, the shooting stopped. They arrived, unloaded, and assessed. All of Yribe’s men were fine.The insurgents had beaten a hasty retreat. Miller took Lauzier and half of 3rd Squad to search the nearby hamlet that the shooters would have had to pass through. The soldiers kicked in doors and questioned the locals, but they all professed ignorance.
First Platoon was usually up and working by 6:00 or 6:30 a.m., filling sandbags or fortifying other positions until sundown.Between those duties, patrols, and guard rotations, soldiers were lucky to get more than four hours of sleep a night. Miller was appalled at the lack of equipment and lack of support 1st Platoon received from the very first day. They were dependent on airdrops for everything. He would get on the radio every few minutes to request new supplies. You name it, they called for it: sandbags, food, ice and coolers. Two minutes later it was cots, wood, water, charcoal, and lighter fluid. Two minutes after that, shovels, pickaxes, hammers, and hoes. Finally, Goodwin said no more calls. Keep a list, for chrissake. For weeks afterward, it became a running joke. Anytime Goodwin saw Miller, he’d say, “Need anything? Need anything? Need anything?” Miller didn’t find it funny. He was annoyed that getting his guys even the bare minimum of equipment seemed to be such a low priority.
Working like coal miners and just as dirty, most of the men stripped down to their T-shirts while they were filling sandbags or doing other manual labor. Being “away from the flagpole” had its benefits. Britt and Miller didn’t sweat the finer points of uniform discipline. They were familiar with the theory why strict adherence to uniform regulations is important at all times: If you get the little things right, it shows an attention to detail, a seriousness, and a vigilance that results in greater self-respect, situational awareness, and, ultimately, safety and combat effectiveness. That’s all well and good, they reasoned, but with all the work they were doing on such little sleep and having so few of the necessities like, say, enough water to drink, if a soldier didn’t feel like shaving for a day or two, that was fine with them.
But it was not fine with battalion command. Senior leaders started circulating First Strike’s territory within the first few days of arrival and Kunk or Edwards began visiting the J.S.B every few days. They did not like what they saw. “Supposedly they weren’t fortifying their positions fast enough,” said Bravo Executive Officer Habash. “The Colonel came to the F.O.B and just destroyed Captain Goodwin over the conditions of the J.S.B. They’re working their asses off to fortify this place, and to have your battalion commander come down and destroy you over not doing enough was frustrating.”
But Kunk wasn’t just annoyed at what he perceived to be lack of progress. Hard work or not, he and Edwards concluded 1st Platoon was awfully quick to decide that the rules didn’t apply to them.The men looked like slobs and were sauntering around not just in their T-shirts but in T-shirts with the sleeves cut off And flip-flops?! There was trash everywhere. They told Miller and the other N.C.O's to get their acts together and knock their men into line. Miller and the squad leaders tried to explain that if they had seen what the place looked like before, they’d understand how clean it actually was, how many improvements they had made, and how they were doing it all without any equipment or support. In fact, they thought they were doing a hell of a job. “I wasn’t concerned about the small shit,” said Miller. “Your boot’s unbloused? Who the fuck cares? Last time I checked, that fucker ain’t gonna stop you from getting shot in the face. But me putting up nine hundred fucking strands of wire is. The guys had their sleeves rolled up. Whoopie. It’s a hundred and twenty fucking degrees out here. Maybe they saw that as lack of leadership because I didn’t make them keep their sleeves rolled down.”
That’s precisely the way Kunk and Edwards saw it. Being far away was no excuse to let standards slip. If anything, they insisted, it made enforcing standards even more important. What really made Kunk mad was the feeling that he wasn’t being taken seriously. “There was always a reason why they couldn’t do something,” he said. “I would put out instructions, I would be gone for a day, get back out there, and they wouldn’t be doing what we had talked about. Sergeant Miller and different people wouldn’t write stuff down. And I’m like, ‘Look man, I’m not saying this for my health. I’m saying this for a reason.’”
But to Miller, there was a very good reason they couldn’t do things as quickly as Kunk wanted: Battalion was not providing the tools they needed to do the job right. “I asked for engineer support,” he said. “Couldn’t get it. Couldn’t get any backhoes or any of that stuff down there. My big question was, ‘I know they’re here, so what’s the issue?’ And I didn’t get any clarification on that.”
A few days after the first attack on the Alamo, it got hit again, from the same direction, but this time in the late afternoon and with a rocket-propelled grenade (R.P.G). The R.P.G didn’t hit anything, but 1st Platoon was better prepared to react. They had a Q.R.F ready to go, which found an I.E.D made of three 155 mm artillery rounds on the road leading to the Alamo from the other side. (One 155 mm shell weighs about a hundred pounds and, when fired conventionally, has enough destructive force to severely damage a tank.) A squad moved into Quarguli Village. They started kicking in doors, searching houses, looking for the men or man who just shot at them and laid that I.E.D. In a chicken shack out back of one of the houses, they found a man with an AK-47, detonation cord, and what looked like an I.E.D trigger. They zip-tied his hands, put a sandbag over his head, roughed him up a little, and brought him back to the J.S.B to be picked up.
Watt remembered everybody standing around the man nonplussed. He was a skinny little wretch, 150 pounds tops, with muddy feet and no shoes. This was the enemy? How disappointing. But finding a clear suspect like this proved to be a rarity. Most of the time, they wouldn’t find anything. They would receive fire, return fire, and by the time they could get a search party together, the insurgents would be gone, and the locals would claim ignorance, not just about where the bad guys might be, but often that they had even heard shots. The men started calling their enemy “the ghosts.”
Up at F.O.B Yusufiyah, Goodwin and the rest of the company were also trying to settle in. The battle rhythm, it quickly became clear, was going to be unrelenting. It was a rare day when no member of Bravo got attacked by the enemy in some way. This was true throughout the entire brigade’s sector (four 2-502nd soldiers died in an I.E.D strike on the unit’s first full day in charge of the area), but,over the year, Bravo always had a little bit more, sometimes a lot more, going on than everyone else in First Strike. Days with multiple, even ten or more, significant violent events were commonplace.
From the start, Kunk was unsympathetic to the notion that Bravo should be given any special treatment. Captain Goodwin, First Lieutenant Habash, and First Sergeant Skidis attempted to explain that their environment was more chaotic than Mahmudiyah’s, but that got no play. “Don’t think you have it any worse than anyone else” was one of Kunk’s common refrains. Bravo’s leadership couldn’t figure out if this was a motivation technique or if Kunk really thought it was true. “If Kunk really believed that, then he had to be crazy. Or supremely out of touch,” said Habash. “When we tried to say that we weren’t like Alpha and Delta, with all our troops inside the wire, sleeping peacefully at night, Battalion reacted like we were just making excuses.”
Kunk railed that Bravo was not getting the job done. Even the way they filed their daily reports was deficient. Battalion wanted highly detailed updates every day about everything that happened in each company’s sector. Alpha and Delta platoons at Mahmudiyah could go on patrols and then debrief company leadership in detail, in person, down to the color of every car they had searched. It wasn’t that simple for Bravo. “When you’re spread out and half of your reports are coming via the radio, the transmissions are unavoidably less complete,” commented Habash. “I understand what Battalion was trying to do. But there was a certain level of reality we needed to confront.” But every time he attempted to explain why Bravo’s reports were more fragmented, he said, “they thought I was blowing smoke up their ass.”
Those reports should have been the company commander’s job, but Habash started doing them because almost immediately, Goodwin seemed overwhelmed. It wasn’t more than a week or two into the deployment that the officers and N.C.O's around FOB Yusufiyah noticed something odd, and disconcerting: Goodwin never left the T.O.C. Twenty, twenty-two, even twenty-four hours a day, you could find him by the radios trying to keep tabs on the entire company’s operations. Sometimes he would skip meals. Often, soldiers would find him passed out, in the middle of the T.O.C, sitting in a folding director’s chair he liked to use, with a poncho liner pulled over his head. “I just thought it was the growing pains of starting up,” said 3rd Platoon’s Second Lieutenant Mark Evans. “I thought surely as we got more settled, he’d start to go to sleep. You’d just say to the guy, ‘Sir, you look like hell. You’ve been here for four days.’”
Beyond the relentless pace and the incessant violence, working with the Iraqis was maddening. “Take whoever was supposedly the mayor,” said Goodwin. “The locals tell you, ‘This is where he lives.’ So you go to the house. ‘Where is he?’ ‘He’s not here.’ ‘Well, does he live here?’ ‘No.’ ‘So where is he?’ ‘I don’t know.’ You know, you could be talking to the guy’s brother. Hell, you could be talking to the guy himself. One of the big questions: ‘Where’s so-and-so?’ ‘He’s in Baghdad.’ ‘What’s he doing in Baghdad?’ ‘He’s looking for work.’ That happens all the time. Or, asking somebody: ‘Do you speak English?’ There are two answers. Either ‘No’ or ‘A little bit.’ Sometimes ‘No’ means they are fluent, while ‘A little bit’ means that ‘A little bit’ is the only thing they know how to say. You never know what the real answers are. I would send squads out, saying, ‘You need to go find this guy.’ They would come back. ‘Where is he?’ ‘He’s in Baghdad looking for work.’ It became a running joke. One of the things I was trying to work on, and one of the things that I didn’t accomplish, I was trying to find out where everybody lived. Basically trying to build a phone book. But in a town that size it’s kind of hard, especially when half the people were squatters.”
Men up and down the ranks echoed similar frustrations. First Platoon’s Tony Yribe, who had been deployed before, didn’t trust the Iraqis at all. The ones who were insurgents would lie, the ones who supported insurgents would lie, and even the ones who didn’t also lied, all the time, for seemingly no purpose or gain. He described a common scene: “We went to a house because they had a boat, and there were supposed to be no boats along the river. And I was like, ‘Whose boat is that?’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, it’s my brother’s.’ And I’m like, ‘All right. Who lives on the other side of this house here?’ He’s like, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ So we go over there, and we’re like, ‘Hey, whose boat is that?’ ‘Oh, that’s my brother’s.’ ‘Where does he live?’ ‘Right over there.’ Where we just came from. There’s a big pile of hay nearby. And I said, ‘Hey, what’s in the haystack?’ And he said, ‘Nothing.’ And I was like, ‘Lieutenant Britt, you see what I’m saying? This is exactly what I’m saying. That guy lied to you. And now this guy is lying, too.’ Of course, we pulled out an AK and some rounds hidden in the haystack. I ended up grabbing the Hadji over my head and I threw him down. We kept searching and there was a fucking mortar pit behind his house. It had a base plate, it had defilade. You could see the white line measuring marks. And guess what they were aiming at? The J.S.B. Wherever you’re from in the United States, if your neighbor’s up to something, you’re going to know. And that’s how they are. Everybody that you see knows or has participated in some kind of insurgency, or if they haven’t participated, then they’ve supported it in some way. And I told Britt, ‘You’ve got to think that way.’”
The Iraqi Army (I.A) was as frustrating as the locals. It was well known around the battalion that Yusufiyah’s I.A unit was the weakest in the sector. To many of the men, they were worse than useless: they were dangerous. In a diary entry, a squad leader in 2nd Platoon wrote about his frustration at being sent out on patrol with a squad of Iraqi soldiers on a particularly dangerous stretch of road. “The Iraqis were weak, they were tired and wanted to quit about two clicks into it,” he wrote. “I told them to suck it up and continue to walk or I’m gonna throw them into the canal. I told my interpreter to tell them that they need to learn to fight for themselves or they are gonna get whacked when the Americans leave. One of the I.A's even took out his bulletproof plate and threw it in the canal because he said it was heavy and it hurt his back. Then an Iraqi sergeant gave his weapon to the interpreter and told him to carry it because it was too heavy. I will request to never go on another patrol with them.”
The biggest concern of the deployment quickly became apparent, however: the perfect terror instrument that is the I.E.D. In their vernacular, “getting blown up,” say many of the soldiers, is by far the craziest and scariest experience of their lives. They dare you to imagine what it is like: You are driving along, handing out Beanie Babies or patrolling a road or bringing water to people, and then, boom, a violent jolt of heat, light, and force upends your universe. There is no warning and there is nothing you can do except hope you don’t die. And it doesn’t happen once, it happens over and over and over again. So, obviously, it doesn’t take long before every time you roll outside the wire, you are terrified, truly terrified that you are going to get hit. And which is worse? Getting hit or the anticipation of getting hit, the pain and damage being done to your body or the feelings of inevitability and helplessness that come before? Because that uncertainty is as pure a torture as has ever been invented.
“It’s like someone has a gun to your head and you don’t know whether they’re going to kill you or let you live,” remembered one soldier. Even in a firefight, as scary as those can be, at least you feel like you have some control over your destiny, which is why, let’s be honest, they can also be exhilarating. You can fight back, there are people to engage, and even though some Americans might get shot or even die, an undeniable confidence remains because you seriously doubt that a bunch of insurgents, even a large group of them, will beat a group of Americans in a straight-up firefight. But I.E.D's? They are inescapable, they are frightening in an almost unimaginable way and they begin to weigh on you.
Every ride in a Humvee, every one, is an exercise in terror.You’re riding, with your butt cheeks and fists clenched, doing deep breathing to get control of your heart rate and your nausea the whole time, waiting for it, waiting for it, waiting for it. And still, when it happens, it is still the most surprising thing in the world. One fraction of a second, everything is normal, and the next, well, it depends, but it is definitely not normal. Depending on the size of the bomb and how closely it detonates, any combination of light,heat, pressure, dirt, fire, metal, wind, and noise will hit you in a way your body can never be prepared for. Sometimes you remember every millisecond of the thwomp of that elemental combination blast. Other times you black out for those crucial few seconds, come to with your body in any number of surprising contortions, and wonder, what, what happened? How long ago did it happen? Am I okay? Is that other guy okay? Are we all okay? And if you are not cut and bleeding, you’re probably still hurt in some way. You might not be able to hear for hours, and you might not hear right for days. Your vision might be blurry. And the headaches, there will be headaches, because you can’t knock around your brain like that without there being some after effects. And if you are not injured but the vehicle can not be driven, you should settle in, because you have to cordon off the area and there’s a good chance the wrecker is not going to show up for several hours. And while you are sitting there, the anger builds as you review what just happened. Somebody, not far from this spot, someone right around here—it could be him, or him, or him—just tried to kill you. Who of these motherfuckers just tried to kill you? If you conduct a search and are a combination of lucky and good, you might find a guy or two who have incriminating evidence on them. And then you can lay into them, have a momentary lick or two of revenge. But otherwise? Nothing. There is nothing you can do. There is no release for the anger and the adrenaline coursing through your veins. And look around. There’s a man on a cell phone, a lady putting out some washing, a kid walking down the road, and you just cannot figure it. How can none of these people know anything about what just happened here? All of them said they have no idea. How could they not know? Of course they know. Somebody tried to kill you, he got away, and all of these people know something, yet they aren’t saying anything. How could you not want to kill them, too, for protecting the person who just tried to kill you? How would you contain that rage?
On October 25, less than a month into its deployment, Bravo took its first serious I.E.D casualty. Led by Second Lieutenant Mark Evans, 3rd Platoon was running a heavy schedule, at least three or four separate patrols that day. They had already been on a 3:00 a.m. patrol when, at 11:00 a.m., they headed back outside the wire from F.O.B Yusufiyah. Evans was in the first of four Humvee's in an eighteen-man patrol, driving down Mullah Fayyad highway when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a rag tied to a power line that he had never seen before. Great, he thought, that’s a marker for an I.E.D. Before he had time to complete the realization, an I.E.D exploded near the No. 2 truck. Everybody got on the radio as they checked men and machines. You good? You good? they asked one another. Okay, we’re all good. Everybody was fine, except for the gunner. His bell was rung a little, but he’d be okay, so they pressed on.The patrol headed back to the F.O.B.
Later in the day, Evans got assigned to inspect a site where insurgents had previously fired mortars at the FOB. He generally regarded these as a waste of time. Sometimes there was evidence, or it really was someone’s backyard, but most of the time the enemy mortar teams were good about cleaning up all of their equipment or any other trace that they had been there. More often than not, Evans and his men would go out, look at an empty field, and return, which is what happened this time. But driving back, Evans saw a guy on Route Peggy, just hanging out around his car. As soon as the convoy slowed down, the Iraqi got into his car and sped away. Evans had his gunner fire a warning shot, and the man stopped. He spoke excellent English and his car was clean. Both of these facts were out of the ordinary, but not exactly suspicious, either, so Evans let him go. As the convoy started up again and turned at the next intersection, 3rd Platoon’s second IED of the day went off. Again, after a quick check of everyone, there were no injuries. Evans decided to dismount everyone and search the area. The men fanned out, looking for wires, blast fragments, witnesses, anything. Walking up to the crater in the center of the road, which was about twelve feet wide and four feet deep, he saw some wires, which he figured must lead to the trigger position. He had removed his protective eye shields to get a better look at them, and he was getting ready to call some men over to help him investigate, when he had the distinct sensation he was being watched. He stood up to find who might be looking at him. There was another I.E.D still buried next to the crater he was inspecting, and he was standing on top of it. The trigger man closed the connection and Evans’s third I.E.D of the day exploded.
He felt no pain. Just the sensation of wind on his face, and then what felt like a bad sunburn. Evans couldn’t tell at first if he was standing anymore (he had been knocked off of his feet, several feet in the air, and was now lying on his back), but, to himself, his thought process was calm and rational.
“As long as I have all my fingers and toes,” he told himself, “everything’s going to be okay.” He couldn’t see a thing, but he was much more concerned about accounting for his digits than the fact that he had been blinded. He counted his fingers and wiggled his toes. “All right, I’m good,” he thought and sank serenely into a kind of catatonia. For some time, his sightlessness did not bother him very much.The medic ran over and started applying an IV to Evans, telling him he was going to be okay.
“Am I burned, Doc?”
“Oh no, sir, you’re fine,” said the medic, lying. In fact, he was badly discolored, his neck was bleeding, his eyes were swollen shut, and he had several broken bones in his face—he looked much more like he’d smashed his face on a car windshield than he’d been hit by an IED. Another soldier had been knocked off of his feet by the blast, too, but he did not have a scratch on him.
Evans had entered a very placid state of shock. His primary thought was that tonight he was guaranteed a good night’s sleep, a prospect that pleased him very much. When they returned to the FOB and prepared for the medevac helicopter, Evans still wasn’t registering just how seriously he had been injured. Probably because he couldn’t see how disturbing his bloody and disfigured face was, he wasn’t grasping why everyone was freaking out. In his mind, everybody just needed to chill out.
When they loaded him into the helicopter, the medevac guys were all business. They kept asking him his Social Security number, his birth date, his hometown. He was pretty sure he was speaking coherently, so what was this all about? he wondered. Was this supposed to keep him from falling into shock?
“My birthday is the same as the last time you asked,” he finally said. They put a heart-rate clip on his finger. He held his breath, and the thing started beeping.
The paramedic started rattling around in his bag and yelling, “Come on, buddy! I need you to breathe, buddy!Come on!”
“Hey dude,” Evans said, “I’m just messing with you. I’m fine.” The medic was not amused. Evans was flown back to the States.* Bravo Company had just lost its first platoon leader.
* Back in the United States, doctors determined that his corneas were so scratched and one retina was so badly detached that it took three weeks and scores of experts’ consultations before anyone was sure he would be able to see again. After surgeries to both eyes and six months’ recuperation, Evans made a full recovery and is still serving in the Army.
While Kunk and the rest of the battalion leadership already had their concerns about Bravo’s 1st Platoon, an early major noncombatant injury ensured that the unit registered quickly in brigade commander Ebel’s mind as well. As a part of routine hygiene and maintenance down at the J.S.B, some unlucky private would have to burn the platoon’s WAG Bags and other accumulated garbage in a large pit every day. It was common practice to use diesel fuel to speed the process. Diesel is ideal because it burns slowly and is less volatile than other types of fuel. On October 28, the private in charge of the pit-burning detail did not douse the waste with diesel but used JP-8, the Army’s standard kerosene based vehicle fuel, which, like gasoline, is highly combustible.
He leaned over the open pit, looking down as he threw a match. Whoomph! A geyser of flame and green and black and brown debris shooting thirty feet high engulfed him. Soldiers scrambled out of the way of the incoming shit as burnt, runny plastic remnants cascaded down like a fecal fountain. When the flame died down, the private was still standing there, blackened and crusted like Wile E. Coyote when one of his inventions blows up. His shirt was gone —it had been blasted off of him—and his hair and eyebrows were burned off. His skin was literally smoking. And he was in tremendous pain.
Paul Cortez, who was out on patrol a mile or two away, called back on the radio, “Hey, did you guys get hit? We saw an explosion.” Several soldiers, already laughing their asses off found Cortez’s call utterly hilarious. Others, however, realized the seriousness of the situation, that the soldier was covered in second and third-degree burns. He was so badly hurt, in fact, that he had to be medevaced out and ultimately sent home. Kunk and Edwards were apoplectic. The first major casualty that 1st Platoon suffered was not just a completely preventable noncombat injury but a humiliating one at that: a soldier blew himself up with a pile of shit.
Once Ebel learned what had injured the Bravo soldier he was visiting in the Camp Striker hospital burn unit, he was dismayed as well. And when Ebel saw Miller after the accident, which was the first time the two had ever met, the initial impression he had was that the young platoon sergeant was immature and overconfident and had failed to appreciate the enormity of what had just happened: a classic case of a poorly led, poorly supervised soldier.
Miller was not aware that opinion of him was already turning. He readily accepted his reamings from Kunk and Edwards, and a letter of reprimand from Ebel, over the burned soldier because, no question, there was a lapse of discipline. But he also said he got a lot of praise and left his first J.S.B rotation believing everybody thought he had done a good job. “I’d probably personally talked to Colonel Kunk four times, including the ass chewing for the accident and one other time he was unhappy about us being sloppy,” he recalled. “But the other two times he stopped by, he said we were doing great things, telling us, ‘You guys are doing a good job. Keep it up.’ So I felt comfortable at that point. I felt real comfortable.”
7
Route Sportster and BradleyBridge
IN OCTOBER 29, a 3rd Platoon Bravo patrol was heading down Route Peggy on the way back to F.O.B Yusufiyah. Only a few hundred yards from the intersection with Sportster, one of the Humvee's hit an I.E.D that blew the front of the vehicle clean off. The trigger man miscalculated by a split second. If the blast had been a belly shot, everyone in the vehicle would have been vaporized. The truck’s chassis skidded to a stop and everyone checked themselves over. Amazingly, no one was hurt.After toying with the Sportster problem since the moment they got there, Goodwin and Kunk decided the time had come to secure it for good. On October 30, 2nd Platoon, which had been sent out as the original Quick Reaction Force (Q.R.F) for the I.E.D hit, took over a house on the northwest corner of Sportster and Peggy. It was a large, square, two-story home on the southeast corner of Mullah Fayyad with storefronts on the two street-facing sides and living areas in the back and on the second floor. This house would come to be known as T.C.P (traffic control point) 1.
A day or two after that, with the help of an Iron Claw IED sniffing team, Bravo mounted an all-day clearing mission of Sportster. But everybody already knew that once you cleared something, if you turned your back, insurgents could reseed a road in a matter of hours. In order to keep Sportster clear, they had to hold it. So Goodwin started dropping Humvee's with fire teams at one- or two-mile intervals down the stretch.
“We just started parking vehicles on the road, telling them, ‘Stay here until properly relieved,’” said Goodwin. But the ideal relief, in the form of Iraqi soldiers manning the checkpoints, never came. Kunk intended the T.C.P's to be a way for the Iraqi Army to take more responsibility for this sector, but, especially this early in the deployment, they simply refused to operate in so dangerous an area. In Mahmudiyah and Lutufiyah, Kunk had more success persuading the Iraqi Army to participate, but, he says, “anything on the west side, Yusufiyah, Mullah Fayyad, Sportster, they would say, ‘Ali Baba is there. The bad guy is there.’” Kunk’s idea thus became to use the T.C.P's as a stair step. Build them with U.S. forces and then, as the I.A gained confidence, slowly hand them over.
The vehicle drop positions, over time, would evolve and harden into T.C.P positions 2, 3, and 4. “We thought it was going to be a seventy-two-hour mission,” said 3rd Platoon’s platoon sergeant, Phil Blaisdell. “Seventy-two hours turned into like six days. I had a beard. And all of a sudden it was permanent. We started getting concertina wire down there. And I’m like, ‘Good God, what are we doing?’” The numerical designations and configurations of the T.C.P's would vary slightly throughout the year. A fifth T.C.P would open on the northwest corner of Mullah Fayyad, and a T.C.P.6 would ultimately open between T.C.P.2 and T.C.P.3. Bravo Company was now in the road checkpoint business, and by the end of the deployment, the stair step strategy had resulted in the Iraqi Army claiming full control of only one checkpoint on Sportster.
Across the battalion, the T.C.P's were controversial. It was far from unanimous that they were a good idea. The T.C.P's were static positions, and they were not well defended. They were not patrol bases, but outposts in true enemy territory with no more—and usually far less—than a squad manning each one. T.C.P.1 and T.C.P.4 had buildings where troops could eat and have some form of downtime, while T.C.P.3 had not so much a building but, as Goodwin put it, “a bunch of cinder blocks piled together in an organized manner.”
In the first incarnation of T.C.P.2, troops lived out of two Humvee's, including trying to sleep in them, for days at a time. Early on, there were no HESCO Barriers, large six-foot cubed mesh baskets that when filled with dirt by a backhoe provided admirable protection from gunfire but when empty were no better than a chain-link fence. When HESCOs did arrive, there was no heavy equipment to fill them.
Even with each one so thinly manned, the T.C.P's were also a drain on the company’s combat power. Manning the T.C.P's consumed a whole platoon. Bravo’s initial staffing philosophy—one platoon at the J.S.B and two platoons at Yusufiyah, with one to be home guard and one to run maneuver operations—was out the window. Goodwin worried about the staffing pressures the T.C.P's were putting on his company. Between guard rotations, scheduled and unscheduled patrols, and sleep, the “troops-to-task” math was already not adding up. “The first time I requested more men in November, I was, I don’t want to say joking, but we’d sit down at a Commanders’ Update Brief, and it would be like, ‘What do you need?’ And I would say, ‘I need a platoon,’” Goodwin remembered. “‘No, really, what do you need?’ ‘Well, I need water, and I need this, and I need that. And a platoon would be nice.’ I know the battalion is short on manpower. The brigade is short. But I need another squad or four to keep doing what I’m doing, to give my guys a break.”
This frustration was echoed at every level. “Before,” said 2nd Platoon’s platoon sergeant, Jeremy Gebhardt, “if you were a platoon back at the F.O.B, you rotated with another platoon, so when they patrolled, you got some downtime to catch your breath. Once a platoon’s on T.C.P's, you’ve lost that completely. You look at it on paper, and you’re like, ‘Okay, this can work.’ But even when guys are just sitting at the T.C.P, there’s several hours per day just doing patrols around your area that aren’t factored into what’s on paper. Then, at that point, you start seeing guys getting strung out, and you start getting concerned for how they are holding up. That was a yearlong struggle trying to convince the battalion level of this. But it all came back to, ‘Hey, you’ve got this many guys. It takes this many to do this.’ And that was it.”
Second Platoon’s platoon leader, Lieutenant Jerry Eidson, said his faith in his superiors evaporated once he took stock of the T.C.P mission. “It was ridiculous,” he said. “We were a company spread out trying to operate like we were a battalion. Nobody in my platoon had any confidence in our command structure at all after that.”
Kunk maintained that the strategic importance of Sportster left him no choice. “It had become a superhighway for the insurgents to get into Baghdad, so we had to take it back,” he proclaimed. In that regard, the Sportster plan fit with Ebel’s strategy for the brigade as well. Sportster, in Ebel’s words, became “the base of the anvil” upon which the rest of the brigade, and special operations forces, would continue to hammer the insurgent hideouts to the west. “The risk was, if we gave that up, we would have released an avenue where the enemy would skirt around,” he said.
But many others dismiss the idea that Sportster, when open, was an insurgent superhighway or, when occupied, acted as a barrier to infiltration. They point to a number of routes on a map that circumvent Sportster on the way to Baghdad or Mahmudiyah. “It was obvious they were still coming into my A.O across Sportster,” said Alpha commander Jared Bordwell. “They just didn’t have T shirts that said ‘Insurgent’ on them when they did. I don’t think we needed to own Sportster. It didn’t do anything except give the insurgents a static target and allow soldiers to get complacent and do stupid things.”
Others maintain that even if securing Sportster as a resupply route to the J.S.B was important, it could not be done with so few men. Charlie Company First Sergeant Dennis Largent believed this was obvious from the beginning. “Bravo couldn’t do shit in their own sector because they were tied down to those T.C.P's,” he said. “As early as November we saw that Bravo Company was getting attrited. They needed some help. That’s where the fucking fight was. It wasn’t in Mahmudiyah with the sewer project or whatever. The focus of that battalion sector should have been clearing out Yusufiyah. Cleaning house in there so that that company would stop getting attrited.”
A major component of the Sportster effort was psychological, an affirmation that the enemy never tells the U.S. Army where it can and cannot go. “The taking of Sportster was a big moment, because that sent a clear message to the enemy that we were not going away,” Kunk explained. “We said early on, ‘We are taking it back and we are keeping it. And we are going to own it. And not only are we going to own that, we are going to go anywhere we want to go because we are going to dictate everything.’”
But some officers wondered if this idea of freedom became too much of a priority for its own sake than one that served a larger mission. “Colonel Kunk put his name out there by saying ‘We will own that road,’” explained Bordwell. “Well, in Iraq when you say ‘I am going to own something,’ that means your feet are on it ninety nine percent of the time. So he bought something by saying that. And no one did the math on what it was going to take and what we were going to sacrifice in order to own that piece of property.”
On November 2, Sergeant Major Edwards was making a routine battlefield circulation. First Strike had been in theater just over a month. One of Edwards’s priority stops, on the orders of Ebel, was to go to the J.S.B and impress upon Miller the seriousness of the burn-pit incident. The Personal Security Detachment (P.S.D), the convoy unit that escorted Kunk or Edwards wherever they went, was another battalion-wide tasking, and each company had to provide a handful of soldiers for the effort. Bravo had detailed several, including Specialist Josh Munger and Private First Class Tyler MacKenzie.
As Edwards was chewing out Miller, the guys from 1st Platoon had a chance to catch up with Munger and MacKenzie and the rest of the P.S.D hanging out at the motor pool, just to gab and get the scoop on what life was like for the rest of the battalion. MacKenzie was Justin Watt’s roommate back in the barracks at Fort Campbell and one of his best friends. Once, before deployment, MacKenzie told Watt that he was confident he wouldn’t die in Iraq because he had never won anything in his life, even a raffle, so why should he win the biggest, baddest, anti-lottery of them all? Nah, he assured Watt, he’d be fine.
Heading back to Mahmudiyah, the PSD traveled along Route Temple in Charlie’s area. Around 12:45 p.m., the lead vehicle of the four-truck convoy crossed a large earthen bridge known as Bradley Bridge, so named because it was where a catastrophic IED had hit a Bradley Fighting Vehicle during a previous unit’s deployment. Here, the lead Humvee met the same fate. An intelligence report later said that insurgents had posed as contractors and dug in a gigantic IED with heavy construction equipment months before. The explosion was enormous, completely obliterating the Humvee, leaving it a smoking and twisted heap of metal.
First Lieutenant Tim Norton was on patrol with a group of Charlie Company soldiers when they heard the explosion. Norton was assigned to the Lutufiyah MiTT team, but before deployment he had been a Charlie platoon leader. Since Charlie was based out of Lutufiyah, and Norton was a devoted child of the People’s Army, he would hang out with, and patrol with, his old Charlie guys every chance he got.
The twenty-three-year-old from Mansfield, Massachusetts, was the Distinguished Military Graduate ROTC cadet at Providence College in 2004, a history buff, and a proficient violinist who could identify most songs on a classical radio station within a few seconds. Straight out of Ranger School, he headed to Charlie, where he benefited enormously from the mentoring of his platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Lonnie Hayes, one of the best N.C.O's in the battalion. Norton was assigned to the MiTT team when somebody discovered he had studied Arabic in college. He had vigorously resisted being moved away from his men on the eve of battle, but it was futile. He was making the best of the MiTT beat, but he far preferred what he was doing now, out patrolling with the Cobras, and he did it every chance he got.
With the explosion only a few miles away, the Charlie soldiers got a call to head straight there. Reports from the scene were fragmented, but it was clear there were dead and wounded, and medevac choppers started spinning up. Munger, along with Specialist Benjamin Smith, had been thrown more than twenty feet from the vehicle and were likely killed instantly. Sergeant Cory Collins was injured but MacKenzie was missing: he was simply gone.
Norton and the Charlie guys arrived about ten minutes later. This was Norton’s first experience of combat, and he was surprised at how disorienting it was. The Humvee was obliterated. The entire engine block had been detached and thrown clear of the rest of the assembly. The chassis looked like a scale model of a roller coaster that had been set ablaze. A door had been tossed more than three hundred feet. The roof and gun turret landed in the canal and there were no tires left, just fist-sized scraps of rubber.
Most of the men in the other three vehicles had taken up defensive positions, while the medic and a few others ran to the canal to try to find their men and treat any survivors. Some seemed to be walking around almost aimlessly in a state of shock. Sergeant Major Edwards himself was in a daze. Several men were firing on suspected trigger locations to the north and west. A .50-caliber machine gun, which fires rounds several inches long that can rip through solid concrete, started banging away at the houses from atop one of the intact Humvee's. Its barrage lasted probably only a minute or two but it seemed like an hour, with soldiers tearing through ammo. Once the fire stopped, Norton coordinated with the P.S.D leaders and sent some patrols out, sweeping the area. Soldiers started picking up smaller pieces of remains and searching for MacKenzie. Other soldiers followed the IED’s still-intact command wires back to a chicken coop about three hundred yards away. In the coop was a sand-table model of the area for the trigger man to plan his detonation. In a nearby house, they found four Iraqis and they sprayed their hands with Expray, an aerosol-based field test that diagnoses a range of explosives chemicals depending on what color the spray turns upon contact with a surface. Two of the men “popped,” in the soldiers’ parlance, for a positive reading. (Later, there would be serious doubts about Expray’s reliability in some contexts. Specifically, the spray turns pink in the presence of nitrates, which are a common ingredient in explosives. But in Iraq, fertilizer also has a heavy nitrate content. So, getting caught literally “red-handed” here might mean that a person had been working on a bomb—or was an innocent farmer. The margin of error is so large, for example, that Expray test results are not admissible in U.S. courts. At the time, however, “popping” during an Expray test was considered ironclad proof of being an insurgent.)
Using the P.S.D’s interpreter, a couple of N.C.O's began to question the suspects. The Charlie guys had to pull one of the P.S.D soldiers away from the detainees. He was shouting, hysterically upset, going for his pistol, screaming and swearing at them about his dead friends. Whoa, dude, you gotta back up, they told him. All you guys gotta back up, or you’re gonna do something you regret. A wrecker convoy and Q.R.F that had been dispatched to recover the Humvee carcass hit a pressure-plate-triggered I.E.D just fifty feet from the original blast site around 3:00 p.m. The explosion lifted the thirty ton wrecker’s rear end several feet into the air. This time, a gun battle erupted as the Americans started taking fire from several buildings to the west. Two fire teams headed out to flank the new shooting positions, and Norton and Hayes and a couple of other soldiers, trapped just o- the bridge and out in the open, started unloading their weapons in counter fire.
Time slowed down drastically for Norton. While he was fighting, he had time to contemplate the bullets landing all around him. Each one kicked up a pool of dust just like a raindrop did. If he didn’t know any better, he mused, he would swear it was raining. And then he thought that this was a moment they tell you only happens in Hollywood, but here they were, and it was happening. Norton and Hayes were standing back to back and completely exposed, blazing away with their guns like they were Butch and Sundance, taking fire from three, maybe four shooters—and they weren’t getting hit. It was surreal. The combined firepower of their position and the flanking soldiers ran the shooters off.
Ebel and Kunk and a variety of relief elements arrived shortly after, not that anyone was happy to see them. It is a universal complaint: No matter how much soldiers and junior officers lament the lack of senior leadership presence on the ground during day-today operations, the one time when they are uniformly not wanted is the one time they can be guaranteed to show up—in the aftermath of a catastrophic loss. The search for MacKenzie continued. It was Ebel, chest high in the canal water, who pointed to the culvert where his body had likely gotten caught and pulled underwater. At about 6:00 p.m., they finally recovered his remains.
With many relief units now in place or on their way, Charlie and the P.S.D got sent back to their bases. Norton’s adrenaline flush was receding, and it was a hollowing experience, a bottomless pit of exhaustion. Not despair or sadness, elation, relief, or any other emotion, just exhaustion. He had a shower and headed to the chow hall. They were serving chicken wings. He had never looked, really looked, at them before. Flesh. Bones. Red sauce. All in a pile. He stared at them, dozens of heaped little carcasses. He decided to have a granola bar instead.
After the cleanup was finished, Charlie commander Captain Dougherty was ordered to guard that intersection. The insurgents, Kunk maintained, were counting on the 101st to do what the 48th would do—withdraw. It’s great to make that kind of stand, Dougherty replied, but who’s going to provide the men to staff it safely? He and Kunk fought hard about this position. Dougherty believed in force demonstration as a deterrent. He put fifteen men in three trucks on it. “It’s the difference between looking like a chuck wagon and a war wagon,” Dougherty said. When he then complained that he did not have enough soldiers for regular missions, and battalion leadership told him to pull some men off the bridge, he and First Sergeant Largent dug through the thousands of regulations from division headquarters and pointed to the one saying that all convoys had to have three vehicles. “That was the last we heard about it for a while,” recalled Largent. This impasse was laid to rest within a few months without a full confrontation,however, because the Iraqi soldiers in Lutufiyah were more competent than any in the rest of the region, and they were able to take over the Bradley Bridge position fairly early.
Since the Personal Security Detachment had been pulled from every company, the deaths of Bravo’s MacKenzie and Munger and Alpha Company’s Smith hit the entire battalion hard. Most soldiers can pinpoint three times when their war began. The first is the day they arrived in theater, the second is the day when the enemy first did violence to them, and the third is the day they lost their first comrade. For many in 1st Battalion, November 2 was their entree to the third and most painful day of war’s stutter-step beginning. “It affected everybody differently,” said Private First Class Chris Barnes. “I was pretty angry. It scared a lot of people. Some people were mad. Some people were in tears.”
Two days later, Charlie was dealt a blow. At about 8:45 p.m. on November 4,Charlie’s executive officer, First Lieutenant Matt Shoaf, was leading a three-truck convoy from MacKenzie, Munger, and Smith’s memorial service on FOB Mahmudiyah back to Lutufiyah along Route Jackson. He was in the front passenger seat and Staff Sergeant Jason Fegler was driving. Most of the soldiers were having trouble seeing; their night-vision goggles were whiting out due to the oncoming headlights.
Shoaf saw a spotlight flicked on up ahead and Fegler flashed his back. One of the trucks behind him reported receiving small-arms fire from the right. Others would later say the fire was coming from the left. In sworn statements, several men were very specific about the color of the tracer rounds or the angle of fire they witnessed from rooftops on both sides of them. Shoaf’s gunner saw some flashes to the left and fired at the rooftops. Shoaf was waiting for a report back, leaning down to grab something off the floor or adjust a dial, when rounds, big ones, started hitting his truck from straight ahead. Even though Humvee windshields have bulletproof glass, these large-caliber rounds smashed straight through. Shoaf, already leaning over, ducked under the windshield as best he could as the bullets riddled the truck’s interior, shredding metal, glass, and canvas. Shoaf’s gunner dove into the belly of the truck as bullets penetrated the turret shield. One bullet nicked the lip of the chest plate of Fegler’s body armor but kept going straight to his heart. The two Humvees behind Shoaf’s got hit as well. One bullet hit the gunner of a rear Humvee and he slumped over. Another soldier, Sergeant Juan Hernandez, pulled the hit gunner down and took his place. Hernandez got one burst of rounds off before he too was hit in the left shoulder. The lead truck, pocked with no fewer than three dozen bullet holes, rolled to a stop off the side of the road. Fegler managed to put the truck into park before he fell face-first unconscious into the steering wheel. Shoaf was wounded and in shock. He had been hit in the shoulder and his face had been torn up by flying glass.
In a mad blur to get out of the kill zone, the back Humvee's didn’t realize that their lead truck had pulled off. They floored it, speeding the final few miles to get to F.O.B Lutufiyah. The two Humvee's pulled into the F.O.B. Both gunners were badly hurt, bleeding profusely. Captain Dougherty called in a medevac to the F.O.B and tried to figure out what was going on. Where was Shoaf? Where was the lead vehicle? The men in the Humvee's didn’t know.
Left out on Route Jackson, Shoaf and the other soldiers in the truck were having trouble piecing together what had happened to them and what they were going to do. Four of them were slightly or seriously injured, but Fegler was in critical condition. They tried to treat him, but they didn’t have anything but a small first aid kit and though he still had a pulse, Fegler was completely non-responsive and quickly bleeding to death. Their Humvee didn’t work, the radio was out, it was pitch-black, and they were injured and alone on the side of a large but lightly traveled highway due to a nighttime curfew. Shoaf spotted an Iraqi checkpoint two hundred yards away and started running for it.
The leader of an Iron Claw platoon from the 2-502nd was listening to the radio network, which had just erupted with chatter.His crew had come south from Camp Striker several hours ago and was checking Jackson for I.E.D's. It was weird, though, they had just had a very close call not a minute or two ago. The gunner of his rear vehicle had spotted a couple of pairs of headlights coming up fast on him and he tried to elicit a friendly response by signaling with a flashlight twice. When he got no response, he fired a warning burst with his M249 machine gun. When the headlights still kept coming, he switched to his heavier .50-cal machine gun. He fired one more burst of warning shots and then opened fire with shots to kill right between the headlights, tearing through all of his .50-cal ammo. The headlights receded, the threat was neutralized, and they kept driving.
There was a rush of confusing cross talk on the various radio networks. A Charlie Company Humvee had hit an IED, one transmission said. There is a disabled Iraqi vehicle on the side of the road, said another. An Iraqi checkpoint was protesting that coalition forces were firing on them, said a third. It took a while for people in company and battalion headquarters to work out what one soldier from the Iron Claw convoy had been telling his truck commander from the beginning: They had just shot up an American Humvee.
“The two Humvees that just sped past us,” he said. “They were part of the U.S. convoy we just fired on.”
Shoaf ran toward the Iraqi Army checkpoint, yelling in English as he approached, hoping that he wouldn’t get shot. In pidgin Arabic and hand gestures, Shoaf, soaked in Fegler’s blood, convinced the Iraqis to load up a truck and return with him to pick up Fegler. Bleeding himself, and struggling to remain lucid, Shoaf somehow got the radio working again long enough to contact Charlie headquarters. An air medevac to the site of the shooting was denied because they did not have a precise location, so Dougherty launched a Quick Reaction Force to go find them. Shoaf and Dougherty decided they should get the Iraqis to drive to Mahmudiyah instead of Lutufiyah because the two bases were almost equidistant and the larger FOB had better medical care.
But they could not leave without an American escort. “It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do,” said Shoaf. “If I sent an unmarked Iraqi civilian truck with no radio to the gates of Mahmudiyah, it would’ve been destroyed. I had to sit there and wait and watch Sergeant Fegler bleed more while our guys came to get us.” After what seemed like an eternity, but was really only fifteen or twenty minutes, the Q.R.F unit rolled up. Fegler no longer had a pulse. In the meantime, Dougherty called Mahmudiyah to tell them that a U.S.-Iraqi convoy was going to be barreling up to the gate soon.
“One truck is an IA truck,” he told Mahmudiyah. “It has multiple litter-urgent [critical] U.S. pax [passengers] aboard. Do not, repeat, do not shoot that truck.” The good news was that no one tried to shoot up the evacuation convoy. The bad news was there was no one to escort them to the aid station. There was no one manning the front gate whatsoever. The lead evacuation vehicle drove around the FOB for a few minutes trying to figure out where to go. Finally, the driver stopped to ask for directions. Thinking that they had arrived at the aid station, the soldiers in the back vehicle began
unloading Fegler. Not knowing what the rear vehicle was doing, and with accurate directions in hand, the lead truck then drove off, leaving the soldiers in the rear to carry Fegler the final seventy-five yards to the medics. Although an autopsy ruled that no amount of medical attention could have saved Fegler’s life, it took, in all, about forty minutes to get him the four miles from the accident site to Mahmudiyah.
Around this time, the Iron Claw convoy arrived at FOB Lutufiyah. Word was circulating at all levels about what had happened, and some of the Charlie men were getting heated.
“They fucking shot up our guys!” some of them yelled. “They killed our own dudes!”
Dougherty called the Iron Claw platoon leader into his office and said to him between deep breaths, “I know this was an accident, but there is a lot of anger here right now. So you and all of your guys need to be out of here and out of the way. You guys need to go to your trucks and stay there.”
In all, six Charlie Company soldiers were hurt and Staff Sergeant Jason Fegler died. Extensive investigations followed. The Iron Claw gunner was exonerated for following proper escalation of force procedures even though there was no standard, brigade-wide night recognition signal in place at that time. If anything, the reports found areas of fault with the Charlie convoy for using closed radio frequencies and because they had taped their Humvee's headlights square to look more like Iraqi vehicles—a tactic that has obvious benefits and drawbacks. The investigating officer found only U.S. shell casings along the route and did not find any bullet holes on the vehicles’ sides and rear, concluding that there had not been any insurgent fire that night. Kunk refused to recommend any of the Charlie men for Bronze Stars with Valor medals or any other awards for their actions because he concurred that there was no enemy fire at all that night—something that the Charlie men involved in that incident passionately claim there was. “All the written reports saying there were no enemies involved? That’s bullshit,” said Shoaf. “We started shooting because there were some dudes shooting in our direction before any of this occurred.”
Fegler’s memorial was held on November 11 at FOB Mahmudiyah. The battalion typically held a memorial service within a week after a soldier died. They were simple but emotional affairs. Kunk would say a few words, the company commander would say a few words, there would be a few Bible readings, a few hymns, a friend would give a remembrance, and the chaplain would give a homily. Soldiers, two by two, would pay their respects to the classic soldier memorial erected on a dais—the soldier’s helmet perched atop his rifle, its barrel stuck to the ground, with his dog tags hanging from it and his boots in front. The hardest part for most soldiers was the final roll call, when the first sergeant would call the names of the platoon’s soldiers and they would shout back, “Here, Sergeant!” Until he got to “Fegler! … Staff Sergeant Fegler! … Staff Sergeant Jason Fegler!” Anyone who had resisted crying until now was usually in tears.
Transportation from MacKenzie, Munger, and Smith’s memorial had been the occasion of Fegler’s death. And, like a daisy chain of carnage, transportation from Fegler’s memorial became the setting for another major casualty. As the Bravo Company convoy mounted up following the memorial, Executive Officer Habash asked First Sergeant Skidis if his truck had an extra slot. Sure, get in, Skidis said. Habash headed for the front right passenger seat, the customary place for the man with the highest rank. But the left rear door on this truck didn’t open, he remembered, so he climbed across the truck’s interior to that seat. Skidis took the front right spot.
Just before 10:00 p.m., the Humvee hit an I.E.D on Route Fat Boy just north of Yusufiyah. There was heat, flash, and confusion. Habash remembers everything going white and then black, and, for a moment, none of his senses were working. Unable to process any data, he asked himself, “Am I dead?” Reality reasserted itself within seconds, however, as he saw and smelled the cab, which was filled with smoke.
The driver was yelling, “What do I do? What do I do?”
Between his screams of pain, Skidis yelled, “Just go! Go! Just drive!” Safely past the kill zone, they assessed quickly that no one was mortally wounded, but the truck was on fire.They stopped and extinguished the flames, pulled security, and a Q.R.F from Yusufiyah came to relieve them. One soldier had a sprained wrist, but the blast had pulverized Skidis’s calf. He was in excruciating pain. The explosion had not penetrated the door, but the concussive force of the shock wave was so powerful, the door wall hit Skidis’s leg like a hammer, and now his lower leg was swelling fast. The head medic diagnosed it as compartment syndrome, a serious condition in which so much blood is pouring into the relatively inelastic leg muscles that surgery is required to relieve the pressure. Skidis was medevaced to Baghdad and then home, where he would endure seven surgeries to regain almost 100 percent use of his leg. Less than three weeks after Bravo had lost one of its platoon leaders, its senior enlisted man was out of the fight too.
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