Any young men or women considering joining the military should really read this book, to see just how they look out for their soldiers in a war zone.Not going to try and justify what happened,but these men got seriously screwed over by their superiors.None of them should have been still in Iraq,when they committed the murders,what a waste of life,sad....
BLACK HEARTS: ONE PLATOON'S DESCENT INTO MADNESS IN
IRAQ'S TRIANGLE OF DEATH
BY JIM FREDERICK
BY JIM FREDERICK
12
“It Is Fucking Pointless”
ISOLATED PHYSICALLY AND with limited links to the outside world, Bravo
soldiers frequently had no knowledge of how their efforts were
,fitting into the broader strategy of the war, let alone what that
strategy might be. Indeed, the very notion of strategy, and whether
America’s strategy was sound, was simply not a concern for many of
them. All that mattered was what was happening in and around the
ground they were occupying.
News of anything occurring beyond the FOB, the traffic control
points, and the JS Bridge was hard to come by, and even major
events about Iraq making headlines around the world seemed to
have little impact on their lives. In the two and a half months since
their arrival, for example, Iraq had ratified its constitution, the trial
of Saddam Hussein had gotten under way, and Democratic
congressman from Pennsylvania John Murtha had begun calling for
a U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq. None of these got much notice
from men on the ground. Far more important to them was staying
alive until the next morning and whether there would be hot food
for dinner that night.
One exception to the company’s odd remove from national affairs was its activities in support of Iraq’s December 15 nationwide
parliamentary elections. Polling-day safety became a priority for
American forces throughout Iraq, and, hoping to entice Sunnis (who
had largely boycotted a round of elections in January), U.S.
commanders put particular emphasis on safeguarding Sunni areas
such as Yusufiyah.
Shortly after coming off of a full day of patrolling on December
13, Eric Lauzier was ordered to take a 3rd Squad fire team out for
an overnight ambush at a site where mortars had been launched at Yusufiyah several times before. He protested, because his squad was
supposed to be off. They had just put in an eighteen-hour day. His
guys hadn’t slept that day.They needed some rack time, he insisted.
Arguing was futile. He was ordered to move out. So he and five
other men walked about three or four miles into the bush and
settled into their overwatch positions, on the inclined banks of a
canal. Winter nights in Iraq can get cold, with temperatures
plunging to the 40s, and the guys were freezing. Soldiers got an
hour or two of sleep when they could, but most of them were up at
any given time pulling 360-degree security. When the sun rose, they
expected to stay in position and, if they made no contact, they’d
return after nightfall. About 4:00 p.m., they got a radio call. Their mission was changing.
“Uh, you know we’re in an ambush right now, over?” Lauzier
asked. Roger, came the response. Scratch that mission. Do the new
one. They were now to walk another five miles to do a battle
damage assessment on some mortars that an element of 2nd
Brigade had fired. Lauzier was pissed. Things come up, yes, but to
be forced to abort an ambush for a nonessential mission, to have
nobody else to send, is either bad planning or bad priorities. They
got the grid coordinates, popped up from their hiding position, and
started walking. The coordinates were off, however, so they spent
another several hours crisscrossing the fields trying to find the
impact site. They were starting to run low on water. Trying to keep
his men’s morale up, Lauzier told them that when they got back, he
guaranteed they would get some hot chow and several hours of
uninterrupted rack. He would make sure nobody messed with
them. They were doing a hell of a job, he told them, and they’d be
rewarded for sucking it up and driving on.
A few hours later, they found the place. There was nothing there
except a few large smears of blood, like someone had been
dragged, and a child-sized bloody Dip-Dop. Now Lauzier was pissed
and disgusted. He called it in.
“Hey, you wanna know what you hit? You fucking blew up a kid.
Good job, over.” Night fell as they humped the several miles back to the FOB. Third Squad had just started to unload their equipment when Miller called Lauzier over.
“Sorry to dump this on you, but you need to go out and patrol
FatBoy overnight,” Miller said.
“What do you mean ‘patrol FatBoy overnight’?” Lauzier asked.
“I need you to go out with two Humvees, and drive up and down
the road.”
“Drive up and down the road?”
“Yeah.”
“In two trucks?”
“Yup.”
“Just us, driving up and down the road, all night.”
“Yes, that’s what I’m saying.”
“That is fucking retarded.”
“I know. I tried to tell them that, but that’s the mission.”
“Bullshit. No. We’re not doing it. Get someone else.”
“There is no one else. Everybody else is out. ’Cause of the
elections, doing the same stuff.”
“So our mission is to drive up and down Fat Boy drawing out
IEDs—with no medic and no QRF and no air support—so they don’t
bomb the civilians tomorrow? Our mission is to get blown up?”
“Yup, pretty much.”
“But my guys haven’t slept. They haven’t eaten. I promised
them.”
“Dude, I’m sorry, but you know how it is.”
Lauzier could not bear going back to his men and telling them
what they had to do after he had promised them they would get a
break. He knew what got soldiers through the nights, the hard
times, the exhaustion, or the stone-cold conviction that the
commanders either were incompetent or didn’t give a damn about
them. What got them through the night was the next moderately
pleasant experience: the next hot meal, the next time sleep for five or six hours, the next time they could just be left
alone, for just an hour or two with an iPod, a movie on the laptop,
or a book. He had just dangled that in front of them, and now he was going to snatch it away. He went back to look at them,
exhausted, dirty, hollow-eyed. They knew bad news was coming,
and he delivered it. They all sat silent for several seconds as the mission sank in.
“Fuck it,” said Private First Class Chris Barnes, raising his hand.
“Let’s do it. This sounds like a great fucking idea. Who wants to get
blown up?” They started laughing. Watt, Barker,Cortez, and Private
First Class Shane Hoeck all raised their hands. They did not give a
damn anymore. It was all so absurd to them, that they were going
to drive up and down a road for the next eight hours as bomb magnets. The only thing that they could do was laugh. “Hooray!
We’re going out to get blown up!” they sang. “Who’s on board?
Hey, who wants to come get blown up? Woohoo! Yeah, dude, I am
ready to go fucking die! We are all going to fucking die!” Lauzier, at
that moment, was prouder of them than he ever had been, and he
loved them more than he ever thought possible.
The six men went out, and until well past sunrise they zipped up
and down Fat Boy, dozens of times. They did not, in fact, get blown
up, although one of the trucks did hit a dog, which scared the hell
out of them. Once they returned to the FOB, fifty-six hours since
their last downtime, their mission was still not over. They had to
turn around and escort Captain Goodwin for ten more hours to all
the polling locations so he could shake the hands of voters and meet with local officials. By late afternoon of the third day, there was no one who could drive the Humvee longer than a minute or
two without falling asleep.The man in the passenger seat had to hit
the driver in the arm every twenty or thirty seconds. As they walked
back into the FOB, dirty, delirious, strung out, and aching for sleep,
First Sergeant Andrew Laskoski took a hard look at them and
asked, “Did you men shave today?”
On that election day, about 70 percent of Iraq’s eligible voters,
including a broad turnout from Sunnis, went to the polls on a
generally peaceful day. The Sunnis’ strong participation indicated
that rifts between the native Sunni tribes and Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda in
Iraq (AQI), which had started small, were widening. To Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, cooperation with the U.S. and Iraqi governments, or
voting in the elections, was intolerable. But the Sunni sheikhs were
becoming disillusioned by the barbarity of Zarqawi’s extreme and
violent policies, and they had begun to explore other alliances,
including with the Americans and the Iraqi government. Al Qaeda,
some Arab papers said, was starting to get expelled from Sunni
strongholds in Anbar. This trend would very slowly build
nationwide throughout the rest of the winter and the following
year. Zarqawi would find himself in far smaller regions to operate with far fewer allies. But while the west and north of Iraq led the
turning away from Zarqawi, the Triangle of Death remained a
holdout area of support.
Al Qaeda’s senior leadership was concerned about this rift and
thought Zarqawi’s heavy hand was threatening the entire movement
in the country. In December, a senior Al Qaeda leader sent Zarqawi
a blunt and rebuke-filled letter. It exhorted Zarqawi to spend more
time on winning over the people and to be more compassionate
and tolerant of other Muslims, even those with whom he disagreed.
A month after the elections, in a move widely interpreted as an
attempt by Al Qaeda to combat the impression that it was an anti Iraqi
hyper violent nihilistic band of exterminators, it actively sought
allies among Iraqi insurgent groups and declared itself subservient
to this coalition of its own making, which it called the Mujahideen
Shura Council (MSC). Along with the creation of this new group was a purported shift away from wanton attacks on civilians. AQI
stopped taking credit for some of the most violent strikes against
Shiites. Even so, many of the most prominent native insurgencies,
such as the Islamic Army in Iraq, Ansar Al-Sunnah, and the Mujahideen Army, refused to join, leaving the MSC open to the
charge that it was really just AQI by another name.
On December 19, Bravo’s 2nd Platoon was operating in two
different sectors. Platoon Sergeant Jeremy Gebhardt had one squad
up in Mahmudiyah, assisting with the much-loathed gravel runs
from Camp Striker to FOB Mahmudiyah. Platoon Leader Jerry
Eidson and the rest of the platoon were chasing the J-Lens. Upon
Eidson’s return to Yusufiyah, he was sent out to Mahmudiyah to
pick up Gebhardt. Gebhardt had only two trucks. He had hopped a
larger convoy out there, but because higher command was enforcing
a regulation they didn’t enforce, for example, on election night, and
enforced only selectively—that all convoys must be at least three
vehicles—he was now stuck. Cursing the inefficiency of it all,
Eidson grabbed eight volunteers to form a three-vehicle task force
and headed out to retrieve their platoon mates.
Eidson was in the lead truck when the convoy left Yusufiyah just
after 9:00 p.m., Specialist Noah Galloway drove, and Private First
Class Ryan Davis was in the gun. They left the wire and turned the
corner, heading north on Fat Boy. A minute or two down this road,
they hit a tripwire-triggered IED that struck the truck’s front-right
quadrant, tossing it like a matchbox onto its right side and into a
canal. The bright blast kicked up a cloud of dirt, dust, and debris
that blocked out the night-vision goggles of the drivers of the two
trailing vehicles, so they gunned their engines to get past the kill
zone. The occupants of one of the trucks thought they saw the
taillights of the lead Humvee ahead, so they kept rolling, trying to
catch up to it, until they realized they were mistaken. They started
calling Eidson on the radio, but there was no response.
“Hey,” said one of the soldiers, “we need to turn around, we need
to go back.” When Eidson came to, sideways in a truck filled with water, he asked if everybody was all right. Davis said he was fine,
just that his leg hurt. Galloway did not respond.
“Noah, Noah, are you okay?” No response. Eidson could not
open his door, so he followed Davis out of the gunner’s hatch,
jumped out, and landed in chest-deep water. He made his way back
over to Galloway, who was mangled. His limbs were going in the wrong direction, and he was not responding to Eidson’s yells and
slaps. But he was breathing and he had a pulse. Eidson pulled
himself out of the ditch and stood in the middle of the road. He had
no weapon or helmet, his other trucks were gone, Davis was
limping around, and Galloway was unconscious. He did not notice
that his arm was broken and the bone was sticking out of his Desh
until he tried to pick up the shredded remnants of Galloway’s
helmet. It was at that moment that Eidson expected to die.
Insurgents frequently followed an IED strike with small-arms fire,
so they should be opening fire any second, Eidson thought. He was
scared, terrified of death. He waited a beat or two for the shots to
come, but they didn’t. And then a few more seconds. Still not really
believing that he was getting this reprieve, he headed back to check
on Galloway. He jumped back into the canal, assessed Galloway’s
condition, evaluated his weight versus the steepness of the canal
banks, and concluded there was no way he could pull him out.
He heard two trucks coming from the north and he signaled with
his flashlight. His men had arrived.
Tearful and shell-shocked, Eidson approached Staff Sergeant Les
Fuller and said, “We have to get Noah out.”
Fuller, a devout Christian who tried never to swear, looked
down, saw what had become of the Humvee and Galloway, and
exclaimed, “Oh, fuck!” The entire engine block and driver-side door
had been blown off. Fuller and another soldier jumped down and
started trying to pull Galloway out of the seat. Fuller grabbed him
by the body armor while the other soldier hugged his torso. Fuller
noticed that Galloway’s left leg was pinned under the seat. He
grabbed it to try to free it, and the leg twisted loose in his hand.
They decided that Galloway would be easier to pull out if they took
off his body armor. But as Fuller grabbed Galloway’s left arm to
pull it through his body armor’s armhole, that limb came of in his
hands as well.
Eidson was now thinking clearly enough that he was doing
platoon leader math. He had nine guys and two operating trucks. He had one critical case stuck in a Humvee with two severed limbs who needed to be extracted from a ten-foot-deep ditch with muddy,
slippery, steep-angled walls. He needed at least two men on the
guns to pull security. Two men, including himself, were too badly
hurt to help with the rescue. That left four men to try to lift
Galloway out of the ditch, practically straight up. It was not going
to happen. He called up to FOB Yusufiyah requesting more manpower. Goodwin told him there was no one at the FOB to send.
There was no Quick Reaction Force, there were no extra men on
the entire base whatsoever, and the medevac was not responding
yet. Goodwin told Eidson that he had to get himself to the FOB. [I am flabbergasted WTF?Look what they do with your sons and daughters D.C ]
“There is no way we can do that with Galloway,” Eidson
responded.
“You have to,” said Goodwin. “There is no one—repeat, no one—
who can come get you.” Luckily, a convoy of U.S. and Iraqi
platoons happened to be passing by. They stopped and formed a
chain of about a dozen Americans and Iraqis to yank Galloway from
his seat. They reloaded everybody into the Humvees to catch the medevac that was now en route to Yusufiyah.*
It was not lost on anyone: The casualties just kept mounting.
Every week or two, they were losing someone, or multiple people —frequently leaders—to injuries or death. The average was about
one a week. Lieutenant Ben Britt was the only platoon leader left in
Bravo Company, and while he hid it from the lower-enlisted
soldiers,Eidson’s injury shook Britt badly.
“I just know I’m next,” he told Yribe and Lauzier that night. “It’s
bad juju to be a lieutenant,” he said. “My number is up.” They told
him that you can’t talk like that, but they viewed Britt’s pessimism
as a significant change. He had always been the one to tell the most
depressed, fatalistic, negative soldiers to always look at the odds—
even in a war zone, he would often counsel them, the numbers are
always with you. Far more people come back than ever get killed,
and it almost always is the other guy who gets it.
The feeling that death was certain was becoming pervasive throughout the platoon, and it was spreading like a panic. More
and more men started to believe that they simply weren’t coming
home. Some of the men say drinking in the ranks was becoming
fairly common around late December. It is difficult to judge just
how pervasive the drinking was, but it was common enough that
just about everyone in 1st Platoon under the position of squad
leader acknowledged that it was happening, even if they denied
taking part. More than a few soldiers were sneaking drinks to cope with the stress, to take the edge off, to fall asleep, to calm their
nerves.
Booze was always on offer in Iraq, even in the Triangle of Death.
There were plenty of I.A's or interpreters who were happy to
procure bottles of whiskey or gin or even pills or hash for any
soldier who wanted them. A lot of Iraqis were users themselves,
often on the job. In addition to their drinking and smoking habits,
I.A soldiers were also enthusiastic consumers of pornography.
Anyone who thinks that Iraq is a Muslim puritan stronghold where
nobody drinks or does drugs is sorely mistaken. Many Iraqis enjoy a
stiff drink (or several), and it is not outlandish to speculate that part
of the reason Iraqi society ultimately rejected Al Qaeda was because
they were simply not going to live by its teetotaler code.
While many men within 1st Platoon were having trouble adjusting
to the casualties the unit incurred, the incessant operations tempo,
and the constant threat of violence, Private First Class Steven Green was reacting particularly badly. He had always been a loudmouth, a malcontent, a racist, and a misogynist. He was fond of quoting a
line by Nathan Bedford Forrest,Confederate general and ,rst Grand
Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan: “To me, war means fighting, and
fighting means killing.”
But the day Nelson and Casica died he had snapped. That was when he gave up even pretending to support any notion of
peacekeeping, society-building, or being nice to Iraqis. From then
on out, all he cared about was killing them. This was well known, and not something he attempted to hide, even from superiors.
That, in itself, was not necessarily exceptional. Many of the men
by this point hated Iraqis and many would offhandedly opine that
the whole country needed to be leveled, or the only good Iraqi was
a dead Iraqi. But only Green talked about killing Iraqis all the time,
incessantly, obsessively. Only Green talked about wanting to
capture Hadjis, flay them, and hang them from telephone wires.
Only he talked about burning them alive so they had to smell their
own flesh cooking. Everybody was frustrated that the enemy was
cowardly, but Green had a harder time accepting that this was
simply the nature of this war: U.S. soldiers had to behave more
honorably than the enemy. Why, he sincerely wanted to know, did
Americans have to restrain themselves when the insurgents did not?
At the prodding of Staff Sergeant Miller, Green went to see
Lieutenant Colonel Marrs from the Combat Stress team, who was
visiting from FOB Mahmudiyah on December 21. The intake
evaluation form she filled out while talking to him that day is a
horror show of ailments and dysfunctions. In the entry marked
“Chief Complaint,” she quoted him: “It is fucking pointless.” Green
told Marrs he was a victim of mental and physical childhood abuse
by his mother and brother, he was an adolescent drug and alcohol
abuser who drank every day between 8th and 10th grade, and he
had been arrested several times. He told Marrs he had been
suffering from symptoms of instability, extreme moods, and angry
outbursts, including punching walls, ever since the deaths of
MacKenzie and Munger. (Her notations indicate he said their deaths
happened about a month before, but it was actually seven weeks.)
Green told Marrs he was experiencing all of the following: sadness,
difficulty falling asleep, nightmares involving violence and the
death of his friends, anxiety, worry, increased heart rate, tightness in
his chest, shortness of breath, feelings of helplessness, being easily
startled, being quick to anger, and thoughts that he would not make
it out of combat alive. [absolutely insane that the Army left this kid out there after this report,good chance the Iraqi family would still be alive had he got the help he needed so bad,good chance,here was the bad idea guy. DC]
In her own observations, Marrs noted that Green had abnormal
eye contact, including staring, and that his mood was angry. Green
told Marrs he was having suicidal and homicidal ideations,
especially thoughts about killing Iraqi civilians. On his one-page
intake sheet, Marrs noted his wanting to kill Iraqis four separate
times. One entry states, “Interests: None other than killing Iraqis.”
She diagnosed him with Combat and Operational Stress Reaction
(C.O.S.R), an Army term to describe typical and transient reactions to
the stresses of warfare. C.O.S.R is not a condition recognized by the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV, the bible
of the psychiatry profession, something the Army is well aware of,
since it doesn’t even consider C.O.S.R an ailment. As one Army
journal article puts it, “Those with C.O.S.R are not referred to as
‘patients,’ but are described as having ‘normal reactions to an
abnormal event.’” Thus believing Green’s psychological state to be
normal, Marrs prescribed him a small course of Seroquel, an
antipsychotic drug that also treats insomnia, and recommended that
he follow up with another visit (though she didn’t specify when),
and she sent him back to his unit.
“I told her, ‘My main preoccupation in life is wanting to kill
Iraqis, whoever they are, wherever they are,’” Green recalled. “She
said, ‘Okay, here’s these pills that will help you sleep, and we’ll
probably be around.’ I don’t think she thought I was serious, even
though I was going out of my way to be like, ‘Look, I’m serious
about this.’”
According to Goodwin, Marrs reported back to him that Green
“needed a little bit more counseling.” Goodwin, like most of
Green’s superiors, thought Green’s problems were manageable
anger issues that could be dealt with, he said, “through time,
through grief counseling, if necessary, medication, through Combat
Stress, and supervision.” When Staff Sergeant Bob Davis, a Combat
Stress technician with a reserve unit out of Boston, arrived in
January 2006 as part of the team to relieve Marrs’s team, she told
them about Green. “She warned us that, given his experiences and
the things that he’s done, he might be someone we’d want to follow
up with.” Despite this warning, they would not see Green until
March 20, 2006.
While Sergeant First Class Phil Blaisdell and his 3rd Platoon
suffered countless frustrations with Iraqis who would lie and
stonewall, he always tried to put himself in their shoes, and he tried
to get his men to think that way too. One day, a local told him that
the traffic control points were particularly onerous in the mornings
because people were trying to get to work in Baghdad. He had
never thought of that before, that people were commuting. But
from then on, he tried to get the checkpoints open by 6:00 a.m. to
handle what he quickly noticed was, yes, a morning rush north. On
particularly hot days, when the backups were long, he’d have his men hand out bottles of water to the waiting cars. He tried to talk
to the people and explain to them what was going on to the best of
his ability. Whenever he was at the JSB, he would run up and down Malibu as much as possible, talking to the Quarguli sheikhs, trying
to solve their problems, even if they were small ones. If the roads were closed but they had a harvest of apples they wanted to get to
Baghdad, they would call Blaisdell. “I’d say, ‘Okay, but I got to
search the cars, though. Is that okay?’ They’d be like, ‘That’s fine.’ We worked together on shit. It made all the difference in the world.”
Getting his guys to not give in to hate no matter how frustrated
they were, or how badly some of their friends got hurt, was by far
his biggest challenge. “Soldiers can turn negative in a heartbeat,” he
remarked. “‘Fuck this! Fuck these people!’ People would get mad
that they were not telling us information. But you know what? If I was them, I wouldn’t tell an American anything either!” He tried to make his men understand that the main reason Iraqis were
uncooperative was that they were scared to death for their own
lives and they did not believe that the United States was capable of
protecting them. When a squad of Americans rolled up at a house
and asked for info, and if an insurgent then got nabbed, every single
other insurgent in town knew who had squealed, and there would
be reprisals. Blaisdell started getting informants to text him, or to
drop notes out of car windows at TCPs, rather than risk talking to
him in person. He told his men not to tear apart people’s houses,
not because he was a softy but because Iraqis are not stupid: they
knew houses were getting searched regularly now, so the ones who
happened to be insurgents pretty much stopped hiding
incriminating materials in their homes months ago. This was
another reason he told his men to be careful when they found a
cache of weapons in someone’s yard. Some Iraqis had started
framing neighbors they had grudges against. And then, once that
started happening, others figured out that by saying they had been
framed, they could still stash guns in their own backyard. See? It was all a mind game, he explained, and it was dizzying. But the worst mistake you could make was to think that the Iraqis were not
several steps ahead of you.
Blaisdell had the same lack of patience for soldiers slapping
people around. “There’s a twelve-, thirteen-year-old kid in the
house, and if I saw a soldier slap the father around, I’d ask that
soldier, ‘Hey, what would you do if some guy came in your home
and slapped your dad around?’ He’d always say, ‘I’d fucking kill
him.’ Okay, so what makes you any different than that kid right
there? And you know what he’s going to do now? He’s going to go
plant an IED. And it might not be you that gets killed. But some
other soldier is dead because you had to be a tough guy.”
Second Platoon’s Sergeant First Class Jeremy Gebhardt was
quieter than Blaisdell and did not have quite the local politician in
him that his counterpart did. He did not glad-hand the locals as much, but he believed in and worked on some of the larger
infrastructure missions, such as getting schools reopened and water
treatment plants up and running. But he, like Blaisdell, considered managing the attitudes and morals of his men to be the biggest part
of his job. Anytime he heard complaints about the Iraqis—or about
superior officers, for that matter—he snuffed it out quick.
“You need to shut the fuck up and focus,” he would say.
* Galloway survived but lost both his left limbs, and Eidson, the third Bravo leader to
be injured in less than three months, was sent back to the States, where he underwent
several surgeries that restored function to his arm.
13
Britt and Lopez
TWO DAYS AFTER Eidson and Galloway got hit by an IED, Britt was still
in a melancholy mood.
“I just have a feeling that I’m not going to make it back from
here,” he said.
“Sir, you can’t think like that,” Yribe responded.
“It just doesn’t
seem like I’m going to be able to make it back with all the people
that are dying.”
“If it’s your time, it’s your time,” Yribe said. “There’s nothing
anybody can do about it.”
One of the day’s major missions was another clearance of
Caveman. Bravo First Sergeant Andrew Laskoski, Britt, and a mixture of 1st Platoon’s 3rd and 1st Squads were assigned to
accompany an Iron Claw team. In the medic area of FOB Yusufiyah,
there was a dry erase board where all the medics were supposed to write their whereabouts. Since he knew they were going on
Caveman that day, Specialist Collin Sharpness wrote, “Getting
Blown Up.”
They started around 8:00 a.m. Following Iron Claw’s big rigs as
they slowly inched west on the north side of Caveman, the men walked behind, looking for IED triggerman hides or caches along
the side of the road, walking cloverleaf patterns for five hours
straight in the drenching heat. The Humvees, each with a driver and
a gunner pulling security, followed behind them. Around 1:30 p.m. —whoosh!—an RPG screamed past them and narrowly missed one
of the Iron Claw vehicles. A few soldiers tracked the flight path
across the canal, over the south side of the road, to where they saw an assembly of some type, a tube from which it looked like the
RPG had been fired remotely. As Lieutenant Britt and the Iron Claw
lieutenant were discussing their next move, three mortar rounds
landed nearby in quick succession, one hitting the right rear
quadrant of the lead Iron Claw vehicle, disabling it. The Iron Claw
lieutenant said his crew needed to go back to Yusufiyah for repairs
before they could do any more clearing.
Everybody started turning around as Britt called the situation up
to the TOC. The Iron Claw convoy was long gone, and the Bravo
vehicles were almost back at TCP4 when Goodwin told Britt to go
get the mount. But that wasn’t feasible, Britt responded, because it was on the other side of the canal. Go get it, said Goodwin. That is
a no-go, said Britt, it is on the other side of the second road as well,
and that road had not been cleared. Britt asked if it was okay for
them to backtrack all the way from the beginning and clear the
south side of Caveman up to the mount. They had already been out
there six hours, Goodwin calculated, and one Iron Claw vehicle was
now damaged. To get more clearance vehicles out there could take well past nightfall. Goodwin refused. Find the closest bridge, get in
there, get the thing, and get out, Goodwin said.
“I don’t care if you have to swim across the fucking canal,” he
insisted, “but you will get me that tube.”
“Yes, sir,” Britt responded.
The men saw a small footbridge about two hundred yards
northwest of the spot where they first turned around. Britt
assembled a team of about eight men, including Laskoski and Yribe.
They’d have to walk across the bridge, track back southeast another
three hundred and fifty yards, pick up the mount, and return. They
headed out. Just as they crossed the canal, they saw a blue Kia
Bongo, a kind of small, high-cab pickup truck that is ubiquitous in
Iraq, driving toward them from the southeast on the south side of
Caveman.The soldiers wanted the Bongo to stop well in advance of where the RPG mount was, so they started yelling and making hand
gestures to stop. The Bongo would not stop. Now it was
approaching the RPG’s kill area. Laskoski ordered one of the
soldiers to fire a warning shot. He did, but the Bongo still didn’t stop. The soldier fired another. With the truck about to enter the
area, and still defying the warning shots, Laskoski ordered the men
to open fire on the truck.They sprayed it with dozens of bullets, yet
it continued to drive all the way through the RPG tube’s area, while
under fire, until it rolled to a stop fifty yards past it.
Laskoski said, “We’re going to have some dead bodies in that
truck.” The group headed down to check it out. Astonishingly, there were no dead bodies, just an older man in the passenger seat, with
a gunshot wound to his right calf, and a younger man, the driver, who was completely unscathed. The older guy was some sort of
Quarguli sheikh, carrying an ID card that Kunk had distributed to
local grandees.
Britt said, “All right, let’s go get this thing.” Laskoski and some
other soldiers hung back to deal with the men in the Bongo, while
Britt, Yribe, and Sergeant Roman Diaz headed out to get the RPG
tube. Thirty-three-year-old Specialist William Lopez-Feliciano from
Quebradillas, Puerto Rico, who had arrived at Bravo only three weeks earlier, was standing there, tentative, not knowing which way to go. They were already fifty or sixty yards on their way, but
Yribe turned back and yelled, “Yo, Lopez, let’s go,” and he
scrambled to catch up.
The four men walked closely together. They were bunching up, which wasn’t safe. Yribe was up front, but Britt, with several feet of
antenna sticking out of his backpack, was almost on top of him.
Yribe turned around and said to all of them, “Hey, back off me.
Get separated.” He turned around again, and said to Britt, “Back off me, sir.” Britt fell in behind Yribe and Diaz, with Lopez bringing up
the rear.
Then everything went black. A deeply buried IED with several
hundreds pounds of explosives exploded directly under where Britt
and Lopez were standing. The blast was so massive that soldiers
heard the explosion in Lutufiyah ten miles away. Britt was thrown fifty feet into the air, cartwheeling “like a rag doll,” remembered
one soldier. Within a second or two, his body had plummeted back to Earth and into the canal. The blast ripped Lopez into two pieces,
bisecting him at the waist. The pressure wave sucked the earplugs
out of Yribe’s ears and covered him and Diaz in dirt, smoke, and
human tissue. The bomb was so big that all four of them should
have been dead, but something about how the IED was set focused
almost all of its energy straight up rather than out. Diaz and Yribe were relatively unharmed, but they didn’t know that yet. At first
they were just trying to figure out if they were still alive.
When Yribe shook himself awake, he couldn’t tell how long he
had been out. It must have been only a couple of seconds. Diaz was
on one knee, right behind him.
He grabbed Diaz and yelled, “Are you okay?” Diaz said yes. They
started to run back west where Laskoski was heading toward them.
Laskoski gripped Yribe by the vest, but Yribe couldn’t make out what he was saying.Yribe was trying to talk, but his mouth was full
of dirt, so he started spitting it out, right into Laskoski’s face.
Finally, he started to understand Laskoski: “You gotta get ahold of
yourself, you gotta get composure.”
“Composure,” Yribe thought. “How can I get composure when I
don’t even know what is going on?”
By then, the dust was starting
to settle. Diaz and Yribe patted each other down for injuries. Diaz
had a faceful of superficial shrapnel wounds, and something had hit
or twisted Yribe’s gut hard enough that he’d ripped his abdomen’s muscle wall. But they were both okay. Laskoski told two soldiers to fire into some treetops about a hundred yards away, since that
seemed like the most likely trigger spot. They called in the IED hit
to Bravo’s TOC (Tactical Operations Center). Looking around, the men tried to figure out if there was another blast coming or if
insurgents were going to follow with a small-arms attack.But it was
quiet, completely still. After such violence, it was amazing how
quickly mundanity reasserted itself.
Goodwin had hoped that his order was the correct one. He was
tense when he overruled Britt’s wishes. He was nervous, and he was
still weighing the pros and cons when the call came over the radio at 2:37 p.m.The patrol had hit an IED, the transmission said. They
couldn’t find Britt and Lopez, but it was likely they were dead.
Goodwin reeled. He felt nauseated. He thought only one thing: “I
just sent them to their death.”
“Britt! Lopez! Britt! Lopez!” the men who had been walking
shouted. They didn’t know where they were. The two had
effectively vanished. But the soldiers in the Humvees across the
canal had seen the whole thing. Private First Class Chris Barnes, in
one of the Humvee gun turrets, yelled and pointed that Britt was in
the water. He’d seen the canal go crimson with blood, but the
current had carried the stain away almost instantly.
Yribe turned and said to Laskoski, “Hey, First Sergeant, I’m going
in.” He ripped his vest and helmet off and jumped in. Almost
immediately, he realized that this was a mistake. The canal’s water
temperature was about 55 degrees, its depth was twenty feet, and
the current was moving so fast that Yribe was as much trying not to
drown as trying to find Britt. Soon exhausted, he barely reached the
other bank, where soldiers from the trucks helped him to dry
ground.
After a minute or two, as the shock wore off and the permanence
set in, Goodwin realized he was about to have a breakdown. He
needed to get out of the TOC. He couldn’t let his men see him in
that state. Laskoski was running the recovery mission down at the
site, helicopters were already in the air, and Q.R.F's were already
either en route or being staged from both the JSB and Mahmudiyah.
So at least for a little while, the wheels were turning and Goodwin was not needed. Which was fortunate, because he was suddenly, massively, uncontrollably incapacitated by grief and guilt. He told
First Lieutenant Habash, “Hey, you’re in charge. I need to step
outside.”
Goodwin sought out Combat Stress nurse Lieutenant Colonel
Marrs, who was still on the FOB. He broke down in sobs and self recrimination.
“You tell a guy to go across a bridge, and within five minutes he’s dead,” Goodwin said. “With everything that had been
going on, I just snapped.” The two talked for about an hour. The session helped. By the end of it, Goodwin was at least able to
project a composed demeanor and go back out and do his job. But
he wasn’t sure how. “At this point, how do you manage this
debacle?” he wondered.
Phil Miller also sought out Marrs later that day. During their
discussion, he told her that he thought 1st Platoon had become
combat ineffective. “It’s one of the most embarrassing things for a
leader to do,” Miller admitted, “to call your platoon combat
ineffective, but I told Captain Goodwin, too, that they are not in the
fight.Their soul, everything, is gone right now.”
Goodwin went down to TCP4. People there were doing math
problems. He couldn’t believe how morbid and mundane it was,
but they were trying to figure out how far and how fast Britt’s body might flow through in the canal system. If the canal’s water is
traveling X miles per hour, they scribbled, and object A at start
point Y has a mass of B, how fast would object A travel to position
Z? “We were throwing sticks into the canal to determine how fast
the water was running, so we could figure out where the body was,” he said. “It was ridiculous, ungodly, inhuman.”
Multiple relief teams, including the original Iron Claw team,
Bravo’s 3rd Platoon, Army dive teams, Edwards and Kunk, and Ebel
and a general from division headquarters would eventually
converge upon the site, but it was up to the squad on the ground to
begin the recovery effort.
The carnage in front of them was difficult to process. There was a
jawbone, stripped clean and shiny white, lying in the dirt. There was a large internal organ that Yribe could only think was a liver,
Lopez’s liver. Flack vests, or parts of them, were lying on the
ground, ripped to shreds as if they were made of paper.They found
ID cards, tatters of money, a wedding ring. Lopez’s torso had been
thrown two hundred yards from the blast site. His arms were gone
from the bicep down and his eyes were wide open. The men put
his upper body in a poncho because they didn’t have any body
bags. Yribe carried him over to one of the Iron Claw vehicles and
handed him off to another soldier. They didn’t know each other, and there was nothing to say.They just nodded to each other.
Captain Jared Bordwell showed up with a team of Alpha soldiers
to relieve the shaken 1st Platoon men. Alpha started jumping into
the canal and dragging it with grappling hooks. As usual after a
catastrophic event, the men on the ground found the senior officers who had flocked there disruptive. Bordwell thought the men could
have used a kind word from Ebel about how crappy it was to have
to look for a dismembered comrade, but Ebel wanted to know why
they weren’t wearing eye protection. Bordwell said that the men in
the canal weren’t even wearing their body armor so he didn’t really
see what difference eye shields made at this point. Later, the
general from division called Bordwell over and inquired what that was that he had found sticking out of the road.
“That is det cord, sir. That is an IED,” Bordwell responded. “You
need to back away from that.” The general sent his aide, a captain,
to mark it by setting an oilcan on top of it. Bordwell looked at him
and said, “Sir, you’re fucking nuts.” The Alpha guys shook their
heads in disbelief.
By 4:50 p.m., the medevac took off with Yribe and Diaz to get
treatment at FOB Mahmudiyah. That night, they had part of a tent
to themselves, and they talked about what they were going to do
now, how they were going to survive.
“I don’t even know what to tell these guys anymore,” Yribe said
to Diaz. “Because I can’t tell them it’s going to be all right. What do
I tell them?” Diaz said he didn’t know—all they could do was get
back out there and be with the rest of the men as soon as possible.
They both caught the first convoy to Yusufiyah the next morning.
Lieutenant Colonel Marrs agreed with Miller’s and Goodwin’s
assessments of 1st Platoon. Later that night at FOB Yusufiyah, she
told Kunk that “hostility and vengeance seem prominent in 1st
Platoon.” She advised him that the platoon’s mental health status was “red”—non–mission capable—and they should be given respite
from their current operations tempo to recover from their losses.
Kunk and Edwards approached Goodwin that same night. They asked him how he was doing and what he needed. This time, there was no joking around, no sheepishness about how unlikely the
request was.
Goodwin said, “I need another platoon.” They asked him how he
thought 1st Platoon was doing. Goodwin replied, “They are not mission capable, and I don’t know when they will be. They are
done.”
Kunk looked Goodwin in the eye, said, “Okay,” and got into his
truck. Goodwin was confident that something would be done to
reduce the pressure on 1st Platoon. He was sure, now, that some
sort of relief was coming.
Later that night, the word came down. First Platoon was being
pulled out of the fight for forty-eight hours, after which they would
resume their normal duties.
When asked about staffing, Kunk sometimes said that he tried to
get more troops down in the AO, but there were none to be had. “If
I needed more manpower,” he explained, “then I would ask for more manpower. I would lay it out to the best of my ability. If the
resources aren’t there, then my brigade has to rob Peter to pay Paul,
and they weren’t willing to do that.” Other times, he asserted that
he rejected Goodwin’s requests for more men because he didn’t
think that Bravo needed them. He thought the company had enough
troops to complete the job.The problem was that 1st Platoon could
not get their act together and Goodwin was not using what he had
efficiently.
Goodwin insisted on going through and boxing up Britt’s and
Lopez’s personal items that night. He didn’t want to put any of his men through that. Everything was shredded and mangled—Kevlar,
ammo magazines, pieces of uniform—and soaking wet, whether
from water or blood or both. The smells were ripe, the textures magnified, either extraordinarily rough or extraordinarily smooth.
Goodwin tried to separate the stuff as best he could. The wedding
ring was obviously Lopez’s. The watch, probably Britt’s. He made
two piles, trying to get back to each family as much stuff as possible, so maybe they could feel more connected to their father
and husband, or son and brother. The whole time, Goodwin was
thinking to himself, “This is what you did.You killed them.”
Around-the-clock dive teams did not3nd Britt until the middle of
the next day. HHC commander Shawn Umbrell was there as Britt’s
body was pulled out of the canal, and the sight took his breath
away. With the water running so fast and so cold over him for so
long, Britt had been thoroughly washed and preserved. He was
perfectly white and clean. He was immaculate.
Caveman was declared black (closed to military traffic) after the
incident and, with few rare exceptions, it remained black for years
afterward. First Strike units patrolled the road periodically, but not
in any concerted way ever again. And even though there was still
one large concrete span over the canal that his own chain of
command would not let him blow up, and all the other bridges
could be easily rebuilt, Kunk considered the Caveman missions a
success. “If you are stopping the freedom of movement of the bad
guy, now you are controlling and dictating where he can move and
can’t move. We did go in there and drop a lot of the bridges. And it
paid huge dividends. It got to the point where I didn’t need
Caveman, but the reason why I didn’t need it was because I took it
away. We took Caveman and the use of Caveman away from the
enemy.”
Others disagreed. “I don’t know what the hell we were thinking,”
Goodwin volunteered. “Seriously. It poses absolutely no significance
to anything. And I hate to say that for as many hours as I spent on
that fucking road, for nothing. There was no reason for us to go
down there. None. It served no purpose. Insurgents could maneuver
in there, but they couldn’t get out. There was nowhere for them to
go. They were going to run into us or the I.A's somewhere. So what
did we need this road for?"
next
14-Leadership Shake-up
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