PART 4:BLACK HEARTS: ONE PLATOON'S DESCENT INTO MADNESS IN IRAQ'S TRIANGLE OF DEATH

BLACK HEARTS: ONE PLATOON'S DESCENT INTO MADNESS IN 

IRAQ'S TRIANGLE OF DEATH
BY JIM FREDERICK

8 

Communication Breakdowns 

THE MOUNTING PRESSURES of combat made encounters with Kunk even more stressful than they had been in garrison. Kunk had three meetings with company leadership every week, one each with the company commanders, company first sergeants, and company executive officers. Many attendees loathed them since so much of them involved Kunk yelling erratically at various people for a variety of reasons. “His reaction to everything was the same,” remarked Charlie’s first sergeant, Dennis Largent. “If you lost a soldier, or if you had cigarette butts on the FOB, it was the same reaction. He would explode on you. He would just lose his mind, which made his whole leadership style just totally ineffective.” 

The meetings frequently started with the tedious but necessary minutiae of war fighting: How many trucks were running? How many suspected insurgents had been detained? How many weapons caches had been found? But something along the way would set Kunk off. The company commanders would joke among themselves before the meetings started: Did you hear that sound? Who’s the Kunk Gun traversing on today? Everybody got Kunked once in a while, but early on a pattern was established: Goodwin and Dougherty got Kunked all the time. It was very direct and very negative. Kunk yelled that they were shitbags; everything they did was fucked up. Sometimes, after the meeting, he would haul one or the other of them into his office to yell at them privately, although it wasn’t really private because the whole episode could be heard down the hall. Bordwell, who started the deployment on such shaky ground, had quickly rehabilitated himself into the battalion star, while the pre deployment favorites suddenly became the problem cases. The company commanders routinely had small problem cases. The company commanders routinely had small debriefing sessions among themselves afterward, just to decompress and assess what had happened in there. "We would sit down with Goodwin and just let him vent, the guy was just beat down,” remembered Bordwell. “Every time he went up there, it was a public whipping session.” 

Many of the company commanders and first sergeants didn’t see Sergeant Major Edwards as any help in turning the battalion into a well-run unit. In many battalions, intentionally or not, the lieutenant colonel and the sergeant major usually assume a good cop/bad cop act. One half of the duo is the hard guy, and the other balances as the more approachable one. In this battalion, however, both were bad cops. “Both assumed the negative role,” explained Bordwell. Many of the lower-ranking soldiers found Edwards to be an ineffectual yes-man. “The battalion sergeant major is supposed to be the guy that when I have a problem, and my first sergeant can’t fix it, I can go to the sergeant major, and he will go to the commander and say, ‘This is a problem. This needs to be fixed,’” said Bravo 1st Platoon’s Chris Payne. “And that did not happen. Or, if it did happen, he wasn’t any good at it.” 

Kunk threatened to fire both Dougherty and Goodwin within the first few months of arrival and several times before the year was through. These were not idle, motivational threats. He made moves. He passed the recommendations up to Ebel, but Ebel would always say no, there was no reason to fire them, and there were no captains in reserve anyway, so you had to work with what you had. When Kunk made his first serious attempt to fire Goodwin, because he perceived that the captain was not moving fast enough to install a piece of radio-relay equipment at the JSB, Goodwin decided he now had three enemies on his hands.“I had Al Qaeda, and I had the Iraqis. Not so much as an enemy, but I had to deal with them on a daily basis,” he said. “And I had Battalion. That’s who my enemies were.” 

Many company-level leaders were concerned about the command climate, and Headquarters and Headquarters Company commander Shawn Umbrell continued to try to mediate between the captains Shawn Umbrell continued to try to mediate between the captains and Kunk, but those efforts were frustrating. “I couldn’t understand why a battalion commander would have such a hard time building a team,” he said. “If you continuously crush their spirit, they are going to be timid, wondering if everything they do will earn them another ass chewing. It had an impact on the way those guys operated.” 

But Kunk did not see any problem with the battalion atmosphere. “I believe it was an open, honest command climate where you could come if you needed help. I thought there was an open and honest dialogue back and forth. I mean, could it be contentious? Yes. But trying to understand the whole environment there and the complexities of it was very challenging.” 

Delta commander Lou Kangas felt that was true—for him, anyway. “I personally felt like I had support. I would go to the boss with bad news and tell him what I was doing about it, and I was treated positively,” he said. “Colonel Kunk and the sergeant major supported me and my first sergeant for the most part. Now, other companies are guaranteed to say something dramatically different.” 

Umbrell tried to convince Kunk to reconsider some of his perceptions of his other subordinates, but Kunk frequently ended discussions with one of his favorite phrases: “Sometimes perception is reality, Shawn.” Umbrell found there wasn’t much he could say once Kunk had rested on that position; the way Kunk saw things equaled reality. 

As the battalion’s operations officer, the man who actually wrote the orders, Major Rob Salome contended that Kunk’s intentions were clear; Charlie and Bravo simply failed to meet them, and that was the problem. “Everyone got a Task and Purpose,” he explained. “Some people can look at the Mission Statement and the Commander’s Intent, and then the Task and Purpose, and tie all those things together to see how it achieves the mission. Some guys didn’t have the ability to make those critical links. One thing that you learn in Ranger School is how it all ties together. And John didn’t have that experience to lean on, so I had to become more and more descriptive as we went through the year. To the point and more descriptive as we went through the year. To the point where I was writing extremely descriptive Mission Statements where I put not only Task and Purpose, but a full Who, What, When, Where, and Why so there was no misunderstanding about what I was trying to say.” 

As he tried to manage both Goodwin and Dougherty, however, Salome discerned a distinct difference between them. “If I saw that John had done something that I thought was just wrong, and I said, ‘John, what were you thinking, man? That’s just dumb,’ he’d reply, ‘Sir, I know. I’m screwed up. I shouldn’t have done it that way. What can I do to fix it?’ Very apologetic and very submissive. But if I called Bill and had the same discussion, it was, ‘No, sir. We are not screwed up. We’ve never been screwed up. We did the right thing and I’ll tell you why.’” 

With this pressure bearing down on him, Goodwin became increasingly filled with self-doubt. He was not the most confident leader to begin with. According to Salome, Goodwin needed to have his every decision validated, which was fine when everyone shared a headquarters. But being physically removed from the battalion, and with battalion-Bravo relations going poorly from day one, Goodwin frequently seemed at a loss, without initiative, or even a firm grasp of what was going on in his sector. 

First Sergeant Skidis and First Lieutenant Habash had supported Goodwin the best they could. They not only had run a big portion of the company’s affairs, they had become his sounding board and confidants. Now, however, with Skidis hurt, Goodwin was even more at sea. Sergeant First Class Andrew Laskoski, who had been the battalion’s scout platoon sergeant, came in to replace Skidis, but it was hard to match the degree to which Skidis had run things and the degree to which Goodwin had relied upon him. 

❤❤❤❤❤❤❤

Soldiers loathed the traffic control points for a variety of reasons. They hated the very idea of them because they despised being tied down to a fixed position. Everything they had ever been trained to do, every piece of Army doctrine they had internalized, told them  that the key to the Army’s lethality was its ability to maneuver and fire, maneuver and fire. If this was the heart of bad-guy country, they wanted to actually go hunt bad guys, not play crossing guard. As Squad Leader Eric Lauzier put it, “If we were supposed to control the area, we said let’s go seize control of it, not sit around waiting to get hit. Let’s do patrols, set up ambushes and observation positions, do recon, control the tempo. Let’s put the pressure on them, instead of the reverse.” 

But not only were the T.C.P's static, they were undermanned.There was never any consensus about just how many men there should be at each position. Before late June 2006, Kunk issued no written guidance to the companies on staffing requirements at the T.C.P's, and Goodwin never issued written guidance to the platoons. Recollections of what the verbal guidance was varies widely. A squad at each position was the preference, but with four or five T.C.P's to cover, and with the company depleted through casualties and mandatory midtour leaves, that almost never happened. Add in missions that spontaneously arose—whether B.D.A's (battle damage assessments), Quick Reaction Forces, or investigating something suspicious that somebody at Bravo’s headquarters had seen on the J-Lens—and it was not uncommon for a T.C.P to have just three or four soldiers for an extended period of time. 

Squad leaders routinely received ad hoc mission assignments over the radio. The sergeant would frequently radio back to say that he only had five, or six, or seven guys total, and that he was the only N.C.O there. He would ask: Do you really want me to leave three guys at the T.C.P, and none of them a sergeant? Affirmative, would come the response. Do the mission. “Now you are going a click and a half to two clicks out in the bush with four guys,” Lauzier said. “You need four guys just to carry one casualty. What am I going to do if we get hit out there? Or the T.C.P gets hit and there are three guys there? You are screwed.” The T.C.P's were also shockingly underfortified. After 1st Platoon’s initial several-day rotation at the T.C.P's, platoon sergeant Phil Miller went to Goodwin to complain. Specifically, he wanted to get rid of T.C.P.2, which he thought was a death trap. “I told Captain Goodwin that it’s in the open, there’s no cover, it’s only a click from T.C.P.1,” he recalled. “So what do I gotta do? What would you like to see happen at that T.C.P to get rid of it?” Goodwin told Miller that he was worried about the canal running under the T.C.P. If it was undefended, insurgents could lay an I.E.D big enough to make the road completely impassable. “So, the next time we went out to the T.C.P's, I took seventy-five strands of wire down there and told Sergeant Nelson, ‘You need to make sure no one can get anywhere near this canal.’” 

Nelson and his squad did as they were told. “We got it all done, and I told Goodwin, TCP2’s good to go. You can’t get anywhere near that fucking canal now, that bitch is locked down.” But TCP2 stayed. “Well, then I was pissed,” Miller said. “Because I was told one thing, and now I’m being told another. I don’t know whose call it was, but my big thing is if you’re fighting on the ground, it should be your decision.” 

The overwhelming majority of interactions with locals at the T.C.P's were routine, just men and women and kids trying to get wherever they were going and be on their way. But there were enough odd or disconcerting interchanges from the start to make the whole experience tense and unnerving, all the time. Sometimes it was like the Iraqis were testing them. Sometimes it seemed like a car would pass the stop signs or disobey a stop order from a soldier just to see how fast the soldier would resort to a warning shot. When they were back at the F.O.B, the soldiers loved reading in the news about how Iraqis were being terrorized at checkpoints because they were unfamiliar with how roadblocks worked or, since so many Iraqis were illiterate, they couldn’t read the warning signs. What utter bullshit, they would exclaim. After two and a half years, every single fucking Iraqi knows exactly what a checkpoint is, they would shout, and exactly how they work. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they said, if there was a car speeding for the nogo line, that Iraqi was doing it on purpose. 

Iraqi men would loiter around the TCPs. It was obvious to the soldiers that they were doing recon on how the checkpoint operated. If you sent someone out to go talk to them, they would slink away, or if you happened to sidle up to them before they could get away, they would turn as friendly as could be. 

“Oh, hello, Meester. Very good. USA, number one!” they would say, all smiles. Likewise, it was common for a car or truck that had been waiting in line to pull out of the queue and speed away as soon as the driver could verify that full searches were in effect. That is exactly the kind of car that sergeants would love to send a team to follow, but there were rarely enough guys at a TCP to do that, so they just had to let them drive off. Other times, the soldiers would get scowls and get into scuffles with men pulled from cars, obviously humiliated, obviously pissed off, either about the rough way they were being handled or perhaps about the fact that their women were being looked at, commented on, talked to, ogled. Sometimes an Iraqi man would actually push a soldier. Sometimes there would be an interpreter to try to smooth emotions on each side, but often not. Soldiers couldn’t figure out why they got any resistance at all. The power dynamic at that moment was not exactly equal. But when they did get attitude, many soldiers found that a swift and solid jab to the kidney was very useful in extracting maximum compliance. 

By far the biggest complaint the men had with the Sportster T.C.P's was the way they were forced to look for I.E.D's. Every morning around dawn, soldiers had to conduct “dismounted I.E.D sweeps,” essentially walking from their post to the next T.C.P and back looking for makeshift bombs. The policy was to walk in a V formation, with the tips of the V well off of the road looking inward, but Sportster was so narrow, with built-up areas or other features such as reeds or canals coming all the way up to the shoulder, that soldiers had to do the sweeps basically walking on top of the street. For many, this was almost unbearably stressful. “Every morning before conducting an I.E.D sweep, you truly felt that this was the day that you were going to die,” Lauzier once wrote. The fear and the mental stress were cumulative. It was not so much   that the men were asked to do something hazardous, it was the daily, grinding awareness that tomorrow they would have to do it all over again. 

“Let me put it to you this way,” explained Private Justin Watt. “Take something you do every day, like go to the mailbox. Every day, you go to the mailbox. Now say that every time you go to the mailbox, there was, say, a 25 percent chance that the mailbox was going to blow up in your face. The explosion might not be big enough to kill you. But it could be.You just don’t know. Either way, you do know that there was a one-in-four chance that it was going to blow right the fuck up in your face. But you have to go to the mailbox. There is no way you cannot go to the mailbox. So, I ask you: How many times do you think you could go to the mailbox before you started going crazy?” 

The strain, for some, was debilitating. “How many times can you wake up in the morning knowing you have to do this death walk?” wondered Private Justin Cross, an eighteen-year-old from Richmond, Virginia. “How many times can you walk down the road saying, ‘I might die this time’ before you’re like, ‘Fuck it, I hope the next one does just fucking kill me, because I’m tired of this shit’?” 

Lauzier, as one of the leaders, did his best to keep his fear hidden, but he could not understand why the Army would make him do this. They found a lot of I.E.D's this way, no doubt, but they also got blown up a lot too. “Men would be engulfed by the smoke and you would lose visual,” Lauzier wrote. “Debris from the explosion would be hitting you.” Once the post explosion fear subsided, the headaches, ringing ears, or deafness might last for hours or into the next day. But no matter how fatalistic Lauzier and his men became, and how convinced that the battalion and the brigade valued their Humvees more than their men, he took pride in the fact that they kept getting up in the morning and kept doing what they were told. “It is amazing that these men, mostly boys, did their duty and conducted themselves with such courage and constantly put themselves in harm’s way to preserve the lives of their fellow soldiers, with total disregard for their own personal  safety,” he wrote. 

Ebel understood that the men disliked the T.C.P's, but he mistook the primary emotion they inspired, and he argued that it really wasn’t that bad out there anyway. “The thing is that it gets boring,” he said. “That’s the reality. And it doesn’t matter how effective you are, for the individual soldier he’s just seeing his job as ‘I’m in the Humvee, I’m in this hut, I don’t have the best food, my other guys are out there on base camps.They don’t have to live like that.’” 

The N.C.O's would constantly ask to do I.E.D sweeps using the Humvees, but the requests were always denied because the human eyeball is, in fact, one of the best I.E.D finding devices on Earth. Some of the squad leaders devised workarounds. Lauzier would study a map and plot a route the morning before. On the morning of the patrol, his men would take over a house, head to the roof, scout a stretch of road with their binoculars, and then move forward. Scout, move forward to the next building. Scout, move forward to the next building. It was a completely unauthorized way of doing business, but it was effective. 

The T.C.P's never eliminated I.E.D's on Sportster. People still got blown up all the time, though the I.E.D's did decrease in deadliness over the year. With American eyes on the road fairly regularly, insurgents could not lay in hundred-pound bombs anymore. But they could drop small package bombs out of a hole cut in a car’s floorboard or quickly bury one while pretending to change a tire. Even so, the staffing rotations were exhausting the men. “My vehicle got hit on Sportster once,” related Alpha commander Bordwell, “and I could see the eyes of the dude in the tower from where I got hit with the I.E.D. I went to that tower, and I looked back and I could see the hole, nothing obscuring it. So I asked the soldier, ‘What the hell, man?’ He was like, ‘Ah, sir, I’ve been on guard for eight hours.’ So, you can’t really yell at the soldier. Well, you can. But how does anybody stay sharp for that long a time when there’s no one to replace him?” Staffing became a constant and contentious topic of discussion at battalion-wide meetings as well as during one-on-one consultations between battalion staff officers and company-level leaders. These discussions rarely deviated from this: The companies routinely declared they did not have enough men, and Battalion countered that they did, but they weren’t using them efficiently. Kunk always sneered at claims of overtaxed duty rosters. 

“Bullshit!” he would shout. “Do I have to show you how to do it? Do I have to draw it out for you myself?” When presented with compelling shortfalls, he would ask, “What are your cooks and mechanics doing?” When told that they were cooking and working on vehicles, he insisted that every specialist in the Army is a rifleman first, and they could soldier too. 

“That was always his big thing, to use them on missions,” said First Lieutenant Tim Norton. “Sure, sounds great. So they come with us for a huge operation. And once we come back, everybody is saying ‘Man, I can’t wait for some fried chicken.’ Oh, but whoops, the cooks are racked out. Can you really tell them, thanks for coming on that mission with us, and now that we are all taking a break, you need to get cooking?” 

Operations Officer Salome believed troops-to-task calculations were straightforward mathematics. “I would take the task that we had assigned each of the company commanders, and then I would say, ‘Okay, this is what they have.’ I had been a commander of two companies by that point, and I’d say to myself, ‘If I had the resources that they have, could I accomplish the mission that they have?’ And, you know, we always felt like they had what they needed.” Executive Officer Fred Wintrich concurred. “If you had a combat power problem, you always had a sympathetic, attentive audience, but it had to start with a cogent argument. If your math sucked, you got told to pound sand.” 

Salome conceded that sometimes it took a little creativity to solve an apparent staffing scarcity, but he found Goodwin the least adept at this kind of thinking. “If a unit from 3rd Platoon was going out to recon a certain area in their Humvees, and 1st Platoon needed chow at T.C.P.1, then why can’t 3rd Platoon take the chow out to T.C.P.1 on their way to the other mission?” he asked. “That is a simplified example, but I don’t think that John ever really looked at it like that. He looked at those tasks as discrete things. He didn’t multitask anybody. And if you don’t multitask everyone, then you’re never going to get it done.” Sometimes, Salome said, Goodwin would send three separate patrols to Mahmudiyah in one day, each for a reason as mundane as picking up a spare part, even though a scheduled supply run the next day could have accommodated all four trips. 

“Hey, man,” Salome would say. “You just wasted a patrol, and you didn’t get the mission done that I had given you because you were running supplies back and forth all day long. Help me help you, okay?” 

But others maintain that 1st Battalion quests for efficiencies didn’t just stretch the staffing models to their limits; they started violating them. “Several times, Kunk tried to tell me I could do something when my troop-to-task roster said I couldn’t,” asserted one of the companies’ first sergeants. “He said, ‘You got this amount, and you can do this.’ I said that was possible only if I plan on letting this guy who just came in from a twenty-four-hour mission sleep for five hours before rolling him out for another twenty-four-hour mission. And you can do that—for a day or two. But for a week or longer? To have that be the normal duty rotation? No. Someone’s going to get hurt.” 

Charlie’s First Sergeant Largent asserted that not only was the math not working, the battalion was playing loose on their reports to brigade. “They would call three guys a squad,” he said. “But you can’t turn three guys into nine unless you are lying. They were bullshitting brigade. They were sending up reports saying this checkpoint is manned, but if the guidance is you got to have at least a squad out there with two vehicles, and if you’re not doing that, then you are bullshitting them.” 

Charlie’s Executive Officer Shoaf had similar convictions that information was getting distorted as it got passed up. “I saw reports that I had written myself misquoted by the time they got up just to the brigade level,” he said. “It’s not like that one little piece of information is going to lose the war, but when you see the cumulative effect of information becoming washed in order to tell a story that a battalion or brigade commander wants to tell to their highers, then you got real problems. That’s the more sinister side of it.”

9 

The Mean Squad 

IN THE EARLY days of the deployment, whenever Bravo’s 1st Platoon was on a T.C.P rotation, Lauzier’s 3rd Squad usually volunteered to occupy T.C.P.3, because that’s where shootouts were most likely. They preferred to be out hunting bad guys rather than sitting on their butts waving through cars all day. Whenever they had enough men, they would do patrols, search houses, see if they could draw fire.The Army phrase for this is “moving to contact,” and, until they got sick of absolutely everything about the war, including killing, that is what 3rd Squad liked to do best. They were always up for a mission—especially if the answer to their questions “Will we get to shoot something? Will we get to kill people?” was yes. Lieutenant Britt called 3rd Squad “Task Force Lauzier.” It was a designation Lauzier loved. 

The Arabic interpreters (called “terps” by the soldiers) who worked with the company told them that the locals knew who everybody was. It did not take the locals long, they said, to know which platoons were which. And if the locals knew you all, they told the men, it was an easy bet that the insurgents knew you guys too. One interpreter told them that the locals even knew which squads were which, and that 3rd Squad was known as the Mean Squad. Third Squad did not mind this at all. They took a kind of pride in it. 

They ran their checkpoints ruthlessly. If they were stopping and checking cars, it could be a slow process, with only one car allowed through the barbed-wire serpentine at a time. Long traffic jams were common, and the soldiers were impatient with Iraqi impatience. “They’ll push your buttons,” Watt said. “They will play a game of chicken with you. They’d get impatient, pull out of line,  and gun the engine to the front of the line. We’d say, ‘Stop!’ and, bang, put a shot through their engine block. I don’t know who they are. I’m not going to let a VBIED [vehicle-borne IED] roll up on me.” 

When the battalion put out orders to stop firing warning shots at the cars themselves, they would fire into the dirt and find other ways to teach a lesson. “You didn’t come in our wire without my okay,” said Lauzier. “Because once they are inside your wire, you have already lost. If you came in our wire without my say-so, you got thumped. We would pull them out and rough them up. Check them against the vehicle. Give them a kidney shot, tell them, ‘I’m not fucking around. Do not come in my perimeter. I own this shit. I’m the sheriff here.’” 

Sometimes the soldiers would sit the offenders in the sun for three or four hours. Not do anything else to them, just sit them in the sun. “I would drink my water in front of them, and go, ‘Mmmmm, so good,’” said Watt. “‘Are you fucking hot, you dumbass? You want to be stupid? If you keep being stupid, I’m going to treat you like an idiot.’” 

Occasionally, one or the other of the lieutenants would pull Lauzier aside and tell him that he was being too aggressive, that he should tone down the physicality. He would, respectfully, tell the young lieutenant that he didn’t know what he was talking about. 

“I’ve been here before,” he told them. “I know how these fuckers are. You can’t show them any kindness, because kindness is weakness. You gotta let them know you’re in charge.” If there was an error in judgment regarding the use of force, he’d rather use too much than too little. He’d rather absorb the second-guessing consequences than have more Americans dead. 

Yribe and Lauzier were in absolute agreement on this, and they formed a unified front on how the squad conducted itself despite their vastly different personal styles. Lauzier was a bundle of manic energy, excitable, almost hyper, while Yribe was Mr. Chill, self possessed and laid-back, even when in a firefight. 

The constant gunplay bred an intense hostility. “It is well in excess of a hundred and twenty degrees, you had just been out on a six-hour patrol, and some sort of bug you just caught made you vomit and shit yourself with watery diarrhea all at the same time,” described Lauzier. “You have finally gotten back to the TCP, and you are just starting to clean yourself up, and then somebody starts shooting at you. All you can think after that is ‘All right, motherfucker.You want to shoot me? I’m going to fucking kill you.’ So you head to the house where you know the shots came from, and you are going to put a lot of hate and discontent out there. We would patrol in there, toss their house, throw their shit around and go, ‘Who the fuck fired at us? They were from your house. And we know you know. So I’m going to be a pain in your ass until you tell me.’” 

On November 11, Yribe and members of 3rd Squad went out on their first-ever patrol with Civilian Affairs, the community outreach arm of the Army, to hand out Beanie Babies or pencils or soccer balls. They left FOB Yusufiyah and hadn’t walked more than three hundred yards when Yribe noticed a car speeding toward them too fast for his liking. He shouted, “Stop!” and got no response, so he fired a warning shot into the dirt. Still getting no response, he fired two more shots until the car finally slowed down. One of those shots had ricocheted and hit a teenage boy standing nearby. From the front, it looked like he just had a pinhole wound, but the bullet had blown a crater the size of a grapefruit out his back. The Civilian Affairs patrol was over before it started. “You can’t really go hand out Beanie Babies after you shoot a fucking kid,” said Watt. 

Watt had taken an advanced first aid class, he was frequently the designated medic whenever Specialist Collin Sharpness, the platoon’s real medic, wasn’t on patrol. Watt started patching the boy up. It was his first major injury and it was an odd one. On the one hand, much of the kid’s back was missing, and Watt had to quickly go through a series of complex procedures: sealing the wound off, deflating the boy’s lung. On the other hand, the boy was conscious and alert, it didn’t seem like he was in too much pain, and there wasn’t a lot of blood. “You’re doing it all wrong!” Lauzier shouted. 

“I’m nervous. I’ve never done this shit before!” Watt yelled back. They sent the boy to the local hospital. Back at the FOB, Yribe got yelled at for about thirty minutes but it was ultimately deemed a clean shot. 

Six days later, 1st Platoon headed back out to the TCPs to relieve 3rd Platoon, with 3rd Squad taking over TCP3. The next morning, Lauzier woke up Yribe to tell him that somebody had found an IED farther north on Sportster and that he and Miller were going to go check it out. Lauzier was leaving Yribe in charge of Cortez, Barker, Watt, and several other soldiers. Bravo halted all traffic on Sportster until the IED threat was resolved. When Yribe got onto the road, there was a line of cars stacked up, honking, trying to get through, trying to figure out why the traffic was stopped. 

Tension was escalating, and Yribe was nervous that he was losing control of the situation. He decided to fire a warning shot to get the locals to disperse. He passed by Cortez and Watt, walked over to the front of the wire, and aimed his rifle into the ground near the line of vehicles. He fired one shot but it ricocheted off of a tractor rather than hitting the ground, and pierced the windshield of a pickup truck. There was much commotion. All the other cars that were waiting in line peeled out and sped off. The driver of the pickup started pulling a woman out of the cab. 

“You fucking shot her in the head,” Cortez said. Yribe yelled to the medic, who was at the other end of the TCP. The medic started running as Watt got his first aid bag and ran over as well. By the time they arrived, the woman was on the ground, her head oozing blood. Watt knelt down and stopped cold. Her brains were coming out of her skull, white and gelatinous, and she was making shallow, rattling breaths, which the medic said meant she was “expectant”— medic-speak for “about to die.” The other woman in the truck had been injured by flying glass, and the medic started treating her.  

Watt did not move. He was watching a woman die and there was nothing he could do about it. A third woman from the truck knelt down next to him, grabbed his hands, and pushed them toward the first aid bag, as if to say, “Do something, do something to save her life.” It was always this way, Watt thought. Sometimes Iraqis seemed not to believe that Americans did not have magical powers. They seemed to think that the Americans were capable of fixing every problem—generate their electricity, make their water run clean, bring their sisters back to life—but just chose not to. 

Watt didn’t know what to do except say to the woman, “I am sorry. I am so sorry.” 

Yribe called Lauzier on the radio: “Dude, you should get down here right away.” 

“Why?” 

“I just killed a woman.” 

Yribe and Cortez conferred briefly, and Cortez started moving the concertina wire and the stop signs farther out, so that it looked like the truck had driven into the TCP’s kill zone. Although the shot had been an accident, the men were scared that no one would believe them. Yribe had been involved in an accidental shooting just days before. By simply moving the wires and fabricating aggressiveness on the part of the driver, it would be far easier to convince the inevitable Army investigator that the death was justifiable. 

Within an hour and a half, a lieutenant from one of the battalion’s other companies had been assigned to conduct the AR 15-6. Common investigations in the Army, AR 15-6s are routinely ordered up by a commander in the aftermath of a death or other major event. They are usually informal, with an officer assigned to gather evidence, conduct interviews, formulate an analysis, and offer findings and recommendations. While merely fact-finding reports, they are frequently used to determine whether to proceed with a legal investigation, and they can be presented as evidence later because they include sworn statements from participants and witnesses. By the time the lieutenant showed up that afternoon, most of the men at the TCP had already written sworn statements about what had transpired. 

The statements filed by Cortez, Barker, and Watt, the only soldiers who claimed to have seen what had happened (Yribe either never wrote a statement or it has been lost—he does not recall writing one), are as consistent as they are inaccurate. They lied that Cortez was pulling a strand of concertina wire across the street when a fast-moving truck approached and did not stop, forcing Yribe to shoot before the vehicle hit Cortez. With no reason to suspect that the sworn statements were bogus, the investigating officer found no wrongdoing on Yribe’s part.

10 

“Soldiers Are Not Stupid” 

OFTEN, THE BRAVO platoons received missions that they viewed as recklessly dangerous or a waste of time, or both. One of the most hated types became known as “Chasing the J-Lens.” The JLens was a high-powered video aerial observation system with remote-controllable camera mounts attached to a high tower, so a technician could search wide swaths of the company’s sector from FOB Yusufiyah’s tactical operations center. When the company headquarters saw something on the screen it deemed suspect, it would often send a fire team or two to check it out. 

After the first JSB rotation, parts of 1st Platoon were ordered to investigate some suspicious-looking crates in a field. They mounted up and headed to the coordinates, but the J-Lens had not been properly calibrated, so they were perhaps miles off course. For hours, Bravo headquarters had them crisscrossing the area looking for the crates. 

“Bulldog Main, this is 1-7. We just gave you our grids, and now we have our infrared strobe on.Can you see us, over?” Miller asked at several points. 

“Negative” came the response from the TOC (tactical operations center). The calibrations were so far off, they weren’t even looking in the right zone. 

“Well, I don’t know what else to do, because we are where we are,” Miller said. “And the crates aren’t here. Over.” When they finally found suspicious boxes, they were full of eggplants. 

Even when the J-Lens was properly calibrated, these were still unpopular missions. Bravo headquarters would routinely send JLens chase missions straight to the TCPs to investigate a suspicious vehicle, say, or check out a guy who was digging a hole in the middle of the night. And again, a squad leader would be forced to split an already small unit into two smaller elements. 

“You know we only have six dudes, right?” the squad leader would ask. Usually by the time they walked out to the grid location, whatever they were trying to check out would be gone. 

Another despised mission company-wide was the “gravel run”— escorting convoys of gravel from Camp Striker to FOB Mahmudiyah. The fractured relations between Bravo and 1st Battalion were already trickling down to every level of the company. Word was getting out that Kunk had it in for Bravo, so it did not take much prompting for Bravo to view all of the battalion’s moves with suspicion. A major source of resentment was the notion that Bravo, with all that was going on in their sector, had to assist in the beautification of FOB Mahmudiyah, especially when that FOB had Alpha, Delta, Echo, and HHC on site. “Colonel Kunk wanted gravel on the battalion FOB,” said 2nd Platoon Leader Jerry Eidson. “He wanted rocks, I guess, because it was muddy. I don’t know why. But I do know I routinely had to give up half of my platoon to Colonel Kunk so he could have gravel on his FOB. I’m not sure if Colonel Kunk’s intent was malicious, but facts are facts. My guys spent a lot of time pulling security for gravel trucks, not fighting the insurgency.” 

“Area Denial” was a third type of mission that raised hackles throughout the battalion. The idea was to lay an ambush in a zone that someone in division or brigade headquarters had calculated to be an ideal place from which to launch a rocket or mortar at the Green Zone. It was irrelevant that no rocket had ever been fired from that area before or that local commanders had no intelligence that rocket teams ever operated in the area. Company commanders had long lists of places where they wanted to set ambushes based on actual enemy behavior, and they resented having to send a platoon to stare at an empty field for eight hours based on hypotheticals. These kinds of missions took their toll on the men’s confidence. “Soldiers are not stupid,” said Lauzier. “They know when the chain of command does not know what it is doing.” 

It wasn’t just the soldiers, either. Soldiers complain, all the time, about everything. To complain is part of the soldier’s very essence. But one of the most valuable functions a platoon leader serves is to explain to a bunch of complaining soldiers why a mission is not stupid, a time waste, or a death trap. He helps the soldiers understand the often nonobvious logic of unpopular missions. But 2nd Platoon’s Lieutenant Jerry Eidson found he had trouble rationalizing missions to his men, because he didn’t understand them himself. 

Bravo’s platoon leaders frequently received missions they had to saddle up for immediately, even though Goodwin knew about them the night before or several days before. Often the missions were delayed for hours because men were either taking showers, sleeping, or otherwise unavailable, simply because they did not know they were on deck. And once the missions were assigned, the instructions were vague and incomplete. “The orders we got didn’t make sense at all,” Eidson recalled. “They were ‘Go here and do this’ and that’s all. There was no purpose why. I had a hard time dealing with that. I needed more information about why we were doing things. I would call up to get Task and Purpose and some of those were just retarded. Some of the missions I just wouldn’t do. Is that wrong? Yes, it’s probably wrong. But I was not going to risk the lives of my men for something that didn’t make sense.” 

Charlie’s relationship with the battalion brass was no better than Bravo’s. In many ways, it was worse. Dougherty and Largent were by far the most combative of the company leadership teams with Kunk. Like Bravo,Charlie was away from the flagpole, so seemingly simple things, such as communications connectivity, were difficult, especially during the early days. Battalion and brigade headquarters wanted immediate, accurate, and complete reporting for every event, and they were impatient with the excuse that some time delay and errors were an inevitable part of any information relay system. “If I were up in Mahmudiyah,” said Largent, “I could walk over and explain everything in detail and answer all of your goddamn questions, and everything would be fine. Instead, you’ve got questions about my reporting, and you’re not going to see me in person for another three or four days. And that shit just festers and causes a rift.” Like Bravo, Charlie also had an early, dumb accident —a soldier fell out of a guard tower—that earned them unwanted attention and created lots of second-guessing. 

But unlike Goodwin, Dougherty and Largent did not silently absorb Kunk’s vitriol. Dougherty and Largent consciously decided, painful as it was, that they would not let Kunk bully them, and they would object, every step of the way, to his insistence that he knew how to run their company better than they did. When Kunk told Dougherty he was fucked up, Dougherty would respond, “No, sir, we are not fucked up,” and try to explain why. Sometimes he would rebuff Kunk’s abuse with a tenacity and vehemence that would elicit knowing smirks and glances that said “Here we go again” from the other commanders. He and Kunk got into loud, long fights on every topic imaginable. “They would argue about the color of an orange if they could,” as Goodwin put it. 

And during the first sergeants’ meetings, Largent’s interactions with Kunk were just as fractious. “I can only assume that it was because of our personal dislike for each other,” said Largent. “I hated him. I grew to hate him as a leader. And I’m sure that came across in some of those meetings. I tried to keep my mouth shut, but I just couldn’t do that sometimes.” 

The best way to hunt for IEDs was a constant source of tension. Early on, for example, Bordwell’s Alpha Company was having great success in their area doing dismounted IED searches with the V formation. Because many of the roads he hunted on allowed his men to spread out, and most of the IEDs were command-wire detonated with two hundred or more yards of wire, his guys would frequently jump the triggerman in the bush or find the wire. Based  on that success, Kunk enforced this method of IED hunting throughout all areas of operations. 

“Well,” said Bordwell, “different A.O, different terrain, different IED cell.” In other areas, remote-detonated or pressure-plate IEDs were more common; there was no wire to intercept. Likewise, some roads were bounded by canals, making it impossible to search a road on foot unless you were standing on it. “So it’s ignorance saying this or that technique works for everybody,” said Bordwell. “That was one of the fights we were fighting as company commanders. To say, ‘Hey, don’t tell me how to do that. Because it doesn’t work in my A.O. Or, it might have worked last week, but it doesn’t work this week, because that guy has a brain, and he’s watching me respond, so he’s changing his techniques.’” 

Increasingly frustrated by Kunk’s micromanagement, Largent and Dougherty focused on the concept of “commander’s intent” instead. They aimed to fulfill what the battalion wanted accomplished, and ignored its proscriptions on how to do it if they disagreed with them. “The battalion commander’s job is not to tell you how to suck the egg,” Largent quipped. “But he was just terrible about telling you exactly how to hold the egg, and on and on. We refused to let them tell us how to suck the egg.” 

More galling to Largent was that Kunk would explode if he figured out they had deviated from his instructions, even if they had been successful. “Why would you direct us to do the most tactically unsound method of clearing that route for the type of terrain we had? And then, when we didn’t do it your way but were successful anyway, you still got angry? But he’d get off-the-charts pissed if we didn’t use the technique, the exact technique, that he had specified. It came across like he was angry that we didn’t get blown up.That’s how silly it was.But we weren’t going to put our guys at undue risk if there was another way to do it safer, and we would get yelled at about it later.” Sometimes they told Kunk, “If you want me to do it that way, you’ll have to issue an order, because then it is on you.” 

The battalion leadership didn’t see it that way and came to believe that soldier safety was taking precedence over mission  accomplishment. So they generated even more detailed instructions. Those, in turn, increased Charlie’s perception that they were being babysat. “If I gave Dougherty a mission, I would tell him, ‘Your task is to interdict along this route,’” explained Operations Officer Salome. “Well, if I just said that, he would take the fastest method he could to get what I said done to keep his guys from getting hurt. They’d go out and do that mission in an hour, which, in my mind, should take four to six hours. That does not achieve the commander’s intent. So I had to write, ‘You’ll take a platoon.You’ll leave no later than this time. And you’ll return no earlier than this time. And you’ll go in this area from here to here.’ It wasn’t necessarily that they were blatantly not doing what we said. It was that they were being less than honest with the way they accomplished it. They were doing the task, but they weren’t achieving the intent, so they weren’t accomplishing the mission.” 

Largent had little patience for Salome’s lectures. “Major Salome?” he exclaimed. “He might have left the FOB three or four times. None of those guys had a clue.The reality of what was going on out there, they were blind to it.” In Charlie’s opinion, the battalion did not understand that the operations tempo they were asking the company to perform outstripped the limits of long-run human endurance. “I’m going to be honest about this: we intentionally pulled the patrols sometimes,” revealed Matt Shoaf, Charlie’s executive officer. “We definitely walked the border of not obeying orders from time to time. And we’d just take the heat for it.” 

First Strike’s second month in theater ended with a spike in violence that hit both U.S. forces and Iraqi locals. On November 23, Sergeant Yribe, a group of IAs, and a MiTT team took a patrol down Caveman, a dirt road that ran from Sportster northwest all the way to the Russian power plant. During this patrol they discovered a shallow grave with a body that had been there for a while. Yribe called it up, providing grid locations. “We were real lackadaisical,” he confessed. “If we had known at that time how dangerous Caveman was, we wouldn’t have been there. We were  just ignorant enough not to be scared.” 

At about 1:40 p.m. the next day, some military police from the 170th MP Company, 3rd Infantry Division, traveled out there to retrieve the body. Near the gravesite, they hit an IED big enough to blow the Humvee upside down and into the canal, killing four. Earlier that day, a suicide car bomber, whose hands were wired to the steering wheel, drove into the southern gate of the Mahmudiyah Hospital, killing at least two dozen locals, injuring thirty more, and wounding several soldiers who were on a Civilian Affairs visit. And, after weeks of constant shelling, a mortar round finally slammed home at FOB Yusufiyah on the afternoon of the 24th, injuring three soldiers. Five days later, a 120mm round crashed right through FOB Mahmudiyah’s headquarters. No one was injured because much of the staff was at the chow hall for lunch. If the headquarters had been fully staffed, much of the leadership of First Strike would have been wiped out.

DECEMBER2005

11 

Nelson and Casica 

AFTER FIRST STRIKE took back Sportster, Lieutenant Colonel Kunk turned his attention to other initiatives throughout the battalion’s area of operations, including doing more community outreach, bolstering water and electricity capacity, establishing better relations with the locals, and helping to build government institutions that had both power and credibility. Within Bravo’s area, specifically, he saw the next priority as pushing out to terra incognita in the west and making overtures to the Quarguli sheikhs who lived along Route Malibu on the banks of the Euphrates. 

Some sub-clans of the Quargulis, along with certain arms of the Janabis, were among the tribal groupings most deeply entrenched in the insurgency. But at least in official, daytime, face-to-face meetings, Kunk built a fast rapport with them. “The Quarguli would guarantee my life the whole time I was there,” Kunk said. “I could move up and down Malibu freely. I was known as the Sheikh of Peace. I felt secure when I would go meet the Quarguli sheikhs.” Sheikhs, with ties to various factions of the insurgencies or organized crime, were similar to Mafia bosses. They may have had their hands in all sorts of shady dealings, but they were smart enough that it was difficult, if not impossible, to tie them directly to anything illegal. And, like syndicate kingpins, they invested great energy in maintaining a veneer of respectability. A particular sheikh might be an essential ally in keeping a specific stretch of road free of I.E.D's.But his underlings might have been just as active in funding an I.E.D cell that focused on a different geography or in running guns the whole time he was talking to the Americans about a weapons turn-in program. The military had no choice but to work with the sheikhs even when they were of questionable character and loyalty. 

It was from these and other sheikhs that Kunk got the idea of how he would take control of Caveman, the road about a mile or so to the northeast of Route Malibu and the Euphrates River, where Quarguli Village was located. Caveman was a gravel road split down the center by one of the larger canals in the area. The canal was concrete-lined, sixty feet across and twenty feet deep. Since neither side of the road was paved, it was very easy to plant large, deeply buried IEDs there. The key value of Caveman, according to what the sheikhs told Kunk, was the bridges that spanned the canal, which made north-south travel easier. 

“The sheikhs would say, ‘How dumb are you, Coalition?’” Kunk remembered. “‘Why don’t you drop the bridges along the canal, then the insurgents can’t move across them?’ So that is what we did.” But before those bridges could be blown up or dismantled Caveman had to be cleared, and Caveman was a beast. 

Others considered Caveman unimportant, because it ran parallel between Route Malibu and Mullah Fayyad Highway and perpendicular to Sportster, all of which were hard-topped roads and fairly well controlled by the Army. Throughout November, Bravo had done some sporadic patrolling of Caveman, but in early December it began dedicated clearance missions. The I.E.D's were so densely packed that the road was more of a minefield than a thoroughfare. Once, they found twenty-six I.E.D's in one three-mile stretch. But because the insurgents could re-seed the dirt-topped Caveman so easily the moment U.S. forces left, it had to be re-cleared every single time. “The first time we went down there, we just turned around and came back,” remembered Goodwin. “No intentions of setting T.C.P's up there or staying in any way. So why are we doing this?” 

The Caveman missions were likewise baffling to the soldiers. “Battalion’s idea was ‘It’s our piece of land, and we want to go down it,’” explained Chris Payne, Bravo 1st Platoon’s 2nd Squad leader. “‘We will not be denied using a piece of land in our area.’ Okay. Good job. But there was no tactical advantage to having that land. We weren’t going to use it. We weren’t going to keep it. We  keep it. We weren’t patrolling anything on the road other than the road itself. There weren’t any houses. There weren’t any villages. It was just a dirt road.” 

❤❤❤❤❤❤❤

In early December, 1st Platoon began another multi-day rotation out at the traffic control points. First Squad, with Staff Sergeant Travis Nelson in charge, headed down to TCP2, which was on the intersection of Sportster and a smaller east-west canal road. There was a small structure on the northeast corner that was empty, but the men, at that time, were told not to occupy it. So, for three to five days at a time, the squad lived at the TCP itself, by the side of the road on a few cots protected by strands of concertina wire. When soldiers wanted to sleep, take refuge from the elements, or just come off of a combat footing even for a minute or two, they had to do so either on the cots or in—or under—their Humvees. They were supposed to keep their helmets and body armor on at all times, whether they were on guard or not. Even when they were off guard, there was nowhere for them to go that was safe. For twenty-four hours a day, uninterrupted for days on end, even when shaving or brushing their teeth, in the heat and the dust and the wind, they had to keep forty pounds of gear on. The men found it virtually impossible to do this without going crazy. 

December 10 started off as a beautiful morning. Watt, Yribe, and others from 3rd Squad not pulling guard or patrolling out of TCP1 were playing Spades. Watt remembered turning his face to the sun and letting the not-yet-too-hot rays wash over him. “You know,” he thought, “we have been here for a couple of months now. This might not be so bad after all.” 

Platoon Sergeant Phil Miller, who was at TCP3 with other men of 3rd Squad, began a mission to get some more concertina wire from Yusufiyah as well as a resupply of food and other necessities. He grabbed Lauzier and a couple of other soldiers for the trip north, and stopped to pick up another Humvee and three more soldiers from TCP2 around 10:30 a.m. Nelson and Sergeant Kenith Casica  had just come off of several hours of guard duty. They were sitting on the cots in the open, central area. They had removed their helmets to brush their teeth and shave. 

Private First Class Jesse Spielman and Specialist David Babineau had relieved them, with Spielman in the Humvee’s gun turret looking south and Babineau pulling guard on foot nearby, on the east side of the Humvee, the opposite side of Nelson and Casica. Every company has a guy like Babineau. The twenty-five-year-old had been a specialist for years and was happy to stay that way. He was a solid soldier, was well-liked, and had leadership potential. Every once in a while, he would catch the eye of a lieutenant or a senior N.C.O who would say, hey, Babs, what’s your deal? You wanna move up? We could send you to the promotion board, make you a sergeant? He would always say, no, thanks, sir, who needs the headache? I’m good where I am. The other members of the squad were manning the serpentines to the north and south. 

Pulling up to TCP2, Miller asked Nelson and Casica what was new. They told him that the night before, they had received a tip about an attack. According to their informant—a guy who had passed along solid info in the past—four guys with guns and RPGs were going to roll up around noon in a black Opel sedan from the southeast. 

“If you say there is going to be an attack, why don’t you have your shit on?” Miller demanded. 

Will do, one of them said, and asked Miller when he would be back. About an hour later, Miller responded. He figured he could finish his run to the FOB and still be back in plenty of time in case anything did happen. When he returned, he would pull the guys in close and be ready for anything. In the meantime, three 1st Squad soldiers loaded up one of TCP2’s Humvees and left with Miller. 

Not long after Miller pulled out, a handful of kids walked through the TCP. This was a twice-daily event, as the TCP was on their route to school.Casica, as he always did, passed out candy and pencils as they walked by. He would give high fives and banter  with them in intermediate Arabic and they would respond in broken English. At almost 11:00 a.m. exactly, Spielman noticed a man wearing track-suit bottoms and a white button-down shirt walking along the canal road from the west. They had all seen him around here before. He had given them some info in the past and he’d always been friendly, so he did not arouse much suspicion. As the man approached, Casica walked over and, as was his way, even seemed glad to see him. Nelson stayed sitting on a field stool, smoking a cigarette, looking in the other direction.Casica started talking to the man, in a mixture of Arabic and English. 

“Hey, man, what’s up?” he asked. “How are you doing? Where you going? You getting a taxi? Meeting someone?” The whole time, all the man said was “La, la, la,” the Arabic word for “No.” Spielman began to think this guy was acting funny after all. But before that thought could take hold, and just as Casica began to tell the man that he couldn’t just hang out here, the man pulled a 9mm pistol from his waistband. Taking aim quickly, he shotCasica in the neck. Casica dropped, with a thud, an instantly inert mass. Nelson did not even have time to react. The man pointed the pistol at the back of Nelson’s head and pulled the trigger. The bullet slammed through the base of Nelson’s skull. His body barely moved, except to slump. 

The man turned to Babineau and fired three or four shots, trying to find an angle around the Humvee that separated them. Babineau ducked behind the driver-side wheel well of the Humvee, trying to get as much steel between him and the bullets as possible. As Babineau dove for the tire, Spielman cranked the Humvee’s turret around toward the gunman. When the gunman saw the truck’s M240B machine gun swinging his way, he aimed up at Spielman and squeezed off three or four more shots. Spielman ducked in the turret as some shots pinged off the gun’s shield and some zipped overhead. While down, he flipped the safety off on the machine gun. Sensing the man had stopped shooting for a moment, Spielman popped up, leveled his gun, and fired a three-round  burst. From his eyes up, the man’s head exploded into a pink cloud as the 7.62mm bullets blasted his skull apart. His body fell to the ground, brains and blood spilling to the dirt. 

Babineau popped back up and Spielman was already on the radio, calling to TCP1 and Yusufiyah declaring, “This is TCP2. We have two men down. We need immediate medevac.” Most of the guys playing cards at TCP1 heard whoever was on the radio yelling, “TCP2 has casualties, TCP2 has casualties!” but they were confused. They hadn’t heard any shots or explosions, so at first they couldn’t fathom it. 

“Casualties?” Yribe thought. “They had been putting up some concertina wire there, so maybe somebody cut their hand?” Nobody was in all that big of a hurry until a second, clearly more emotional and urgent call was relayed only a few seconds later. “TCP2 has two soldiers down, two soldiers shot.They need help. Now!” 

Yribe, Britt, Watt, and another soldier grabbed their gear and piled into a Humvee. Since 1st Platoon’s medic, Doc Sharpness, was on the FOB run with Miller, Yribe reminded Watt, coolly and quickly, to grab his first aid bag. Up at Yusufiyah, Miller was finishing up loading his Humvee when someone ran out of the TOC to say that there had been casualties at TCP2. Miller and Lauzier and the rest of that contingent dropped everything, unhooked their equipment trailer, and sped back down Sportster. 

Yribe, driving down from TCP1, made the three-quarter-mile trip in under a minute. He hit the brakes hard, the wheels kicking up sand and rock. He got out of the truck and the first thing he saw was Nelson, on his stool, a cigarette burning in his hand. “If the squad leader is sitting down and having a smoke, it can’t be that bad,” he thought. But then he noticed a massive bump on Nelson’s forehead. He turned around and saw a nearly headless local and, nearby,Casica, facedown, a black pool of blood welling underneath him. He looked around at the others. Everybody seemed dazed and was moving slowly. Spielman was still in the turret; Babineau was over with Casica; and Specialist James Gregory and a couple of others, who were at the other end of the traffic control point,when the shooting occurred, were standing nearby. 

“Gregory, what is going on?” Yribe asked. Gregory was pointing, trying to explain: one neck wound, one head wound, local national shooter, handgun. Watt got out of the Humvee, looked around, and dropped his first aid bag. He didn’t even know where to start. 

Yribe ran over to Casica and turned him over. Casica’s wound was gurgling blood. Yribe picked him up, body armor and all, and threw him on the hood of the Humvee. Watt tried to pressure-dress Nelson’s wound, but he could not even find it on the first pat-down; he started giving him CPR.Britt was still in the passenger seat of the Humvee. He was on the radio, but Yribe needed help. 

“Britt! Sir!” he yelled. “You have to get out! We have got to move!” Yribe yelled. This seemed to jolt everyone into action. Britt got out of the truck and helped to cut away Casica’s gear as others trundled Nelson into the backseat of the Humvee. Private First Class Steven Green, who had been in the truck from Yusufiyah, got on the hood to hold down Casica as Yribe drove back down toward TCP1. In the back, Watt tried to give Nelson CPR, but he was not responding. 

Yribe’s and Miller’s Humvees converged at TCP1. They both pulled aside TCP1 and men poured out of the trucks. Doc Sharpness got on top of the Humvee hood and began putting a C-collar and respirator bag on Casica. Soldiers from TCP1 were out front, wanting to get a look, trying to help. Miller got on the radio to Yusufiyah and tried to call in a medevac helicopter. 

“Negative” came the response. “It will be faster to drive the casualties to Yusufiyah and medevac from here.” Miller took over the driver’s seat and Yribe moved to the back, where Watt was still trying to get a response from Nelson. Miller peeled out, hurtling down the road at fifty miles an hour with three men on the hood as Sharpness worked on Casica, trying to get an IV started, and Green tried to hold the dying man steady. Green was talking to Casica, and listening for a heartbeat. He looked at Casica’s arm. It was tattooed with his daughter’s name. Green, as he was shouting at Casica,  drooled on him a bit. He worried about that, wiped it off, and then thought it was a weird thing to be worried about. 

In the back, Watt and Yribe traded turns giving Nelson CPR, but they suspected Old Man River was already gone. The bulge on Nelson’s forehead was growing and no one could find an exit wound. His eyes were rolled back and glazed over. He was making gurgling noises, but they could not tell if they were respirations or death rattles. Yribe began punching Nelson as hard as he could in the groin, to get some sort of pain response, any reaction at all. Nothing. The Humvee pulled into Yusufiyah around 11:15 a.m. and multiple medics were waiting. People crowded around. The medics began working on both men, but neither had any vital signs when they arrived. Casica’s mouth and throat were filled with blood. The chief medic still ordered them both intubated, hooked up to IV's, and administered with CPR. Nobody wanted to let them go and, hoping for a miracle, they worked long beyond the point it was clear they were dead. The medevac helicopter landed a few minutes before the chief medic pronounced them deceased at 11:35. Miller had to be physically pried o6 of and pulled away from Nelson as they loaded the body bags into the helicopter. 

Once Nelson and Casica were pronounced dead, 1st Platoon was yanked back to FOB Yusufiyah for a Critical Incident Debrief, a standard post-casualty session. A Combat Stress team from FOB Mahmudiyah, headed by psychiatric nurse practitioner Lieutenant Colonel Karen Marrs, traveled to Yusufiyah to conduct the group therapy meeting. 

“The focus of the intervention,” in cases like this, explained an Army memo, “is returning the soldier to duty using nonclinical, simple techniques in a safe environment. The goal is to prevent the soldier from assuming the sick role, so no psychiatric diagnosis is given and interventions are aimed at reassuring the soldier that s/he is capable of fulfilling his/her mission.” The men, overall, were skeptical that Critical Incident Debriefs did any good. Lauzier likened them to a mechanic who fixes a flat tire when it’s really the engine he should be looking at. “All they would do is hand out  Ambien,” said another soldier. “Go sleep it off? Well, guess what? I got to wake up here tomorrow with the same shit.” 

First Platoon was back on the TCPs that night. “They wanted to go,” said Miller. “They wanted to show the enemy that you cannot knock us down.” Miller made Yribe, the senior sergeant in the platoon, 1st Squad’s new squad leader. Upon the squad’s return to the TCP, the gunman’s body was still there. Often family members would retrieve a corpse, but since this man had just shot U.S. soldiers, that wasn’t likely. And the Iraqi medics, local hospital staff, or other parties who picked up bodies in cases like this didn’t arrive until at least the next day. Yribe carried him off to the trash pit, his brains spilling onto the street, where dogs feasted on them in the middle of the night. As some of the men kicked the body in frustration, Green noticed that the dead man’s teeth were loose. He reached down, pulled several out, and put them in his pocket. 

In the aftermath of the shooting, there was speculation about the gunman’s motives. Some were convinced that it was a revenge killing for the woman Yribe had shot three weeks before, as it was so unlike any other kind of attack they’d seen to that point. But the gunman, since he was missing most of his head, was never identified. Other soldiers were just as convinced that revenge wasn’t the reason. Yribe’s shooting happened at TCP3, they said. Why wouldn’t the shooter have targeted that TCP, or why wouldn’t he have targeted 3rd Squad, or even Yribe, more specifically? These soldiers contended that this guy was pissed off for any number of unknowable reasons, saw an opportunity to capitalize on a weakness, and took advantage of it.

Regardless, the platoon was galvanized by the feeling of Iraqi betrayal. “That was the point where I just didn’t care about Hadjis anymore,” revealed one 1st Platoon soldier. “As far as I was concerned, any military-aged male in Iraq, they could all die. I just wanted to kill as many of those motherfuckers as I possibly could.” For many, the shooting proved that no Iraqi could be trusted. If there had been a philosophical dispute in parts of 1st Platoon— some thought the Iraqis were worth helping, others thought they were all the enemy—the deaths of Nelson and Casica strongly bolstered the confrontationalism claims. “That’s when things started to turn,” observed Staff Sergeant Chris Payne, 2nd Squad’s leader. 

Just a few days after Nelson’s and Casica’s deaths, Green and some parts of 1st Platoon were up at Mahmudiyah and Lieutenant Colonel Kunk and Sergeant Major Edwards walked by. Edwards corrected some element of Green’s bearing, and Green mouthed off. 

“Why’re you in such a bad mood, Green?” Kunk asked. “You’re talking to a sergeant major here.” 

“Why do you think I’m in a bad mood?” Green sneered, noting that Casica’s blood was still stippling his boots. Kunk told him that he had to pick himself up and drive on as good soldiers must. 

“I just want to get out there and get some revenge on those motherfuckers,” Green responded. “They all deserve to die.” 

“Goddamn it, that’s not true,” Kunk responded testily. “Ninety to ninety-)ve percent of the Iraqi people are good people and they want the same thing that we have in the United States: democracy. Yes, there are )ve percent of them that might be bad, and those are the terrorists.Those are the bad guys that we’re going after.” 

“Fuck the Hadjis,” Green declared. 

“Calling them that is like calling me a nigger,” said Edwards. “This sounds like you hate a whole race of people.” 

“That’s about it right there,” Green said. “You just about summed it up.” 

❤❤❤❤❤❤❤

The officer who conducted the AR 15-6 investigation of the December 10 shooting concluded, “The deaths of Sergeant Casica and Sta6 Sergeant Nelson could not have been prevented either by their actions or the actions of the other two soldiers at TCP2.” He acknowledged that there was a degree of complacency at the TCP that day. The men were not wearing their helmets and the shooter got too close without being searched, but the investigator did not find that either fact cost the men their lives. He noted that Casica was shot in the throat and Nelson at the base of the skull, neither of which is covered by a helmet. Likewise, he found Casica’s trust unfortunate but not culpable and resisted second-guessing it. “In order to maintain positive relations within the local population,” he wrote, “it is necessary for soldiers to, on occasion, when they feel it prudent, lessen their readiness posture. In this case, Sergeant Casica approaching the assailant with his M4 oriented toward him (possibly the only measure which would have prevented this incident) would have been wholly inappropriate.” [No wonder these kids are all coming home fucked up in the head D.C]

Brigade commander Colonel Todd Ebel rejected this conclusion. On the cover sheet of the report, he scribbled, “I determine that SSG Nelson and SGT Casica were killed because each failed to maintain discipline at the TCP. …While hard to accept, I believe these soldiers’ deaths were preventable…. Each failed to follow instructions and it cost them their lives.” 

Kunk concurred with this sentiment completely, and did not resist telling the men of every rank, on numerous occasions, that Nelson and Casica were responsible for their own deaths. The blame that Ebel and Kunk placed on the dead incensed the men of 1st Platoon. “The real fault, the real blame, belongs to the chain of command for not securing that house and giving soldiers proper cover,” declared Watt. “The real blame belongs to them for not putting up HESCO baskets around that checkpoint, for not providing someplace where you can take off your helmet for five minutes in seventy-two hours.Kunk and the chain of command cannot face the fact that they failed us, so they pushed 100 percent of the blame onto the soldier.” 

Any argument that anyone made to Kunk that there were other factors at play was met with a fusillade of abuse about making excuses, being a whiner, or not coming to terms with the reality of the situation. 

He lectured the men of 1st Platoon directly, booming, “When are you going to face up to why Staff Sergeant Nelson and Sergeant  Casica are dead? Because they weren’t doing the right things, the harder right. Leaders were not enforcing standards and discipline.” 

The more Kunk pounded this message home, the more the soldiers resented it. “If you are the battalion commander, you don’t have to tell every last Joe, ‘The reason that your team leader and your squad leader died is because they were pieces of shit,’” observed Yribe. “And that’s what we were getting from him.” 

Nelson and Casica’s memorial was held a few days after their deaths. During the memorial, Green spoke simply but movingly about both men: “Staff Sergeant Nelson, Old Man River, was a fine leader with an outstanding career behind him. We all knew no matter how much he yelled, or how many packs of cigarettes he took from us, or how many times he smoked us, that he would do anything for any of us,” he said. “Sergeant Casica was probably the kindest man in Bravo Company and one of the best people I have ever known.” 

A lieutenant from another company who attended the memorial wrote in his journal, “I could see the pain of the loss on every soldier’s face in Bulldog Company. Their commander, CPT Goodwin, looked worn, wounded, emotionally tired. The service was the same as the others. The toughest part is the roll call. The gunfire from the salute caught me even though I was anticipating it. The platoon sergeant, SSG Miller, broke down as people started to go up to the tributes of the two. As I was watching all of the soldiers begin to file up to the tribute by twos, 1LT Britt, the platoon leader of the two soldiers, moved to the back corner of the maintenance bay behind me. His eyes were already welled up before he tried to move out of sight. I felt very sorry for him. I imagine it’s a huge burden that you will carry around for the rest of your life. He’s the one who’s responsible for those men, in good times and bad. I walked back to him and shook his hand. I stood there for a moment and just looked at him. He looked back, tears running down his face. I wanted to say something but I couldn’t, I just didn’t know what to say. I gripped his hand tightly and nodded my head in consolation.” 

Already displeased with Miller’s performance and convinced these deaths were more evidence of lax leadership, Lieutenant Colonel Kunk had written Captain Goodwin a performance warning the day after the shooting, and now he and Sergeant Major Edwards decided to remove Miller.They had already talked about reinstating Sergeant First Class Rob Gallagher, the previous platoon sergeant who was currently on a MiTT team in Lutufiyah, and now they decided to act. Miller heard about the move from a back channel as Kunk and Edwards drove to Yusufiyah to fire him, and he was furious. He felt he was being unfairly punished for the deaths of Nelson and Casica. No matter how often you tell a grown adult squad leader and a grown adult team leader to put on their helmets, he maintained, they are ultimately going to make their own decisions. He didn’t see what more he could have done. He went to the potato bays and began packing his stuff. Lieutenant Britt stopped by and asked what was going on. 

“I’m out of here, man,” Miller said. “They are coming to get me.” Word spread, and 1st Platoon rallied. The squad leaders and Lieutenant Britt asked to talk to Kunk. They lobbied for Miller to stay. Britt spoke with Kunk and acknowledged that he, and Miller, and all of 1st Platoon, were having some trouble, but he assured Kunk that they could turn things around and that Miller was the right man for the job.Kunk relented and gave Britt some more time to get Miller and the rest of his platoon squared away. Britt returned to tell Miller that he and the squad leaders had been successful. Miller was staying. But, Britt said, they were on a short leash and they needed to work some things out. Battalion thought that 1st Platoon’s standards were low. 

“Shaving, uniforms, discipline. We need to improve those things,” Britt said, “or they are going to make this change.”

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“It Is Fucking Pointless”182

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