Swear,the more I read of this book,the more it seems like I am watching one of them old silent Keystone Cops movies.The brass not only seems out of touch with Operations on the ground,they must also be incompetent.The alternative would be,they just did not care about their men...
BLACK HEARTS: ONE PLATOON'S DESCENT INTO MADNESS IN
IRAQ'S TRIANGLE OF DEATH
BY JIM FREDERICK
BY JIM FREDERICK
14
Leadership Shake-up
WHEN THE PLATOON assembled at FOB Yusufiyah for another Critical
Incident Debrief, Colonel Ebel came down too. He was in the
potato barn talking to Goodwin and Laskoski when Miller walked up. They talked for a while and Miller mentioned Green,
saying that Green was having a particularly hard time dealing with
these deaths. Ebel and Green met privately for about thirty minutes,
an extraordinary occurrence. Although Ebel spoke briefly with a wide variety of soldiers every day, frequently consoling them during
times of loss, he cannot remember another occasion when he met
one-on-one with a private for half an hour.
During the meeting, Green told Ebel that he hated Iraqis and wanted to kill them all. Ebel thought that this was a normal
reaction to what he had just been through. When you watch a
comrade destroyed by the enemy, Ebel felt, everybody goes through
a full range of emotions.
Green asked about the rules of engagement, wanting to know,
“Why can’t we just go shoot them all?”
Ebel responded, “Because that is not what American soldiers do.”
“I’ll be all right,” Green told Ebel. “I’m just frustrated.” Ebel was
reassured by the conversation and told Green’s immediate
supervisors to keep looking after him.
Green said Ebel’s high rank made it just the most noteworthy
example of a fairly common occurrence: he’d simply agree to what
a superior officer was asserting about treating Iraqis humanely, and
the officer would think he had fixed him. “I would tell them right
from the get-go how I was,” he recalled. “And then they would tell me, ‘No, this is how you’re supposed to look at it.’ And I would say,
me, ‘No, this is how you’re supposed to look at it.’ And I would say,
‘All right.’ They outranked me by so many levels, it’s not like I’m
going to get into a big argument with them.”
The debilitating effects of warfare have likely been known to
humankind since warfare existed, at least since Homer described
Achilles’ rampage and desecration of Hector in the Iliad. But
scientists have been studying the topic in earnest only since World
War II. And that work, though constantly growing and being
revised, is conclusive on several major points. Primary among them:
A soldier can endure combat for only so long before he begins to
break down. In The Face of Battle, military historian John Keegan wrote that early studies concluded that a soldier “reached his peak
of effectiveness in the first 90 days of combat, and after that his
efficiency began to fall off and that he became steadily less
valuable thereafter until he was completely useless.”
It is tempting to contrast the great battles of Normandy and the
Battle of the Bulge and even the Tet Offensive—massive waves of
tens of thousands of soldiers clashing against one another as gun fire
rained down for days and thousands of men died—with Bravo
Company’s fight and say the two don’t even compare. And that is
true in certain respects. Bravo faced no force-on-force battles that
lasted more than a few hours, and these were rarely larger than a
squad fighting a handful of insurgents. But to then conclude that
Bravo’s struggles were somehow less significant or more bearable
does a disservice to the way that warfare has changed in the last
few decades and glosses over the psychological effects—still largely
uncharted—that these changes have wrought. During World War II,
units would be thrown into major battles that could last a day, a week, perhaps a month or even two—but then they would be withdrawn from the front lines for weeks, sometimes for several months, before being sent into battle again. American policy during
WWII was to never leave troops on the front lines longer than
eighty days.
The men of Bravo stayed in a combat zone, went “outside the wire”—onto the front lines—every single day for eleven months
straight. In the case of the TCPs, they lived outside the wire twenty four
hours a day. And they experienced some form of enemy
contact almost every single day. Deployments where every day is a
combat day are a fairly new phenomenon in the U.S. Army. As
former lieutenant colonel and psychological researcher Dave
Grossman writes in his 1996 book On Killing, “Spending months of
continuous [emphasis his] exposure to the stresses of combat is a
phenomenon found only on the battle fields of this century…it is
only in this century that our physical and logistical capability to
support combat has completely outstripped our psychological
capacity to endure it.”
Even pushed to the limits this way, the vast majority of Bravo did
not crack. But all men start any endeavor with different capacities
to cope, and in this environment, with so little support from
superiors, it is not surprising that some were overwhelmed. After
Britt and Lopez died, an already fraying platoon began to unravel more quickly. Its psychological separation from the company and
the battalion became more pronounced. The platoon began falling
in on itself. In the turmoil of combat and stress, violence and death,
they started to redraw moral and social codes that they believed
applied only to them. Foremost among their rationalizations was
their conviction that no one else had experienced what they had,
and no one else could possibly understand it. “We didn’t want to
hear anything from anybody, because nobody knew what we were
going through,” explained Sergeant John Diem. “That’s the
leitmotif: ‘Nobody knows what we’re going through.’”
They became isolated in every sense; the Pygmalion effect was in
full swing. After being continuously told that they were screwups
and outcasts, 1st Platoon consciously or subconsciously decided to
live up to their outcast status. This “shrinkage of the social and moral horizon,” as psychologist Jonathan Shay puts it in Achilles in
Vietnam, is a common phenomenon for small groups of soldiers in
prolonged combat settings. Such soldiers, Shay writes, “sometimes
lose responsiveness to the claims of any bonds, ideals or loyalties outside a tiny circle of immediate comrades. An us-against-them
mentality severs all other attachments or commitments.”
Extreme hatred of Iraqis was now common, widespread, and
openly discussed. Paul Cortez rated his hatred of Iraqis as a 5 on a
scale of 10 when he first deployed. By December, he said, it had hit
20. The platoon became more aggressive. Suspects were routinely
beaten before being brought back onto the FOBs. There was a
hierarchy that governed who got to punch or kick a detainee—new men were not allowed to participate until they had experienced a
sufficient amount of combat. There were insiders and outsiders and
you had to earn your way in. “If you weren’t there the whole time,”
said one soldier, “new guys would get told, ‘Who the fuck do you
think you are?’ ‘Stay away from me. I don’t even want to know
you.’” Many of the men suffered from other well-documented
symptoms of extended combat exposure, including fatigue, anxiety
and panic attacks, increasing irritability, and obsessive-compulsive
tendencies. Drinking increased, became more open, and was not
limited to the lower-enlisted. Some NCOs not only allowed their
soldiers to drink, they were drinking themselves. A common
attitude was:Everything’s fine as long as it doesn’t get out of hand.
“The platoon rejected anything that wasn’t tailored to the reality
that they had crafted to protect them from what was really
happening,” explained Sergeant Diem. “And what was happening is
they were debasing themselves as individuals. I’m not coming down
on these guys any harder than I come down on myself. Because I
can church it up and say, ‘I was doing the best I could. We were
doing the best we could.’ I allowed myself to feel overwhelmed and
I allowed myself to misinterpret reality, allowed myself to basically
become insane in order to make it as easy on myself as possible.”
The whole brigade was aware that Bravo was depleted, and that it would be a challenge to fix it. “Having to reseed the leadership of
virtually an entire rifle company while in combat is a very difficult
thing to do,” commented battalion executive officer Fred Wintrich. The answer, battalion leadership decided, was not to rotate units
but to rotate leaders. “Maybe we should have put a whole new
company in there,” reflected Ebel. “But I don’t know—the model was that a company builds credibility with the populace by having
some tenure there. Tom Kunk’s strategy was sound. He was rotating
his leaders, his platoon sergeants, thinking that’s the catalyst.”
In reality, everyone understood that there was no real issue with
2nd or 3rd Platoon. Sergeants First Class Gebhardt and Blaisdell and
their men were performing exceptionally well even without
lieutenants. The real focus of the leadership shake-up was 1st
Platoon.
Enough with the false starts and second chances, Kunk and
Edwards decided. Miller had to go. They started lining up Rob
Gallagher, the former 1st Platoon sergeant now on one of the MiTT
teams, to take over the platoon immediately.
“The exact words I received from the sergeant major were ‘You
need to fix things quick, fast, and in a hurry,’” Gallagher said.
Beyond that, he didn’t receive a lot of guidance on what was wrong
or instructions on how to correct it. He knew that there were
problems with morale, discipline, and coping with the loss of four
comrades in a short amount of time. And, as Gallagher understood
it, Miller would continue as platoon sergeant. He was being
installed as platoon leader, in the same way that Blaisdell now ran
3rd Platoon and Gebhardt ran 2nd. He loved his old unit and he was immensely honored to be handed the task.
Gallagher was a surprising choice for many in the battalion.
Before this deployment, he had been Bravo’s platoon sergeant for
nine months, and before that he had taken over as 3rd Platoon’s
sergeant three months into OIF1. But Battalion moved him to the MiTT team, it is widely acknowledged, as a graceful way to reassign
a platoon sergeant who was not jelling with his men. Before
deployment, he’d had some close friends in 1st Platoon, including
Nelson and Miller (“Nelson” is Gallagher’s son’s middle name), but
his opinion of the junior soldiers in the platoon was low. Among
the biggest complaints from peers and superiors about Gallagher in garrison was that he was too critical and dismissive of his own men.
He was quick to declare them beyond hope. He would vent
inappropriately at meetings that his men were a bunch of losers
and dimwits who couldn’t do anything right. Both Blaisdell and
Gebhardt liked Gallagher personally, and both resisted offering an
opinion on whether he was the right man for the job, but they
agreed on this: If the chain of command did not have confidence in
him in garrison, which was no secret, they did not understand why
they would bring him back now.
Gallagher arrived on December 26. Although he was excited to be
asked to take charge of his old platoon again, there was not exactly
a receiving line waiting for him. “The company commander didn’t
even know that I was coming,” Gallagher said. “The first sergeant
didn’t even know who I was. So I don’t know at what level I was
directed to go back to the unit, but I got the impression that no one
really knew what the purpose of it was.” Nonetheless, after
showing up and introducing himself around the TOC, he dropped
his gear and headed out to the TCPs to be with the platoon.
The men of 1st Platoon were not happy to see him. At best, he was tolerated. To a degree, this was the inevitable by-product of
Gallagher’s conscious decisions. His friendships with Miller and
Nelson notwithstanding, he rarely cultivated relationships, with
either subordinates or superiors. He came to the job with an old school
mentality that being overly familiar clouded one’s judgment
and ability to perform the tough tasks that both leading men and
taking orders required. He was disdainful of “Joe lovers,” leaders who sought approval or friendship from those many ranks below
them. He thought the informal and relaxed dealings between
enlisted men and senior NCOs and junior officers that was
increasingly becoming the standard in the Army was a disgrace. Nor
did he develop mentors. “I am never the type to cultivate close
relationships with a person regardless of their rank,” he said. “So I was never in Sergeant Major’s tight circle. I did not arbitrarily strike
up a conversation with him just to have a conversation.” While
principled, his taciturn, standoffish, and tetchy demeanor meant that he had few friends, no allies, and no base of support.
Arriving at the TCPs, Gallagher was stunned by how 1st Platoon
had changed in just three months. “I don’t think he was prepared
for what he was walking into,” said one 1st Platoon soldier. They
looked nothing like the happy, eager, optimistic troops he had said
good-bye to. They were dirty, haggard, exhausted, pale, and dead eyed.
Many were alternately angry or despairing. Some of them
would tear up on routine missions or cry into their lunches. “I have
been in the Army a long time,” Gallagher said. “And I was
overwhelmed by the amount of despair.” Asked about morale, he
said, “On a scale of 1 to 10, it would probably be 1, the lowest
possible.”
Miller was among those hurting the worst. After losing four men
so quickly, he was having doubts about himself, but he also knew, with the arrival of Gallagher, that Battalion had lost its faith in him
as well. Although he still retained the title of platoon sergeant, the move felt to Miller like a demotion and he did not subordinate
himself to Gallagher gracefully. His relationship with Gallagher,
once strong, was now strained, and would soon break down
completely. He undermined Gallagher’s authority. Squad leaders
and soldiers exacerbated the power struggle. They would frequently
look at Miller after Gallagher issued an order, as if to ask, “Is it
okay to do what he says?”
Gallagher spent his first few days trying to restore order and
discipline to the unmoored platoon. He emphasized proper
uniforms, grooming, and hygiene. The men were unimpressed.
According to Lauzier, Gallagher’s fatal flaw, in their eyes, was his
inability to filter out the pressures coming down from higher-ups,
one of the widely acknowledged but unofficial jobs of a senior
platoon NCO. Ideally, the men should have no idea how hard they
are being leaned on. Gallagher would not just pass along the stress,
Lauzier said, but magnify it. “He’d get the lash, and then he’d come
back and explode on you,” explained Lauzier. “And you can’t do
that. He put a lot of stress on everybody.”
Unbeknownst to Gallagher or Miller, however, there was another
leadership shake-up in the works. Kunk planned to bring in First
Lieutenant Tim Norton, who was also serving on a MiTT team in
Lutufiyah, as 1st Platoon’s platoon leader. Norton was the senior
lieutenant in the battalion, he had received high praise from
everyone he’d worked with, and he was considered one of First
Strike’s most promising young officers. Kunk called Norton to his
office shortly before the New Year to tell him of his new
assignment. Norton got only the shortest of briefings on what to
expect and what was expected of him. Kunk told him that the
platoon was having some morale and discipline issues and that he wanted Norton to help get them on their feet.
Kunk mentioned that Miller had declared the platoon combat
ineffective, but added, “The platoon sergeant doesn’t get to do that.
Only I get to do that.” Get them to work through their losses, focus
on the basics, and start being soldiers again,Kunk said.
Norton was wary, but willing. Bravo, and 1st Platoon especially,
had developed a reputation throughout the battalion. Depending on
how charitable the person relating the info was, around the
battalion you could hear anything from “Bravo is in a fight to the
death down there,” to “Bravo is having a tough time,” to “Bravo is
seriously dicked up.” Norton was confident in his abilities, and
excited to lead a platoon again, but he was well aware that he was
not inheriting a custodial role. He was being brought in to fix
something no one had been taught to fix. As he noted, “There is no manual that says, ‘Here’s how to take a war-torn platoon and train
it back up to a fully operational level while still in combat.’”
Norton caught a ride to Yusufiyah on New Year’s Day. He arrived at about 10:30 p.m. to report in to Goodwin, whom he had never met. He found Goodwin sitting in the TOC, in flannel pajama bottoms and a T-shirt with a poncho liner over his head. He was asleep. Norton said hello to the rest of the TOC and headed out to meet the platoon. Not surprisingly, he got the cold shoulder from them. “Who the fuck are you?” some soldiers ranking as low as private challenged him. Others barely acknowledged his existence, hardly responding when he spoke to them, until he explained that hardly responding when he spoke to them, until he explained that he was not some cherry lieutenant straight from Officers’ Basic. He had been in Lutufiyah the whole time, and before that he was with Charlie, so it was not like he just fell off the turnip truck. That, at least, prevented outright insubordination, but it still took a while for him to be taken seriously because, as the soldiers never ceased to remind him, “Lutufiyah sure as shit ain’t Yusufiyah.”
Norton’s leadership philosophy was based on a quote he picked up somewhere: “Leadership is 90 percent people skills and 20 percent motivation.” He didn’t see any point in being aloof, or in pretending that he wasn’t the same age as most of his soldiers. He thought it was possible to maintain a command separation, but the line could be drawn in chalk, it didn’t have to be etched in stone. “You have to feel people’s emotional states, their wants and needs,” he explained. “It’s not like I have to be their best friend. But if I know some dude likes fishing, then I’ll start the conversation with fishing.”
Given how closed off 1st Platoon had become, Norton did break down their walls very quickly. Soldiers grew to like him because he had an infectiously upbeat attitude, even in that environment. He didn’t demand a salute and he insisted on being called not “Lieutenant Norton,” or even “Tim,” but “Timmy.” He was not happy unless other people were laughing and, unusual for a lieutenant, he was not afraid to make a fool of himself to do it. He did a wicked Harry Caray impression. He was also an enthusiastic soldier who always volunteered to patrol, who always offered to ride along into the field. Frequently, he wouldn’t wait for orders to come down, he’d just draft up a mission and go. “He merged with the platoon like he had been there the whole time,” remarked one soldier. “To take over a platoon that smoothly, never mind just join one? You’ve got to be doing something right. He fit right in with us, no problems whatsoever.”
That’s not exactly true. Taken by surprise, Gallagher and Miller both had a big problem with Norton’s arrival. They both felt lied to. As Gallagher understood his initial brief, he was coming in as the platoon leader, so for Norton to arrive just a couple of days later, with no communication, no warning, no nothing, did not start things off well. And as Gallagher slotted back to platoon sergeant, that relegated Miller back to being a squad leader, which incensed him. If Miller had felt as if he was being demoted before, now he explicitly was.
“At that point,” Miller said, “I was like, ‘You know what? You can fucking kiss my ass. I’m not going to be part of this bullshit anymore.’” He would have had no problem taking a squad with a different platoon or a different company—he was still a staff sergeant, after all—but to be relieved yet forced to remain in the platoon was a double humiliation. “I was bitter. And I was fucking pissed. To be lied to like that, to be told that I was staying on as platoon sergeant, and then moving me down to squad leader after I had run this shit for four months without a word to me? That’s when I started thinking, ‘I am not going to be a party to this abortion anymore.’”
After the Britt and Lopez memorial, a general asked the 1-502nd’s executive officer, Major Wintrich, “Where are you getting your replacement lieutenants?”
Wintrich told him, “We aren’t. We don’t have any infantry lieutenants sitting on their hands saying, ‘Put me in,Coach.’”
Actually, there was one sitting on the bench up at Striker: twenty three-year-old Lieutenant Paul Fisher. And soon after that memorial, he started as Bravo Company’s 2nd Platoon leader. Fisher entered the Army on an officer candidate contract in February 2004. Basic Training, Officer Candidate School, Infantry Officer Basic Course, Airborne School, and Ranger School kept him in training until August 2005, when he got to Fort Campbell. He arrived just as the brigade was making its last push toward deployment. He was excited to get a platoon and “live the dream,” as infantry officers in on-the-ground leadership positions like to say. Then he received his assignment: in the Brigade Public Affairs Office. He was not happy. “So my first job as a lieutenant who did absolutely everything correctly, all the right schools, everything to a T? I got fucked.”
He spent two and a half months up at Striker with Brigade Headquarters, and he was frustrated. “I was living on this little Fort Campbell in the desert,” he said, “where I could not have felt safer than in my own bed at home.” The sound of gun fire in the distance especially irritated him because that’s where he should be. The idleness of his job drove him crazy. Among his tasks was delivering the morning newspapers to brigade senior command. Desperate, he started pulling guard at the front desk of the TOC checking I.D's— ordinarily an enlisted man’s job—hoping someone from an infantry unit would notice his lieutenant’s bar and his Ranger Tab. It worked. Lieutenant Colonel Rob Haycock, commander of the 2- 502nd, passed him one day and asked him what the hell he was doing there, and told him to come work for him. Fisher was ready to head down to 2nd Battalion, but on December 29, he got the word: 1st Battalion needed him more. He was going to Yusufiyah. “You’re going down to the Wild West,” one of the brigade staff officers told him.
Fisher caught a MiTT convoy down to Mahmudiyah carrying a ridiculous amount of equipment: two footlockers of stu; in addition to his rucksack. “Little did I know what a brigade puke I had turned into,” he admitted. “I didn’t even know how soft I had become.” He had a quick briefing with Kunk and Salome.
“You need to get your shit together, Lieutenant,” they told him, “because you’re about to go where things are life or death. It ain’t DVD Night every night around here, so get your head screwed on straight and you might be okay.” He caught another convoy to Yusufiyah about an hour later.
Halfway to Yusufiyah, at the exact same spot that Specialist Galloway and 2nd Platoon’s previous platoon leader, Jerry Eidson, had been hit ten days earlier, Fisher’s Humvee triggered a trip-wire IED, setting off three 120mm rounds strung together. The entire truck was lifted off the ground, and it landed with a thud. He heard screaming and checked himself. He was unhurt. Sitting in the rear left seat, he could tell the guy next to him, the gunner, and the driver were all wounded. He got out and started trying to treat the driver. The driver had a two-inch hole through his leg that was gushing blood, soaking Fisher’s uniform as he tried to stanch the bleeding. Other members of the convoy took over, started applying tourniquets, and managed to save all of the injured soldiers’ lives. The three other occupants of the Humvee were later evacuated back to the United States. But at that moment Fisher stood in disbelief at what he had just witnessed. Just hours earlier he was naively ensconced up at Striker and now he had narrowly escaped death his first time on the road.
Once all the blast debris was cleaned up, the convoy completed its journey to Yusufiyah. Fisher headed to the TOC. He thought it odd to find Captain Goodwin asleep in the middle of the headquarters. First Sergeant Laskoski gave him the thirty-second tour, introduced him around, and pointed him toward his platoon sergeant, Jeremy Gebhardt, in the potato bays and told him to introduce himself.
At no time did anyone at Yusufiyah seem to find it strange or feel the need to mention to Fisher that his uniform was covered with fresh, wet blood. “So I can only conclude that this is completely normal, to get blown up out there like this,” he said. “I was freaked.”
He met Gebhardt and they had coffee while Gebhardt tried to bring Fisher up to speed. There was a midnight mission heading out soon, but Gebhardt suggested Fisher skip this one, grab some shut-eye, and get ready for tomorrow. Fisher noticed that 2nd Platoon’s bay had a wall where soldiers marked down each time they got hit by an IED or a mortar. They were running out of room for their hash marks and they had only been there three months.
JANUARY 2006
He considered FOB Yusufiyah outside the wire because, to him, it could not be called a forward operating base at all. A FOB, in his mind, provided a degree of comfort and rest, a measure of safety and security. But after eight months of that potato factory being occupied by U.S. forces, including three months by the 101st, Gallagher could not understand how the place had none of the basics that most people would consider essential to maintaining the long-term morale and welfare of combat soldiers. He could not believe that they were still living in the potato bays, with no more overhead protection than the building’s corrugated tin roofing.
“I addressed that with First Sergeant Ski [Laskoski],” he said. “I explained to him that in my opinion morale is terrible and immediate steps needed to be taken to correct this, otherwise we were going to have major problems. Simple things in regard to the living conditions, which were abysmal in my mind.”
When he voiced such concerns, he was told that he was whining. Laskoski, for his part, had quickly decided that Gallagher was incompetent and noted deficiencies of not just discipline but combat readiness. “It was the rainy season,” Laskoski said. “Arms and ammunition, you’ve got to keep that maintained twice daily, three times, it doesn’t matter how many times, daily. I looked at some of his vehicles and they were just trashed out. Ammo rusted, commo [communications] gear just not working. That’s unacceptable.” Looking more closely at the assignments at the TCPs, Gallagher concluded that he did not have enough men to meet minimum staffing requirements. “When you talk about an Army guard rotation, you are talking about three reliefs,” he explained. And when he arrived, each TCP typically had six, seven, or eight troops. Guard detail alone required three people, with three in relief for every guard position. “So, right there, there are not enough people.”
And at the TCPs, time not on guard was not really downtime. Soldiers not on guard had to search vehicles and people passing through the checkpoints, do IED sweeps, supervise IAs, and be ready for any ad hoc tasks or emergencies that arose. “You are burning the candle at both ends,” Gallagher admonished. “You can’t ask a guy to pull guard for six hours and then as soon as he gets off guard to go on a six-hour IED sweep.” Similarly, because everyone was already doing something else at the TCPs, it was impossible to reinforce the positions’ pitiful defenses.
He likewise thought that searching for IEDs on foot was crazy and dangerous and demonstrated contempt for the soldiers’ safety. “You are looking for a large-caliber artillery round that is designed not to be found, and the blast radius of that round exceeds your visual radius,” Gallagher said. Gallagher would clear Sportster using Humvees until he had to be specifically ordered not to. He began butting heads with Sergeant Major Edwards immediately over the issue. “It was a death march,” he asserted. “I told them the way we were doing business was absolutely ridiculous. The exact words I received from the sergeant major were ‘Who are you to question brigade policy?’”
Even Gallagher’s critics among the soldiers acknowledge that he always led from the front. He never asked his soldiers to do something that he didn’t do. Frequently, he would pull guard himself, just to buy another soldier an hour or two of rest. “He was the only platoon sergeant that would pull guard,” said one. “He’d be like, ‘Yeah, put me up for two night shifts.You guys need to rest too.’”
And despite how foolhardy he thought the policy was, he led every IED sweep he could. “I was the point man,” he said. “I felt if anyone should be blown up it should be me. I was not going to put soldiers in danger.” He also ranged 1st Platoon’s positions randomly. It was his way to stay connected to every facet of the platoon and keep his soldiers on their toes. “I have been in the Army a long time,” he explained. “I know soldiers act out when there is no leadership. I would try not to let the soldiers know where I was going. I was the variable that nobody knew. It was deliberately built that way so that the soldiers don’t plan on doing things that they are not supposed to do.”
Once he had fully evaluated the situation, Gallagher became convinced, like many of the others in 1st Platoon, that he was going to die. “My survivability as well as the soldiers’ was very suspect on any given day,” he acknowledged. “My wife asked me the likelihood of my, based on my experience, making it out. I said it was not very good. It’s probably not going to happen.”
Gallagher had little time at the helm of 1st Platoon before Battalion deemed his tenure a failure. Not a week had gone by before Kunk and Edwards regretted their decision. “Gallagher was not getting his job done,”Kunk said. “Gallagher was falling under the same trap that Miller had.There was an excuse why they were not in uniform, why they didn’t have security.” Circling the battlefield, Kunk and Edwards would see that, again, 1st Platoon didn’t have their helmets on, or were failing in some other way. “So we took corrective actions, we did some teaching, coaching, mentoring,” Kunk said. “We followed up about three days later, and it was worse.” Kunk repeatedly pointed to the success that 2nd and 3rd Platoons were having as proof of Gallagher’s deficiencies. “The other two platoons never had any trouble doing the three missions they had to do,”Kunk said.
Many members of 1st Platoon insist that if uniform discipline, let alone other more serious discipline breaches, was really an issue, then the sparkle of Blaisdell’s and Gebhardt’s halos had become so strong that Kunk,Edwards, and the rest of the battalion were simply blinded by them. Second and 3rd Platoons, they claimed, dumped their ACU (Army combat uniform) tops when it was too hot or went several days without shaving when it suited them just as often as 1st Platoon did. To the men of 1st Platoon, the battalion’s conviction that they were incompetent now just seemed like a grudge. “Everything that ever went wrong in that entire area was our platoon’s fault,” said 2nd Squad Leader Chris Payne. “We were the only ones ever out of uniform. We were the only ones who took our Kevlars off outside the wire. We were the only ones who did this and the only ones who did that.”
Compounding Gallagher’s problems was the fact that he and Lieutenant Norton did not get along. Gallagher thought Norton was young and callow, the epitome of the “Joe lover” he despised. He found Norton unprofessional, even treacherous, going behind his back to discuss important matters with Miller or the other squad leaders before he discussed them with him. “I do not know why I was X’ed out of the loop in a very early period,” Gallagher said. “I felt the relationship was sort of doomed from the beginning. I just think Norton’s demeanor, his character, was very immature.”
Norton didn’t have a huge problem with Gallagher, aside from the fact that he was not impressed with his intelligence, his tactical skills, or his relationship with his men.Coming from Charlie, where he benefited from First Sergeant Largent’s and Sergeant First Class Hayes’s mentoring, he found Gallagher wanting. Norton thought Gallagher was clueless when it came to managing relationships. It is one thing not to want to be a political hustler, Norton observed, but it is another when your sour disposition starts working against your own goals.
Norton felt he had been put in this position to fix things, not to declare 1st Platoon unfixable, as Gallagher was doing. Emotionally, 1st Platoon was frayed, there was no question about it. But tactically, Norton felt, they were not that bad. They still got up every morning and they went on patrols and they completed their missions. They needed a huge attitude readjustment, obviously. Norton was trying to get the guys to focus more on the Iraqis as people, to consider that man over there as not just another fucking Hadji but as Ali, who owns a falafel shop and loves his kids and has problems because he needs to get to Baghdad and back every week to buy restaurant supplies.
“I really had to work to convince them, ‘Dude, not everybody out here needs to be killed. Not everybody needs to get the crap kicked out of him. In fact, beating the crap out of people is wrong, you know? Geneva Conventions? Look it up. It’s a concept.’” Norton thought that getting the men to change their focus was an achievable goal, but he was certain that if Gallagher really wanted to get 1st Platoon yanked to the rear, he wasn’t going about it the right way. “Gallagher vocalized it too emotionally and not tactfully at all,” Norton explained, “so it was easy for them to say, ‘Oh, he’s just throwing fuel on their fire.’”
Around this time, Miller headed up to Striker for a week or so to get a chipped tooth fixed. While there, he started looking for a new job without telling Kunk or Edwards. He bumped into Staff Sergeant Chaz Allen, who was in Battalion’s liaison office with Brigade and was itching to see more action. “I told him that it was rough down there,” Miller recalled. “I asked him what his plans were. He said he was trying to get down there. I asked him did he want to swap?” Allen was all for it. He had been to Kosovo, but he hadn’t deployed for OIF1, so he was eager to get back down on the line.
Second Brigade’s Command Sergeant Major Brian Stall called Edwards to say, Miller is up here wanting to know if I have a job for him. This was not a move Kunk took kindly. “Instead of looking us in the eye, like a leader should, and being honest and straightforward, and telling your command sergeant major and your battalion commander that you can’t do the job, or that you’re burned out, or that you might be under stress, he went fishing for a job,” he said.
Miller didn’t see it that way. “I wasn’t going to let someone determine my fate,” he stated. “I wasn’t going to be held responsible for my guys dying if I wasn’t getting the support I needed to prevent it from happening. I think I had the leadership ability to get them through, after all the casualties we were taking. Maybe not. But if they had said you’re the platoon sergeant and you’re staying the platoon sergeant, then, roger that, I would have Charlie Miked,” he said, using Army slang for “Continued Mission.” “I will take the responsibility for every casualty when I was in charge. If they want to blame me, then so be it. Those were my guys. And they still are, whether they’re here today or six feet below. But to blame me, and make me a squad leader, and still keep me around in the same platoon? No, that ain’t gonna cut it.”[I can definitely relate to what Miller says,all I have read so far is soldiers on duty 24-7,and brass with their heads up their ass DC]
After rotating down to the JSB for the 3rst time, Gallagher assessed the Alamo bridge as even more dangerous a position than the TCPs, and he pulled his men off of it. How to properly treat the AVLB had been a controversial issue throughout the year and would continue to be so for the rest of the deployment. The battalion’s order was to “secure” it. According to the U.S. Army’s Field Manual 3-90: Tactics, “secure” means to prevent a unit or facility from being damaged or destroyed by the enemy. Obviously, there are a number of ways to secure something, a point that Operations Officer Rob Salome said he consistently tried to impress upon Captain Goodwin. “I don’t have to physically have my hand on something to secure it,” he pointed out. “I can secure it by fire or overwatch or with a patrol, not necessarily by occupation. John didn’t understand those critical pieces of those definitions, so he couldn’t articulate those to his NCOs either.”
Kunk asserted that it was possible to see the Alamo from the JSB patrol base’s crow’s nest and thus it was securable from there. Everyone else disputed this. The bridge may have been technically visible, but sight lines were not clear enough to make it securable, especially at night, especially since there were recessed routes to the bridge via the canal banks that could be checked only from very close distances. Before late June 2006 the battalion never issued written guidance to Goodwin on how the position should be manned, rationalizing that squad-level staffing decisions are customarily a company commander’s job. Goodwin, for his part, never issued any kind of guidance to the platoons. “I let the platoons figure out their staffing down there,” Goodwin said.
So it is unclear who ordered Gallagher back out to the bridge, and it is unclear whether he received instructions that he had to have men literally on top of it, but he was under the impression he had no choice. “I had to send people back out there,” he explained. “So I sat my best NCOs down and told them these are dangerous missions. I told them what could happen if they go out and not do the right thing. ‘You need to be on your guys’ ass. You need to not be fucking around, or these will be the implications if you do not obey,’ I told them. ‘You will be on Al Jazeera getting your head chopped off.’”
Second and 3rd Platoons found other ways of securing the bridge without always having men standing next to it. Sometimes 2nd Platoon would run patrols down there, or they would overwatch it from an ambush spot, or they would just run a Humvee back and forth from TCP4 to the AVLB to the JSB and back at irregular intervals. Blaisdell would employ all of these tactics as well, saying that he never put a Humvee down there in exactly the same location twice. He used the truck, he said, “like a roving TCP.”[Got a feeling we are about to hear a bad story about this bridge DC]
Regardless of how they varied the detail, it was still common for there to be just two to four men and a truck guarding the AVLB. No one passing by, from Brigade on down, ever corrected them. Captain Shawn Umbrell and other company commanders said the staffing down there was common knowledge. “Sometime in November or December, I remember in a meeting being briefed that the truck at the AVLB took some small-arms fire,” Umbrell recalled. “And I think they said there were like four guys at that position with one truck. And that was the first I heard of it. And I remember thinking, ‘Holy cow! We’re manning a TCP that shorthanded? Four guys in one truck?’ I’m looking around and trying to gauge the looks on other people’s faces, and I don’t recall Colonel Kunk ever saying, ‘That’s unsatisfactory.You need to up the numbers down there.’ But I remember hearing Colonel Kunk talking later, ‘I never knew we had three or four guys!’ And I’m thinking, ‘What do you mean, you never knew? We all knew.’”
Their relationship already strained, Sergeant Major Edwards and Sergeant First Class Gallagher almost came to blows in January. An Iraqi base was being constructed adjacent to the JSB, which required earthmovers, bulldozers, dump trucks, and other heavy support machinery. On the day Edwards came to visit, it had also been raining. There was not enough room at the JSB to harbor all this equipment and the terrain was messy, so the place was sloppy.
“I think what upset him the most was when his PSD came in— because he had a large entourage, there was not enough room for him to move around,” Gallagher said. “His discomfort getting in prompted much of this.” Edwards sought out Gallagher and began to berate him about how messy the JSB was. He was especially irritated that he had also seen some soldiers relaxing, playing a video game. This was not the first time that Gallagher had heard Edwards’s concerns about tidiness, but he frankly thought they were misplaced and mistimed, and, given everything that was going on, he had less patience for Edwards’s yelling than ever before.
“I am not really worried about trash right now, Sergeant Major,” Gallagher replied. “I am worried about my guys getting some rest.” Edwards did not like that response and started to yell some more, so Gallagher volunteered to go pick up the trash himself rather than disturb the men. He started walking around plucking cigarette butts out of the mud. This response was also not acceptable. The discussion, according to Gallagher, went downhill quickly, turning personal and almost degenerating into a physical altercation. “The conversation was very volatile, and I took some offense to the fact that the conversation degraded to a nonprofessional basis,” Gallagher said.
Not long after Gallagher’s run-in with Edwards, he tangled with Green, who had continued his downward slide. No one thought he was an exceptional soldier, but he was not terrible. While not extraordinarily brave, Green was no coward, either. He never ducked a combat mission or froze under fire. But his performance and his attitude, even his hygiene, were declining rapidly. Many in the platoon, when they thought about him at all, were split on whether he was just a little messed up or a turd through and through. Some could not countenance all his talk about blacks or Jews or his increasingly frequent assertions that they should lay waste to the entire country. Others admit to having an odd kind of affection for him, like a disturbed, runty little brother they wanted to protect.
Lieutenant Norton remembered having a couple of late-night bull sessions with him as he made the rounds checking on guard positions. “He was very mad with everything that happened,” Norton said, “but the more you talked to him, the more you realized just how demented his thinking was. Pretty much everybody besides himself was bad. Democrats were bad. Republicans were bad. JFK was an idiot. Abraham Lincoln was a dumbass. Everybody outside of his town in Texas was an idiot. But then, all the people inside of his town were idiots too. ‘If we just killed everybody in Iraq,’ he’d say, ‘we could go home.’ In conversation, he’d come around and see that, no, we can’t kill everyone. In fact, we need to be nicer to Iraqis than they are to us. But it was like Groundhog Day. The next day, it was back to ‘Everybody’s a dumb ass.Everybody deserves to die.’”
Gallagher could not figure out why the NCOs allowed Green to coast by on lower standards than those applied to everyone else. On this particular day in late January, when the whole platoon was back in Yusufiyah, Gallagher was especially high-strung. He was getting in everybody’s face about rolling down their sleeves, cleaning their area, making sure stuff was picked up. Lauzier grabbed a toothbrush and started scrubbing away on a doorjamb or a piece of equipment in elaborate and mocking protest against Gallagher being so fussy. Green walked by, with sunglasses atop his off kilter cap, his ACU top unzipped, and his trousers slung low, almost falling off his butt. Gallagher could not believe what he was seeing. The lack of discipline, the insolence, the completely unsoldierly bearing were simply dumbfounding to him. The final outrage: The crotch of Green’s pants was ripped and his genitals were exposed.
“Green, get the fuck over here!” Gallagher bellowed. “What is your motherfucking problem, son? You had better get your uniform straight or I will kick your ass.” He told Green to hit the floor and start doing push-ups. Green grudgingly did so as Gallagher continued to upbraid him for his slovenly appearance. “You are a fucking scumbag, Green, you know that?” Gallagher yelled. The word “scumbag” hit a nerve. Green popped up and stepped to Gallagher.
“I’m a scumbag?” he screamed. “Fuck you, you fucking bitch!” Incensed and eyes wide at this insubordination, Gallagher squared his chest to Green, whom he outweighed by at least sixty pounds, and shook his pointed finger to the side of his face, in the classic drill-sergeant pose. He yelled every syllable ponderously.
“Stand down, Private. Get yourself squared away, Green, or you will regret it.”
“Oh yeah? Let’s go, right now!” Green yelled. “You want to make it personal? Well, come on, motherfucker, let’s go.”
Gallagher was again dumbfounded. He had never experienced anything remotely like this. “I seriously contemplated, after eighteen years in the Army, throwing away my career to physically abuse him,” Gallagher later recalled. They stepped up to each other even closer, chest to chest, a ridiculous picture because Gallagher outsized Green in every way.
“Do it, motherfucker!” Green continued to yell. “Come on, motherfucker, do it!” Squad leaders and others leapt to separate the two. As soldiers pulled Green away and led him off, he shouted behind him, “You are driving me crazy! You are driving us all fucking crazy!” Green pushed his rescuers away and stormed off, hurling expletives as he went. Before leaving the room, he swung a kick at a pallet of one-liter water bottles, but he missed completely, the momentum of his leg throwing him up and over, and he landed on his back with a thud. “Goddammit!” he shouted as he pulled himself up and continued to curse as he sulked off. Some soldiers rushed off to console Green, while others talked to Gallagher, trying to convince him that Green was a unique case who needed special handling.
Gallagher had tried to be tolerant considering everything 1st Platoon had seen, but this was way over the line. He went to First Sergeant Laskoski to get Green removed from the platoon. “I required him to take all of his belongings and all of his gear and get it out of our platoon area, because I didn’t want him associating with any of my soldiers,” said Gallagher. After hearing about the altercation, Laskoski gave Green an administrative job up at the TOC where he didn’t have much contact with the rest of 1st Platoon.
As part of a broader battalion strategy, Bravo started running more frequent missions to the west, toward a small town called Rushdi Mullah. Lieutenant Norton and Captain Goodwin planned a platoonwide mission into the nearby town of Al-Toraq, which is about three miles northwest of Yusufiyah. Norton and Goodwin would go with the main effort and Gallagher would stay behind with the support and relief element. They would push out from TCP5 and head down Mullah Fayyad Highway. The main element was to move into town while the support element would pull off and wait until the mission was over.
Reviewing the map, Goodwin told Gallagher, “You are good up to this point on Mullah Fayyad Highway. But at this intersection, turn right and stay off the road. We will call you. Head east and we will link up with you there.” He lost count, he said, of how many times he told Gallagher: “Do not drive on Mullah Fayyad Highway past this point. If you go past this point, you’re going to die.”
They headed out after nightfall and a firefight took place. Some insurgents shot at them. They returned fire. Nobody hit anybody, but the platoon searched several houses and detained three men. As they were leaving, Norton called Gallagher to meet at the linkup point. Through his night-vision goggles, however, Goodwin could see vehicles way past the no-go line and headed in the wrong direction. A soldier in Gallagher’s convoy said, “He took us down this road, up to these fields, and everywhere in the world. We’re driving Humvees through fields in the middle of the night like a bunch of morons. It was a mess.”
“Rob,” Goodwin called over the radio, “where you at?”
“I don’t know,” Gallagher responded. “I’m lost.” Goodwin couldn’t tell which road, if any, Gallagher was on either, but he could see the convoy crawling back and forth. Goodwin was getting worried, and angry. They were overdue for the pickup, and now the men were just sitting there, a juicy, stationary target. A mosque’s speaker system crackled to life.
Goodwin’s translator listened and said, “That is not a call to prayer. It is telling people that we are here. They know we are here.” Goodwin radioed some Apache helicopters that he had on call.
“Hey, can you see my Humvees?” he asked.
“Roger,” came the reply.
“Can you direct them to our linkup point?” Goodwin gave the Apaches the grid coordinates, and over the next couple of minutes, the helicopters guided Gallagher back to Goodwin.
As they were waiting, Goodwin said to Norton, “Were we not perfectly clear?” Both Goodwin and Norton had seen enough. They knew that Edwards had been displeased with Gallagher from the start, but after a potentially life-endangering operational screw-up like that, Goodwin decided he was not taking any chances.
Goodwin told Laskoski, “Hey, go talk to Sergeant Major. I need another platoon sergeant.” Laskoski responded that that would not be a problem, since Edwards had wanted Gallagher gone within the first three days.
Even before Goodwin demanded a new sergeant, Edwards had been telling Brigade Sergeant Major Stall that things were still not clicking with 1st Platoon. Edwards wondered who else was available. Stall had an idea. How about Fenlason? Jeff Fenlason was a thirty-seven-year-old sergeant 3rst class from Springfield, Massachusetts, who had just moved from the brigade MiTT office to its Civilian Affairs shop up at Striker. How about him? He’d just had a little problem with his previous boss, which is what facilitated his most recent move, but overall he had a reputation as a good logistician, an organized administrator, and a meticulous planner. He was Ranger qualified and he had been a drill instructor, so he knew a thing or two about discipline. And he’d done a good job in 2004 and 2005 as 3rst sergeant setting up Echo Company, First Strike’s support company, so he was already a known entity to the rest of the battalion. Kunk, in fact, had known Fenlason since 1993 and considered him very much what Kunk liked to call “an engaged leader.”
Blaisdell and Gebhardt thought 2nd and 3rd Platoons had a couple of strong staff sergeants who could step up, but after Miller, Edwards felt 1st Platoon needed a sergeant 3rst class. Blaisdell even volunteered to take the platoon, which might have happened, Edwards told him, if he wasn’t running 3rd Platoon without a lieutenant.
Several times throughout the winter, First Sergeant Laskoski had also offered to take over 1st Platoon. In several regards, he seemed like an ideal candidate. He had been with this deployment from the beginning, so he had extensive combat experience, and he had seen firsthand all of the losses that 1st Platoon had suffered. But as an outsider, he also maintained a certain psychological distance that Gallagher and Miller didn’t have. He felt the losses that they had suffered, but he did not dwell on them. The men may not have loved Laskoski, but they respected him. “I tried my damnedest to take that damn platoon,” he recalled. “I don’t think any of the platoon sergeants that they had made them understand what the hell they were doing there, and how important it was. They just needed the right frigging dude in there.” The higher ranks discussed the merits of Laskoski versus Fenlason, but they decided to keep Laskoski where he was and put Fenlason, who had never been a platoon sergeant before, down with 1st Platoon.
Second Squad leader Chris Payne had gotten to know Fenlason when they were stationed at Fort Campbell together during OIF1 and found him to be a canny careerist, always aware of résumé gaps and how best to fill them. Payne had just arrived on base in August 2003, and even though it was late in the 101st Airborne Division’s first rotation of the war, he was eager to get to Iraq.
“Whoa, slow down,” Fenlason said. “What’s your situation?” Payne, then a sergeant, told him that he had just gotten married and he had a child at home, but he had talked to his wife and she supported his desire to deploy. Fenlason wanted to know if Payne had been to Primary Leadership Development Course (PLDC), a school he needed to attend to get promoted again. Payne hadn’t. Fenlason told him, “You need to go to PLDC now so that you have the chance to get promoted if the opportunity comes about.” And that, said Payne, taught him a lot about Fenlason’s perspective. “He’s very much, ‘I’m going to make sure that I have my ducks in a row, so that if the opportunity for me to advance comes along, I will be ready for it.’”
Fenlason’s briefing from Stall was short but direct. Stall told him his charter was to fix a platoon that had been hit by several leaders’ deaths and was now suffering from low morale and bad discipline.
“Go down there and just do the basics,” Stall told Fenlason. “Don’t pull anything special, don’t try any heroics, just get the platoon back on its feet.”
“What’s the issue with the platoon sergeant down there now?” Fenlason asked.
“Sergeant Gallagher is all about Sergeant Gallagher, and not necessarily taking care of the platoon,” Stall replied. “Go do what you do.” Fenlason, who never betrayed any doubts about his own abilities, leadership style, or decisions, knew he was up to the job. “I knew what I needed to do and I knew how to do it,” he said. “It wasn’t difficult. I knew exactly where we needed to go and exactly how we were going to get there.”
If the battalion’s decision to plug Gallagher back into 1st Platoon had raised eyebrows, the brigade’s decision to tap Fenlason was downright shocking. The Army tries to cultivate a culture of universal proficiency, but the fact remains that not every officer or NCO is good at every task. Among the most persistent skills split is that between “line guys” and “staff guys.” Fenlason was the consummate staff guy. He had spent most of his career in support positions and did not have any combat experience. Before this deployment, his only foreign posting during his fifteen-year career had been a one-year tour to South Korea in the late 1990s. He’d spent all of OIF1 at Fort Campbell as 2nd Brigade’s rear detachment NCO in charge and the four months of this deployment up at Striker.
“He helped stand up Echo Company as their first sergeant,” commented HHC commander Shawn Umbrell. “But he didn’t have a platoon for very specific reasons. Some guys are not platoon sergeants for a reason. And now we’re sticking him in there, in combat? It didn’t make any sense.” Charlie’s First Sergeant Largent, as usual, was blunter. “The reason we take NCOs and put them in jobs away from soldiers is generally because they can’t lead soldiers,” he said. “You can type fast, you can do your computer stuff, you can follow orders, and that’s great. But following orders and being an effective leader of men in combat are so far apart it’s not even funny. Fenlason should never, ever, have been put in charge of soldiers in combat"
Some members of 1st Platoon said the ongoing shuffle of platoon sergeants was just proof that the chain of command was not taking 1st Platoon’s problems seriously. “I’m just a sergeant,” remarked John Diem, “but I would say this: If we had really gotten what the Army calls ‘inspired leadership,’ if someone had honestly taken the time to seriously fix 1st Platoon, they wouldn’t have just sent a sergeant 3rst class with a gun to his head to do it without any support. They wouldn’t have just sent a lone lieutenant to make the impossible happen. They have a lot of tools and a lot of flexibility up there that they did not use. Because the ‘basics’ shit wasn’t working.
"And when soldiers start to feel isolated, throwing a new platoon sergeant down there is just going to isolate them more. And if every time you go down to see your soldiers, you tell them that they’re fucked up, then guess what? They don’t want to see you anymore. And they will do just enough to not get your attention. But they aren’t going to trust in you as a commander, and as a leader you have no in-uence. And when the formal chain of command breaks down, the informal command steps up, and then you are entering dangerous territory, because nobody has any idea where the informal leaders will take the group.”
Gallagher knew that his superiors didn’t think he was getting off to a strong start. He knew that something needed to be done, and he was entertaining several different ideas about how to fix the situation. On February 1, 2006, a little over a month since Gallagher had returned to 1st Platoon, First Sergeant Laskoski called him into his office. Gallagher was expecting a frank discussion about how to knock things back on course. But when he entered, Sergeant Major Edwards and Staff Sergeant Miller were both there already as well. Obviously, something was afoot. Edwards and Laskoski got straight to the point: Miller and Gallagher were being moved to new jobs, effective immediately.
In his final analysis, Gallagher felt he, and the platoon, were being punished because he wouldn’t stop telling his superiors things they didn’t want to hear. “Essentially,” he concluded, “it was easier to move me than to satisfy me.”
When one of the other captains visited, they would say, “Hey, man, you need to get to your hooch. You need to get out of here at least a little bit.”
“But I can’t leave the radio,” he’d say. “What if someone calls?”
“John, your rack is right there,” they’d reply. “They will come and get you if they need you. That’s the way it works.” Usually passing out just before dawn, sometimes he wouldn’t wake up until 10:00 a.m. He looked unhealthy. He said he didn’t have time to eat. His eyes were vacant, hollowed out. His own men, ranks as low as private, were worried about him.
Kunk saw that Goodwin had the famous battle-fatigued “thousand-yard stare.” Kunk had already tried to remove Goodwin from command several times, but Ebel wouldn’t sign off on it.Keep working with him,Ebel told Kunk. Work with what you have.
“I think you need a break, John,” Kunk told Goodwin. “I am sending you up to Freedom Rest for a few days.” During Vietnam, soldiers on R&R got to go to Saigon, or even Hong Kong. These days, however, they went to a former Iraqi Army officers club in the Green Zone called Freedom Rest. The complex could accommodate 135 soldiers on four-day passes in the closest thing Baghdad had to four-star-hotel standards.There was still no alcohol, but the food was good, the cotton sheets were clean, the climate control always worked, and a giant, immaculately chlorinated pool featured an array of Olympic-standard diving boards.
“Thanks very much, sir, but I don’t want to go,” Goodwin responded. “I’d rather stay here with my men.”
“I am not giving you the option to decline, John.”
On the evening of January 29, Goodwin caught a Black Hawk to LZ (landing zone) Washington in the center of the Green Zone and got a ride to Freedom Rest. He could not believe his eyes. Although the perimeters of the Green Zone were well defended, the interior of the heart of Baghdad was not. It was the only place in the country that even approximated normal city life anywhere else in the world. People, even Western civilians, were just walking around, unarmed, as if it were nothing. Goodwin’s Yusufiyah alert system was still firing. “Where is the security?” he wondered. Most of the vehicles were soft-skinned cars and SUVs. He looked around and saw undefended lines of sight, ideal perches for snipers, and innumerable points on the roadside that would be perfect places to hide an IED. “This place is a death trap,” he thought. “Oh my God, I am gonna die here.” Goodwin checked in and, as was standard, left all of his gear at the front desk. He went to his room and fell asleep immediately, but only fitfully, waking at 3:00 a.m., again at 4:00, again at 5:00. With morning finally arriving, he headed off for breakfast. Every time a helicopter passed overhead, he’d tense up, waiting for it to take fire. Every time he heard a shot, no matter how far off, he’d jolt. But after going for a swim, talking to his wife over IM, and reading a little, he was, by the end of his first full day, starting to unwind, actually starting to relax. By the second day, he was feeling even better. Hanging out, eating good food, not worrying so much for the first time in months. On the third day, February 1, he woke up refreshed and in a good mood, looking forward to the day. “Maybe things are looking up,” he thought.
At 8:45 a.m., 3rd Platoon’s Sergeant Daniel Carrick was leading his fire team on an IED sweep down Sportster when they spotted a suspicious object. They called it in to Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) to do a controlled detonation. EOD said they needed confirmation that it was really an IED before heading out there. Carrick knew what was going to happen. He and another soldier walked up to it to get a better look, and it blew up on them. Carrick broke his finger and the other soldier suffered a herniated left calf.
A 1st Platoon convoy was nearby. Carrick’s finger needed an Xray at Mahmudiyah, so the 1st Platoon men ferried him over. After Carrick got his knuckle looked at, 1st Platoon was hurrying-up-and- waiting around the motor pool to drive back to Yusufiyah. Kunk walked by.
“How you all doing?” Kunk asked. There were inconclusive, unhappy mutterings.
“Except for getting blown up twenty-four/seven, we’re just fine,” went one response.
“Pretty shitty, sir,” went another.
Kunk was not in the mood for bad attitudes. Surprisingly often, Kunk would discipline lower-ranked soldiers directly, and even more surprisingly, those sessions would frequently turn into profanity-laced arguments with entire squads or platoons that disintegrated into wide ranging castigations of all the soldiers’ faults. This was one of those times.
“You are getting blown up because you are not following the proper tactics and procedures,” he declared. He upbraided Bravo Company for not doing their IED clearances as well as Alpha Company. He invoked the deaths of Britt and Lopez, saying they were dead because they hadn’t cleared the route well. The men responded with a furious outpouring of fire, shouting that Britt had wanted to clear the route but he had been denied. Kunk pronounced this claim to be bullshit. He looked at Carrick. “What the fuck happened to you today?” he demanded. “What the fuck were you doing? Probably just walking down the fucking street not paying attention.”
Carrick flushed with anger. “I did everything by the book, sir,” he said. “EOD told me to get closer.”
“Bullshit!” Kunk yelled. “You were not following the proper tactics, the proper methods.”
“Fuck you, sir,” Carrick said, walking off as the men from 1st Platoon continued the row.
Sergeant First Class Blaisdell was at Yusufiyah trying to get a mission under way. A few days earlier, they had caught some suspicious types driving around and found several weapons in their truck, boxes of propaganda, a few artillery shells, and a handheld GPS device. Today, Blaisdell and parts of 3rd Platoon were planning on investigating some of the coordinates they had pulled off that GPS, a couple of spots in and around Rushdi Mullah. But the IED that took out Carrick had left him short-handed a fire team. He spotted Lieutenant Norton.
“Oh, hey, sir, how you doing?” he said.
“Hey, Blaisdell, what’s up? I heard what happened. Your guys okay?”
“Just a few scrapes. Everybody will be fine. Hey, you ever been to Rushdi?”
“Never been.”
“You wanna come?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Dude, I need a favor. Can you get like five guys? Because we’re strapped with all those guys back at Mahmudiyah getting checked out.”
“Yeah, I think I can work it.” Norton found his platoon. “Hey, I need a fire team to do this joint mission with 3rd Platoon.”
“Why?” some of them muttered. “They never help us. Fuck them.” Jesus, Norton thought, typical.
“Look, I am not playing this game,” Norton said. “We’re not rolling like that anymore. Bravo is Bravo, period, and we help each other out. So, who’s with me?”
Sergeant Roman Diaz volunteered, along with Specialist David Babineau, Specialist Thomas Doss, and Specialist James Gregory. They talked to Bravo and battalion commands and wrote up the order. Everybody headed to TCP1 to stage. They prepped their gear and checked the maps and Blaisdell briefed the men.
“You like it?” he asked Norton about the plan.
“Love it,” Norton said. Norton held the superior rank, but this mission was Blaisdell’s show. Norton would be overseeing Diaz’s fire team, but Blaisdell was calling the shots.
Leaving at around 3:00 p.m., they started walking the three miles toward town. Norton’s five-man fire team split off and veered to the west to investigate one set of coordinates, toward what the map suggested was a farmhouse. They would inspect the scene, a suspected cache site, and also lie in wait and support two 3rd Platoon fire teams, led by Staff Sergeant Chris Arnold and Staff Sergeant Joe Whelchel, who all continued toward the other grid closer to town. Rounding out Blaisdell’s crew were a handful of IAs and an interpreter. In a decision that would be second-guessed later, Blaisdell did not bring a medic.
Norton arrived at the farmhouse quickly. As his team approached, two men jumped into a blue hatchback, peeled out of the driveway, and sped off. Diaz asked if they should shoot.
Norton told him to hold fire, “but let’s get to that house, call Blais, and tell him that car might be coming his way.” They half knocked on, half barged in the door and, typically, the only person there was an older woman. She was flustered and upset. Norton had studied Arabic in college, and after spending four months in country, he knew how to say most of the important questions. And while he couldn’t follow the paragraph-long answers he frequently received, he could usually get the gist.
“Who just left in that car?” he asked.
The woman started talking and did not stop: “Car? …What car?… I don’t know what you’re talking about….”
“The car we just saw leave. Where’s the man of the house?”
“He’s not here…gone…long time….” Her favorite phrase was “maku,” which means “there’s isn’t any.” She repeated it often. Norton told the men to search the house. They found a CD hidden in some blankets, but they had no idea what was on it, and an AK47, which was not incriminating because U.S. policy allowed every family to have one rifle. Then they uncovered some propaganda leaflets, a laminating machine, and other ID-making equipment. All of which was more suspicious, but not worth arresting a fifty-year old woman over.
Norton ordered Gregory and Diaz to dismantle the weapon, take the ammo, and start searching the field out back while he continued to talk to the woman. Don’t go far, he told them, no more than seventy-five meters out. They went outside and less than a minute later—dit, dit, dit—rounds from what sounded like a machine gun started hitting around the house.
“Jesus Christ!” Norton exclaimed. “Babineau,” he said, “get Blaisdell on the radio and see what is going on,” and he headed out the back door to find Gregory and Diaz.
As Babineau was trying to call Blaisdell, Blaisdell and the men of 3rd Platoon were diving for cover. Insurgents had set up at least two firing positions with multiple men each. They had pinpointed both U.S. elements and had opened fire on them simultaneously. This was a sophisticated group. Minutes ago, 3rd Platoon had reached their target house and taken it down flawlessly. Whelchel and his fire team kicked in the door and secured the family inside, some women and an old man, quickly and with no violence, while Arnold and his fire team secured the perimeter. As Arnold set up a hasty tra c control point on the road about a hundred and Gfty yards from the house, he noticed a woman walking with a couple of her cows. A few moments later, he watched her split off from her cattle, leaving them in the road as she ducked into a house’s courtyard. Uh-oh, Arnold thought. courtyard. Uh-oh, Arnold thought.
The rest of Blaisdell’s men had searched the house and were digging around the yard and scanning it with a metal detector, but they weren’t finding anything. “We were getting ready to go,” said Blaisdell, “when the world just fucking erupted with machine gun fire.” Some soldiers ran up to the roof to see where the shots were coming from. The shooters were northwest a couple of hundred yards. “I think we stumbled upon some kind of meeting, and they got scared thinking we were there to raid them,” Blaisdell said. “We weren’t even planning to go anywhere past those two objectives. My guys by the road said a bunch of cars started taking off when the firing started. I think they left a fire team back just to deal with us, pretty much to die in place if we decided to fight them.” There were several gunmen, perhaps many gunmen, on the move and shooting straight down the street.
Whelchel, Specialist Kirk Reilly, Specialist Anthony “Chad” Owens, and Specialist Jay Strobino started to maneuver to the shooters, who seemed to be consolidating at a house farther up the road. Whelchel’s Gre team headed out of the house and met up with Arnold and his men, who were behind a berm. From that position, Arnold had been able to set up a base of return fire. As they were talking about next moves, they saw a heavily armed fighter run across the street toward the house. Several of them opened fire, but the man successfully scampered to his destination.
With Arnold’s guys laying down more covering fire, Whelchel, Strobino, and Reilly crossed the street and headed toward the new target house. Blaisdell and the rest of his men joined Arnold’s support position. Sneaking down a back alley, Whelchel’s team stumbled upon an old man cowering behind the external staircase of his house. Trembling, he gestured one house over. They approached that house, which had a large hedgerow too thick to bowl through, so Strobino flung himself over the top. Landing in the corner of the yard, he could see two insurgents milling around a Toyota pickup, no more than fifty yards away. They were walking arsenals, wearing suicide vests and carrying AKs. There was another insurgent in the pickup bed loading it with mortars, RPGs, and insurgent in the pickup bed loading it with mortars, RPGs, and packs of explosives. Past them was the side of the house.Reilly and Whelchel were trying to make it over the hedge, while Strobino’s mind went into overdrive. “My guys are making too much noise,” he thought. “But I can’t tell them to shut up, ’cause these Hadjis will hear me. But it’ll take too many shots to get them all before one of them gets me.” All he could do, he decided, was to try to catch one of his buddies’ eyes, while also hoping one of them got over the hedge quickly and quietly.
Outside the farmhouse, Norton found Diaz and Gregory, prone and returning fire toward multiple muzzle Mashes a few hundred yards away. Norton wanted to flank them to the west. He told Diaz and Gregory to keep occupying the shooters.
“We don’t know where Blais is,” Norton yelled, “so watch where you’re shooting! Only shoot at targets you can hit!” He grabbed Doss, planning to head west to the back of the field and then hook hard north and open another position of fire on them. Doss and Norton started running through the farm, which was like an open manger. Within a few strides, they were covered in manure from a variety of species. Rounds started zinging around their heads, too. “Shit,” thought Norton, “more gunmen than I thought!” Norton changed course and doubled back to where Diaz and Gregory were. Just as he approached them—fwomp, kaboom—a rifle-mounted grenade shell exploded right behind them, knocking Norton and Doss off their feet. Norton didn’t like this at all. The four of them were exposed in an open field and they had accurate fire bearing down on them.
“Get back, get back to the house!” he yelled. “Break contact, break contact!” They withdrew in twos, with Diaz and Gregory laying fire while Norton and Doss headed back to the house, and then Norton and Doss firing as Diaz and Gregory backed up. “Babineau! You got Blaisdell yet?” Norton asked. They could hear multiple explosions, more than several distinct rifles and machine guns firing in the distance.
“I ain’t got shit,” said Babineau.
The two insurgents outside the pickup turned to talk to each other, and something Strobino’s way caught their attention. Just as they turned, Strobino opened fire on them both. Both men went down, just as Whelchel dropped down beside Strobino and opened fire on the man in the truck’s flatbed. One of the downed men was still going, reaching for his weapon. Whelchel shot him several more times. As Reilly heaved over the hedge, Whelchel and Strobino saw an AK muzzle and two hands poke around the corner of the house and spray them with fire.They all hit the ground.
Whelchel said, “I’m going to throw a grenade.”
Strobino said, “I’ll follow.” Whelchel untaped it, pulled the pin, and lobbed it over to the front of the house. The moment after it exploded, Strobino sprinted to the wall of the house flush with them, while Whelchel and Reilly ran as far as the truck. His back against the wall, Strobino could see Whelchel and Reilly in front of him, behind the truck. Peeking around the corner to the front of the house, he could see a small piece of the insurgent’s muzzle poking out the front door. He thought for a second that he could sneak along the front wall and grab the muzzle while shooting the guy by holding his own rifle like a pistol. But there was a large front window between the corner and the door that the insurgent could see him through. He snapped back around the corner to think.
Whelchel yelled, “Is he there?”
Strobino gave him a shut-the-fuck-up face and whisper-yelled, “Yeah, he’s right fucking there!” Strobino’s split-second plan: Speed. He’d jump around the corner as fast as he could, never mind the window, and maybe he’d have time to slap the barrel out of the way long enough to get a shot off. He put his M4 on its three round burst setting and flung himself around the corner. He almost bumped into the insurgent, who had also decided on a bold frontal attack. Strobino got his shots off first, and the three rounds knocked the man backward. As the man fell away, he pulled his own trigger, spraying Strobino with bullets. Strobino caught one bullet in the forearm and his hand involuntarily flung his weapon away. He took another bullet to his leg that snapped his femur, so the very next step he took backwards, his momentum carried him around the corner, but he fell to the ground, landing on top of one of the insurgents they had killed a minute earlier.
From behind the truck, Whelchel yelled, “What happened?”
“I hit him but he’s still going,” said Strobino.
“Are you hit?”
“Yeah, I’m hit. I can’t move my arm or my leg.”
“Give me your grenade,” Whelchel said as Reilly started moving forward to “pie the corner” as Strobino had just done. While trying to open his grenade pouch with his one good arm, Strobino saw a grenade come flying from the front of the house over the top of the truck. Whelchel dropped down behind the truck, where fuel was pouring out of a punctured gas tank. Whelchel caught sight of the fighter’s foot stepping out from the corner and popped a three round burst from underneath the pickup, hitting just above a pair of black tennis shoes.
Strobino heard the grenade go off and Reilly scream. And he heard nothing from Whelchel. “They’re both dead,” he thought. Then the insurgent came flying around the corner. “This is it, I’m dead too,” Strobino thought. The emotions that washed over him were more anger and depression than fear. “How come I have to die in this horrible country?” he thought. But either the man was surprised to see Strobino lying there, or he was recoiling in pain from Whelchel’s shots, because he jumped back around the corner, pointed his weapon down, and started pouring more bullets into Strobino. Strobino rolled into the dead man he was lying on top of, taking four bullets in the front of his vest, two in his side, two to the back of his vest, two more in the leg, and a tracer round to the neck. Having been shot a total of seven times in the flesh and six times in the vest, he did not feel much pain. His bigger worry was whether the insurgent was coming back. He was more afraid of whether the insurgent was coming back. He was more afraid of getting captured alive and being tortured than dying, so he pretended to be dead. After a few seconds, it became clear the insurgent must have retreated again. Whelchel started calling him again.
“Bino! Bino! Are you alive?”
Strobino felt a wave of euphoria wash over him. “Not only am I alive, but Whelchel is alive too!” he thought, suddenly in a deliriously good mood.
“Yeah, I’m here,” he replied.
“Do you still have that grenade?” It had fallen out of Strobino’s pouch when he got shot, so he rolled over, picked it up with his left arm, and tried to throw it to Whelchel. But being a natural righty and severely injured, he could only flip it halfway. The look of disappointment on Whelchel’s face as it plopped between them was heartbreaking and comical to Strobino all at once. Reilly, who had taken shrapnel in his legs and groin from the grenade, ran up to Strobino, grabbed him by the loop of his vest, and started pulling him toward the back of the house. “Oh, wow,” Strobino thought, “Reilly’s still alive too. This is great! We’re all alive!” As he got dragged, however, the pain came on hard. Every inch he was dragged, his leg, gushing blood and oozing flesh, hurt worse than anything he’d ever experienced.
“Somebody get down here! I need more guys,” Whelchel screamed into his radio. He had taken some shrapnel near his eye, and blood was running down his face. Blaisdell and several soldiers moved forward to help Whelchel. Whelchel lobbed the grenade at the front of the house and then pulled back to pull security on Reilly as he gave Strobino first aid. Reilly wrapped the leg, applied a tourniquet, and asked Strobino if he was ready. Strobino had seen the movies. He knew what was going to happen. Reilly would crank the tourniquet, the pain would be so unbearable that he would pass out, and then he’d wake up in a few days in a nice hospital in Germany with pretty nurses and strawberry ice cream.
“Yeah, I’m ready,” Strobino said. Reilly cranked, Strobino screamed. And screamed, and screamed, fully conscious excruciating pain.
Blaisdell responded to Babineau’s hails. “I need you guys up here now. I got multiple wounded.” Ordinarily, that would be bad news, but all Norton could think was, “Thank Christ. They’re not all dead.”
“Okay. Where you at?” he asked.
“Just head up the center road and you’ll see us.” Since the fire to their farmhouse had petered away as soon as they took cover inside, Norton grabbed the bolt from the dismantled AK-47, which rendered it useless even if the woman could reassemble it, left her there, and took his guys to meet 3rd Platoon.Blaisdell radioed for a medevac and sent several guys to prep a landing zone and several more to secure the perimeter of the house.
This was far from the only emergency that the battalion was dealing with that day, however. At almost exactly the same time that Blaisdell was calling for a medevac, soldiers in Delta Company were facing a catastrophe themselves. Just before 5:00 p.m., a two vehicle convoy hit a massive IED on a road parallel to Route Tampa.The IED’s location was chosen well and the explosives were perfectly concealed. Made of two or three 155mm artillery shells, the bomb rested in a sharp dip and curve in the road. Even traveling slowly, soldiers in Humvees would have had a hard time spotting it before they were practically on top of it. The detonation was perfectly timed, ripping the center of the truck apart and leaving the front and the back relatively untouched. Platoon leader First Lieutenant Garrison Avery, gunner Specialist Marlon Bustamante, and driver Private First Class Caesar Viglienzone were all killed instantly, their bodies ripped to flaming pieces and thrown, along with massive hunks of the truck, as far as seventy-five yards by the blast.
The 1st Platoon fire team spotted Whelchel, who waved them forward. The medevac chopper, which had just come from the Delta IED site, started its approach toward the landing zone about two hundred yards away. Because Strobino could not move his leg and was in agonizing pain, it took about six people to carry him to the bird. Blaisdell supported one of Strobino’s arms while members of 1st Platoon took his other arm and legs. Reilly ran alongside pushing up on his hips. As they loaded him into the chopper and Reilly hopped in as well, Blaisdell looked Strobino in the eyes and then kissed him on the forehead. Fully loaded, the medevac lifted off at 5:40 p.m.*
Back at Freedom Rest, Goodwin was feeling better than he had in months. Since it was getting to be a reasonable hour in the morning back in the States, he had just logged on to IM and pinged his wife.
“Did you hear?” she typed.
“Hear what?” he responded.
“There is a communications blackout down in Yusufiyah. I was talking to Justin and all of a sudden the line went dead.” It is not uncommon in the information age for the company commander’s wife or some other representative of the family support group back home to get daily updates on the unit’s goings-on. In this case, Goodwin’s wife just happened to be getting an update from Bravo’s executive officer, Justin Habash, at exactly the moment things started getting hairy.
“No,” Goodwin typed. “I gotta go. I’ll talk to you later.” Goodwin’s heart began to race and blood rushed to his head. He was having trouble thinking. “This is exactly why I didn’t want to go,” he thought, “if something happened when I wasn’t there. And now it has. Phone. Need a phone.” Goodwin rushed to the front desk and said, “I need a phone, I need a phone. Now.” He dialed through to Habash. “Hey, Justin, what’s going on?”
“We’ve been in a firefight. Third platoon. Rushdi Mullah. Looks bad.”
“Freedom Rest is over,” Goodwin thought. He started calling around, trying to get on a Black Hawk back to Yusufiyah. “Sorry,” he was told, “there are none available until the morning.”
There was a lull. A long lull. The helicopter had evacuated the wounded, but there was still one fighter inside the house. They couldn’t tell if he was dead or wounded. Maybe he had boobytrapped the house, maybe he was just lying in ambush. Whatever he was doing, he wasn’t firing anymore. The 3rd Platoon and 1st Platoon men conferred. An Apache Longbow combat helicopter buzzed overhead.
“How do you want to go about this?” Blaisdell asked Norton. After floating several options, they decided to do a “mad minute,” shooting rounds into every window and lobbing rifle-fired grenades in there as well, hoping to kill the insurgent or, if he survived, enrage or frighten him into shooting back. They shot hundreds of rounds and several grenades into the house. The grenades ignited something in the house. Smoke began to leak out of one window. When they ceased fire, nothing. No response from the house.
“Now what?” asked Blaisdell.
“Air strike?” Norton offered.
“Just what I was thinking.”
“Requesting destroy,” Blaisdell radioed to the pilot.
“Roger,” replied the Apache. But, the pilot followed up, “We’re not sure which house it is. Can you confirm?” Blaisdell and Norton looked at each other.
“Um, it’s the one that’s on fire, over.”
“Sorry, still can’t make it out.Can’t see a fire.”
“Okay, we’ll point some lasers at it.” Everybody had a PEC2 laser pointing device, which can be seen only with infrared optics. Blaisdell called the men around and had them lay a beam on the house.They had more than a dozen targeting the house.
Sorry, came the word from the Apache, can’t make anything out. We can’t read PEC2s.
“Seriously, what the fuck,” Norton said to Blaisdell as Blaisdell radioed the pilot. “Um, how about a Phoenix?” A Phoenix is also an infrared signaling system, but it’s a throwable beacon about the size of a baseball, powered by a nine-volt battery.
“Roger, that’d be good,” said the pilot.
Norton turned to the men. “Who wants to go throw this on the house? Anyone? Anyone?”
“Fuck it,” responded Diaz, “I’ll do it.”
“Be careful,” Norton said, “that guy might have set up a shooting position by now.”
Diaz grabbed the Phoenix, ran out about a hundred yards into the street, and heaved it. It landed short of the house, bounced in front of a car out front, and, in a one-in-a-million throw, flew into the car’s open window. Diaz returned out of breath.
“Strobe is activated, can you read?”
“Negative” came the call.
“Motherfucker!” Blaisdell shouted. The roof of the car might be blocking the signal, the guys hypothesized. Maybe it broke. Diaz shook his head, swore, rousted himself, and sprinted back out, all the way to the car, where he reached inside, pulled out the strobe, and put it on top of the car, then hauled back. “How about now?” Blaisdell asked the pilot.
“Roger,” he replied.
“Thank God,” they exclaimed.
“Request destroy,” Blaisdell said.
“I am not approved for Hellfire,” the pilot said, referring to the rockets that are the Apaches’ main weapons system. “What is the point of being out here, then?” one of the guys muttered. “We are approving you,” said Blaisdell, looking at Norton, who nodded. “We are the on-ground commanders.”
“Negative,” said the pilot. “That is a no-go. I need clearance from my chain of command.”
Another round of “what the fuck” mutterings from all the men.The pilot came back a moment or two later and said, “Hellfires denied.” The men let loose with a long and committed round of profanities.
“But I can do a gun run,” said the pilot. Apaches have a 30mm cannon for strafing.
“Roger, do it,” said Blaisdell. Apaches are like hovering tanks. They are designed to move slowly, rise up out of the tree line, unleash a hellacious HellGre barrage on big targets such as bunkers, armored vehicles, and artillery batteries, and then recede. Unlike nimbler helicopters, Apaches are not particularly good at close quarters combat or strafing. “You’re gonna need to push your cordon out,” the pilot said.
“Roger.” The men moved about Gfty yards farther back from the house, finding refuge in a stable filled with livestock.
“Okay, we are coming in,” said the Apache. “Guns are hot, and we are cleared.” The Apache came in drastically short, hitting very close to the stable where the men had taken refuge. Doss was sitting near a mud-wall berm when the first of the Apache’s rounds impacted twenty to thirty yards away from him, blowing that part of the berm to particles. Doss, taken totally by surprise, was blown off his seat and accidentally squeezed a burst from the light machine gun he was carrying. The first run completely missed the target house, shooting up the livestock field between them and the house. One of the cows got hit and started moaning in a sickening and nerve-racking wail.
“Describe effects,” said the pilot.
“Describe effects?!” shouted Blaisdell. “You almost hit us, you jackass! That shit is danger close! You did not, repeat not, hit the target!”
After a minute or two of the cow caterwauling and writhing in pain, Norton said, “I can’t fucking stand this,” stood up, and shot the cow in the head. It gave a final moo-gasp and fell to the ground. Sheep and goats and chickens scurried around the men in various states of distress. The Apache swung around and returned, this time moving much more slowly. It almost hovered above the house and fired six to eight rounds that blew some sizable holes into and through the house, but the structure remained standing.
“Okay, you’re good,” said the pilot, who pulled back to circling distance.This was not at all what they had had in mind.
“What in the fuck do I have to do to get a house blown up around here?!” Blaisdell yelled. “Seriously,” he asked Norton, “what do I have to do?”
“I don’t know, man, I don’t know,” replied Norton. “We told him everything.”
Blaisdell and Norton conferred between themselves and talked to the TOC and they decided to breach the house. Arnold took the lead, with Specialist Owens and Specialist David Shockey behind. They threw a frag grenade into the foyer and piled through the front door. They did not have a floor plan, and they had discussed how they had no idea what the layout of the house would be, but Arnold found the entryway even more confusing than expected. It was a tiny vestibule with four doors leading off of it, each covered with a sheet, and the house was filled with a haze of smoke. Moving clockwise, they cleared the first two rooms. They had all just regrouped back in the foyer and Arnold had started moving into the third room when the insurgent, in the fourth room, started firing into the foyer. Owens got hit with multiple rounds, slumped, and started screaming. Shockey, the number-three man, tripping up on Owens, took several bullets too. Arnold, whose momentum had carried him out of the line of fire, stepped to the side of the doorway and pumped rounds through the sheet covering the fourth door as Shockey pulled Owens out. Arnold followed them both.
Norton, Diaz, and Gregory rushed forward to pull Owens out of the front yard, and Blaisdell called in another medevac. Arnold prepped a grenade and threw it into the house. Norton, Diaz, and Gregory started working on Owens. He’d been shot several times and his breathing was labored. He could not speak and was barely responsive. Shockey had been hit in the leg. He was in pain, but he would be fine. By 6:25 p.m., the second medevac had arrived, taking Owens and Shockey. Shockey did not want to leave the battlefield and had to be ordered onto the bird. Owens’s injuries looked serious, but the men were optimistic. Everybody had seen worse, and they were getting him to the hospital well within the golden hour. He was not speaking, but he squeezed Blaisdell’s hand as they loaded him aboard.
Goodwin was still trying to get on a flight, but nothing was opening up. He called Habash back and found out that the situation had deteriorated. Owens, Habash told him, was dead. He died from massive internal bleeding forty minutes after the medevac picked him up. Goodwin headed straight to the front desk of the hotel. “When you guys checked us in, you said we could talk to Combat Stress,” Goodwin said. “I need them now. Right now. I don’t care where they’re at. I don’t care if they’re at frigging chow. I need to talk to them right now.” Goodwin spent three hours talking to two different members of Combat Stress. Topics ranged from the responsibility he felt when soldiers under his command died, to his relationship with Kunk, to his constant sensation that he was barely keeping his head above water. After he finished with them, he made more calls about finding a helicopter back to Yusufiyah. Actually, came the answer, if you get down to LZ Washington, we might be able to get you a flight tonight. Goodwin walked back to the front desk. “I need my gear,” he said. “I need to get out of here.”
Owens was dead, another soldier had been injured, and the men in Rushdi Mullah were right back where they were several hours ago. There was an insurgent in the house and they did not know if he was alive or dead. Blaisdell got back on the radio to request Hellfire destruction of the house. He was tired of putting his men at risk when there were multimillion-dollar choppers out there that could end this with one missile. This time, Blaisdell’s request was approved. “Another scenario where somebody has to die in order to get what you want,” Norton later observed.
It was 9:00 p.m. The bird came back in. Again, it could not acquire the target house. It’s the same house you guys already fired on, Blaisdell said, incredulous. It has dead insurgents in front of it, and it is on fire—what more do you need? Negative, came the response from the helicopter, we can’t see it. Again, they shined lasers and threw beacons at it and, again, nothing worked. Finally, Blaisdell ran up to the house so he could capture an eight-digit grid location of it, and he passed the exact coordinates up to the helicopter.
With the grid in hand, the helicopter fired one rocket. It missed.
“I think I’m going to hit it again,” said the pilot. The men looked at each other: Again? He circled around and Gred two more missiles, both of which slammed home, Gnally reducing the house to smoking rubble. A patrol to the house confirmed that the final insurgent was finally dead. That night, Blaisdell’s and Norton’s men took over a house nearby to wait for EOD to show up the next day to deal with the suicide vests and to make sure more insurgents didn’t try to retrieve the bodies. First Sergeant Laskoski and a Bravo relief patrol showed up bringing food, water, and more ammo.
Back at LZ Washington, Goodwin spotted two of his men, Shockey and Reilly. “What are you guys doing here?” Goodwin asked.
“We got tore up, sir.” Medevaced out, they had been treated and released. Now they were looking for rides back to Yusufiyah themselves.
Third Platoon left the next morning as elements from Headquarters and Headquarters Company, Explosive Ordnance Disposal, and more relief units arrived. EOD retrieved the insurgents’ explosives and, after photographing and analyzing the vests, blew them up. Passports found on the fighters indicated one was Yemeni, one was Lebanese, and two were Syrians. The mission was not over, however. Word came down that Brigade wanted to air-evacuate the insurgents’ bodies out. This was not unheard of, but after a daylong battle and an overnight away from the FOB, most of the men were not excited about babysitting and playing taxi service to a bunch of dead enemies.
The helicopters never arrived. The delays were various: The birds had to refuel, so they sent another tandem from another base. But they got diverted into another mission, so the original copters were back on the job. But one had a mechanical malfunction, so they headed back again. One hour stretched into three and then five.
Norton called up to ask if photos of the insurgents were good enough, distinguishing marks, scars? Negative, came the call, higher headquarters wants the bodies. Kunk was getting involved on the radio chatter too, and he was getting heated. He wanted his men out of there, but Ebel or somebody higher than him was insisting on retrieving the bodies. Sitting in the same position for hours on end, the men started taking mortar fire and sporadic small-arms Gre. Bravo was getting more and more irritated. Norton called in to see if they could get some mortars to counterfire on the insurgents’ mortar positions.
“Negative” came the word. “There are high-tension power wires in the area, and there is collateral damage risk.”
“Okay, when one of their mortars hits us, I will let you know,” Norton snapped back. “And if you don’t hear from us, it’s because we’re dead.”
They were still waiting for the helicopters when some men pulling guard on the roof noticed lots of women and children fleeing Rushdi Mullah. More than a hundred of them, in an orderly evacuation. They had donkeys, carts, and shopping bags filled with clothes and goods. Soon after that, three or four Bongo trucks drove up from the power plant and parked on the outskirts of town, at up from the power plant and parked on the outskirts of town, at different points, like they were cordoning off the town from the west, just as the Army had done from the east the night before. This was not looking good.
HHC commander Shawn Umbrell had been dismayed that the Bravo relief group had not arrived with as much weaponry and supplies as he would have expected. Now he was downright alarmed and frustrated. “I was thinking we were not ready for a fight here,” he said. “We needed to get the hell out of there.” The officers and NCOs conferred. This is a fight we’re dying to have, they told each other, but we’re just not prepared for it.
“Where are the birds?” they asked the higher command.
“Still an hour, hour and a half out.”
“That is not doable,” Norton said. “We cannot stay here any longer. We have multiple Bongos cordoning the town, women and children fleeing, and we are taking fire. We need to get out of here.”
“The order is to hold your position” came the response. Norton just about lost it. He threw the mic to his radioman, because he did not trust himself to remain civil on the radio.
“You tell those motherfuckers, if they want to goddamn identify these people, I will gladly cut off their fucking heads, put them in my bag, and fucking throw them right on top of Ebel and Kunk’s desks.”
The radioman translated like a pro: “Uh, Bulldog 1-6 says it is getting pretty hairy out here, and he is in favor of, uh, alternative means of identifying these bodies. And, uh, I don’t think anyone is going to be thrilled with what he’s come up with, over.”
Umbrell got on the radio. Laskoski got on the radio. Minutes of heated discussion ensued. Finally, word came down. Kunk was putting an end to this, regardless of what Brigade or Division wanted. “You’re good to go,” they were told. “You’re cleared to walk out. Just leave the bodies there.”
* Strobino would undergo dozens of reconstructive surgeries over the next year, but he would retain both limbs and make an almost 100 percent recovery. He would also receive the Silver Star, the military’s third-highest award for valor.
next
Fenlason Arrives287s
Norton caught a ride to Yusufiyah on New Year’s Day. He arrived at about 10:30 p.m. to report in to Goodwin, whom he had never met. He found Goodwin sitting in the TOC, in flannel pajama bottoms and a T-shirt with a poncho liner over his head. He was asleep. Norton said hello to the rest of the TOC and headed out to meet the platoon. Not surprisingly, he got the cold shoulder from them. “Who the fuck are you?” some soldiers ranking as low as private challenged him. Others barely acknowledged his existence, hardly responding when he spoke to them, until he explained that hardly responding when he spoke to them, until he explained that he was not some cherry lieutenant straight from Officers’ Basic. He had been in Lutufiyah the whole time, and before that he was with Charlie, so it was not like he just fell off the turnip truck. That, at least, prevented outright insubordination, but it still took a while for him to be taken seriously because, as the soldiers never ceased to remind him, “Lutufiyah sure as shit ain’t Yusufiyah.”
Norton’s leadership philosophy was based on a quote he picked up somewhere: “Leadership is 90 percent people skills and 20 percent motivation.” He didn’t see any point in being aloof, or in pretending that he wasn’t the same age as most of his soldiers. He thought it was possible to maintain a command separation, but the line could be drawn in chalk, it didn’t have to be etched in stone. “You have to feel people’s emotional states, their wants and needs,” he explained. “It’s not like I have to be their best friend. But if I know some dude likes fishing, then I’ll start the conversation with fishing.”
Given how closed off 1st Platoon had become, Norton did break down their walls very quickly. Soldiers grew to like him because he had an infectiously upbeat attitude, even in that environment. He didn’t demand a salute and he insisted on being called not “Lieutenant Norton,” or even “Tim,” but “Timmy.” He was not happy unless other people were laughing and, unusual for a lieutenant, he was not afraid to make a fool of himself to do it. He did a wicked Harry Caray impression. He was also an enthusiastic soldier who always volunteered to patrol, who always offered to ride along into the field. Frequently, he wouldn’t wait for orders to come down, he’d just draft up a mission and go. “He merged with the platoon like he had been there the whole time,” remarked one soldier. “To take over a platoon that smoothly, never mind just join one? You’ve got to be doing something right. He fit right in with us, no problems whatsoever.”
That’s not exactly true. Taken by surprise, Gallagher and Miller both had a big problem with Norton’s arrival. They both felt lied to. As Gallagher understood his initial brief, he was coming in as the platoon leader, so for Norton to arrive just a couple of days later, with no communication, no warning, no nothing, did not start things off well. And as Gallagher slotted back to platoon sergeant, that relegated Miller back to being a squad leader, which incensed him. If Miller had felt as if he was being demoted before, now he explicitly was.
“At that point,” Miller said, “I was like, ‘You know what? You can fucking kiss my ass. I’m not going to be part of this bullshit anymore.’” He would have had no problem taking a squad with a different platoon or a different company—he was still a staff sergeant, after all—but to be relieved yet forced to remain in the platoon was a double humiliation. “I was bitter. And I was fucking pissed. To be lied to like that, to be told that I was staying on as platoon sergeant, and then moving me down to squad leader after I had run this shit for four months without a word to me? That’s when I started thinking, ‘I am not going to be a party to this abortion anymore.’”
After the Britt and Lopez memorial, a general asked the 1-502nd’s executive officer, Major Wintrich, “Where are you getting your replacement lieutenants?”
Wintrich told him, “We aren’t. We don’t have any infantry lieutenants sitting on their hands saying, ‘Put me in,Coach.’”
Actually, there was one sitting on the bench up at Striker: twenty three-year-old Lieutenant Paul Fisher. And soon after that memorial, he started as Bravo Company’s 2nd Platoon leader. Fisher entered the Army on an officer candidate contract in February 2004. Basic Training, Officer Candidate School, Infantry Officer Basic Course, Airborne School, and Ranger School kept him in training until August 2005, when he got to Fort Campbell. He arrived just as the brigade was making its last push toward deployment. He was excited to get a platoon and “live the dream,” as infantry officers in on-the-ground leadership positions like to say. Then he received his assignment: in the Brigade Public Affairs Office. He was not happy. “So my first job as a lieutenant who did absolutely everything correctly, all the right schools, everything to a T? I got fucked.”
He spent two and a half months up at Striker with Brigade Headquarters, and he was frustrated. “I was living on this little Fort Campbell in the desert,” he said, “where I could not have felt safer than in my own bed at home.” The sound of gun fire in the distance especially irritated him because that’s where he should be. The idleness of his job drove him crazy. Among his tasks was delivering the morning newspapers to brigade senior command. Desperate, he started pulling guard at the front desk of the TOC checking I.D's— ordinarily an enlisted man’s job—hoping someone from an infantry unit would notice his lieutenant’s bar and his Ranger Tab. It worked. Lieutenant Colonel Rob Haycock, commander of the 2- 502nd, passed him one day and asked him what the hell he was doing there, and told him to come work for him. Fisher was ready to head down to 2nd Battalion, but on December 29, he got the word: 1st Battalion needed him more. He was going to Yusufiyah. “You’re going down to the Wild West,” one of the brigade staff officers told him.
Fisher caught a MiTT convoy down to Mahmudiyah carrying a ridiculous amount of equipment: two footlockers of stu; in addition to his rucksack. “Little did I know what a brigade puke I had turned into,” he admitted. “I didn’t even know how soft I had become.” He had a quick briefing with Kunk and Salome.
“You need to get your shit together, Lieutenant,” they told him, “because you’re about to go where things are life or death. It ain’t DVD Night every night around here, so get your head screwed on straight and you might be okay.” He caught another convoy to Yusufiyah about an hour later.
Halfway to Yusufiyah, at the exact same spot that Specialist Galloway and 2nd Platoon’s previous platoon leader, Jerry Eidson, had been hit ten days earlier, Fisher’s Humvee triggered a trip-wire IED, setting off three 120mm rounds strung together. The entire truck was lifted off the ground, and it landed with a thud. He heard screaming and checked himself. He was unhurt. Sitting in the rear left seat, he could tell the guy next to him, the gunner, and the driver were all wounded. He got out and started trying to treat the driver. The driver had a two-inch hole through his leg that was gushing blood, soaking Fisher’s uniform as he tried to stanch the bleeding. Other members of the convoy took over, started applying tourniquets, and managed to save all of the injured soldiers’ lives. The three other occupants of the Humvee were later evacuated back to the United States. But at that moment Fisher stood in disbelief at what he had just witnessed. Just hours earlier he was naively ensconced up at Striker and now he had narrowly escaped death his first time on the road.
Once all the blast debris was cleaned up, the convoy completed its journey to Yusufiyah. Fisher headed to the TOC. He thought it odd to find Captain Goodwin asleep in the middle of the headquarters. First Sergeant Laskoski gave him the thirty-second tour, introduced him around, and pointed him toward his platoon sergeant, Jeremy Gebhardt, in the potato bays and told him to introduce himself.
At no time did anyone at Yusufiyah seem to find it strange or feel the need to mention to Fisher that his uniform was covered with fresh, wet blood. “So I can only conclude that this is completely normal, to get blown up out there like this,” he said. “I was freaked.”
He met Gebhardt and they had coffee while Gebhardt tried to bring Fisher up to speed. There was a midnight mission heading out soon, but Gebhardt suggested Fisher skip this one, grab some shut-eye, and get ready for tomorrow. Fisher noticed that 2nd Platoon’s bay had a wall where soldiers marked down each time they got hit by an IED or a mortar. They were running out of room for their hash marks and they had only been there three months.
JANUARY 2006
15
Gallagher
WITHIN A COUPLE of days of his arrival, Sergeant First Class Rob
Gallagher was deeply concerned about what he was seeing in
1st Platoon. The whole setup was insane, he thought. Bravo’s mission was clearly-flawed by design. “There were three rotations,”
Gallagher said. “There was the JSB rotation, there was the TCP
rotation, and there was the mission rotation. But there are only
three platoons. There was no downtime. Everything was a constant
on. The guys lived outside the wire three hundred and sixty-five
days a year, and in my eighteen and a half years of experience, I
just didn’t envision a soldier being able to handle that tempo without some sort of consequence on the back end.” He considered FOB Yusufiyah outside the wire because, to him, it could not be called a forward operating base at all. A FOB, in his mind, provided a degree of comfort and rest, a measure of safety and security. But after eight months of that potato factory being occupied by U.S. forces, including three months by the 101st, Gallagher could not understand how the place had none of the basics that most people would consider essential to maintaining the long-term morale and welfare of combat soldiers. He could not believe that they were still living in the potato bays, with no more overhead protection than the building’s corrugated tin roofing.
“I addressed that with First Sergeant Ski [Laskoski],” he said. “I explained to him that in my opinion morale is terrible and immediate steps needed to be taken to correct this, otherwise we were going to have major problems. Simple things in regard to the living conditions, which were abysmal in my mind.”
When he voiced such concerns, he was told that he was whining. Laskoski, for his part, had quickly decided that Gallagher was incompetent and noted deficiencies of not just discipline but combat readiness. “It was the rainy season,” Laskoski said. “Arms and ammunition, you’ve got to keep that maintained twice daily, three times, it doesn’t matter how many times, daily. I looked at some of his vehicles and they were just trashed out. Ammo rusted, commo [communications] gear just not working. That’s unacceptable.” Looking more closely at the assignments at the TCPs, Gallagher concluded that he did not have enough men to meet minimum staffing requirements. “When you talk about an Army guard rotation, you are talking about three reliefs,” he explained. And when he arrived, each TCP typically had six, seven, or eight troops. Guard detail alone required three people, with three in relief for every guard position. “So, right there, there are not enough people.”
And at the TCPs, time not on guard was not really downtime. Soldiers not on guard had to search vehicles and people passing through the checkpoints, do IED sweeps, supervise IAs, and be ready for any ad hoc tasks or emergencies that arose. “You are burning the candle at both ends,” Gallagher admonished. “You can’t ask a guy to pull guard for six hours and then as soon as he gets off guard to go on a six-hour IED sweep.” Similarly, because everyone was already doing something else at the TCPs, it was impossible to reinforce the positions’ pitiful defenses.
He likewise thought that searching for IEDs on foot was crazy and dangerous and demonstrated contempt for the soldiers’ safety. “You are looking for a large-caliber artillery round that is designed not to be found, and the blast radius of that round exceeds your visual radius,” Gallagher said. Gallagher would clear Sportster using Humvees until he had to be specifically ordered not to. He began butting heads with Sergeant Major Edwards immediately over the issue. “It was a death march,” he asserted. “I told them the way we were doing business was absolutely ridiculous. The exact words I received from the sergeant major were ‘Who are you to question brigade policy?’”
Even Gallagher’s critics among the soldiers acknowledge that he always led from the front. He never asked his soldiers to do something that he didn’t do. Frequently, he would pull guard himself, just to buy another soldier an hour or two of rest. “He was the only platoon sergeant that would pull guard,” said one. “He’d be like, ‘Yeah, put me up for two night shifts.You guys need to rest too.’”
And despite how foolhardy he thought the policy was, he led every IED sweep he could. “I was the point man,” he said. “I felt if anyone should be blown up it should be me. I was not going to put soldiers in danger.” He also ranged 1st Platoon’s positions randomly. It was his way to stay connected to every facet of the platoon and keep his soldiers on their toes. “I have been in the Army a long time,” he explained. “I know soldiers act out when there is no leadership. I would try not to let the soldiers know where I was going. I was the variable that nobody knew. It was deliberately built that way so that the soldiers don’t plan on doing things that they are not supposed to do.”
Once he had fully evaluated the situation, Gallagher became convinced, like many of the others in 1st Platoon, that he was going to die. “My survivability as well as the soldiers’ was very suspect on any given day,” he acknowledged. “My wife asked me the likelihood of my, based on my experience, making it out. I said it was not very good. It’s probably not going to happen.”
Gallagher had little time at the helm of 1st Platoon before Battalion deemed his tenure a failure. Not a week had gone by before Kunk and Edwards regretted their decision. “Gallagher was not getting his job done,”Kunk said. “Gallagher was falling under the same trap that Miller had.There was an excuse why they were not in uniform, why they didn’t have security.” Circling the battlefield, Kunk and Edwards would see that, again, 1st Platoon didn’t have their helmets on, or were failing in some other way. “So we took corrective actions, we did some teaching, coaching, mentoring,” Kunk said. “We followed up about three days later, and it was worse.” Kunk repeatedly pointed to the success that 2nd and 3rd Platoons were having as proof of Gallagher’s deficiencies. “The other two platoons never had any trouble doing the three missions they had to do,”Kunk said.
Many members of 1st Platoon insist that if uniform discipline, let alone other more serious discipline breaches, was really an issue, then the sparkle of Blaisdell’s and Gebhardt’s halos had become so strong that Kunk,Edwards, and the rest of the battalion were simply blinded by them. Second and 3rd Platoons, they claimed, dumped their ACU (Army combat uniform) tops when it was too hot or went several days without shaving when it suited them just as often as 1st Platoon did. To the men of 1st Platoon, the battalion’s conviction that they were incompetent now just seemed like a grudge. “Everything that ever went wrong in that entire area was our platoon’s fault,” said 2nd Squad Leader Chris Payne. “We were the only ones ever out of uniform. We were the only ones who took our Kevlars off outside the wire. We were the only ones who did this and the only ones who did that.”
Compounding Gallagher’s problems was the fact that he and Lieutenant Norton did not get along. Gallagher thought Norton was young and callow, the epitome of the “Joe lover” he despised. He found Norton unprofessional, even treacherous, going behind his back to discuss important matters with Miller or the other squad leaders before he discussed them with him. “I do not know why I was X’ed out of the loop in a very early period,” Gallagher said. “I felt the relationship was sort of doomed from the beginning. I just think Norton’s demeanor, his character, was very immature.”
Norton didn’t have a huge problem with Gallagher, aside from the fact that he was not impressed with his intelligence, his tactical skills, or his relationship with his men.Coming from Charlie, where he benefited from First Sergeant Largent’s and Sergeant First Class Hayes’s mentoring, he found Gallagher wanting. Norton thought Gallagher was clueless when it came to managing relationships. It is one thing not to want to be a political hustler, Norton observed, but it is another when your sour disposition starts working against your own goals.
Norton felt he had been put in this position to fix things, not to declare 1st Platoon unfixable, as Gallagher was doing. Emotionally, 1st Platoon was frayed, there was no question about it. But tactically, Norton felt, they were not that bad. They still got up every morning and they went on patrols and they completed their missions. They needed a huge attitude readjustment, obviously. Norton was trying to get the guys to focus more on the Iraqis as people, to consider that man over there as not just another fucking Hadji but as Ali, who owns a falafel shop and loves his kids and has problems because he needs to get to Baghdad and back every week to buy restaurant supplies.
“I really had to work to convince them, ‘Dude, not everybody out here needs to be killed. Not everybody needs to get the crap kicked out of him. In fact, beating the crap out of people is wrong, you know? Geneva Conventions? Look it up. It’s a concept.’” Norton thought that getting the men to change their focus was an achievable goal, but he was certain that if Gallagher really wanted to get 1st Platoon yanked to the rear, he wasn’t going about it the right way. “Gallagher vocalized it too emotionally and not tactfully at all,” Norton explained, “so it was easy for them to say, ‘Oh, he’s just throwing fuel on their fire.’”
Around this time, Miller headed up to Striker for a week or so to get a chipped tooth fixed. While there, he started looking for a new job without telling Kunk or Edwards. He bumped into Staff Sergeant Chaz Allen, who was in Battalion’s liaison office with Brigade and was itching to see more action. “I told him that it was rough down there,” Miller recalled. “I asked him what his plans were. He said he was trying to get down there. I asked him did he want to swap?” Allen was all for it. He had been to Kosovo, but he hadn’t deployed for OIF1, so he was eager to get back down on the line.
Second Brigade’s Command Sergeant Major Brian Stall called Edwards to say, Miller is up here wanting to know if I have a job for him. This was not a move Kunk took kindly. “Instead of looking us in the eye, like a leader should, and being honest and straightforward, and telling your command sergeant major and your battalion commander that you can’t do the job, or that you’re burned out, or that you might be under stress, he went fishing for a job,” he said.
Miller didn’t see it that way. “I wasn’t going to let someone determine my fate,” he stated. “I wasn’t going to be held responsible for my guys dying if I wasn’t getting the support I needed to prevent it from happening. I think I had the leadership ability to get them through, after all the casualties we were taking. Maybe not. But if they had said you’re the platoon sergeant and you’re staying the platoon sergeant, then, roger that, I would have Charlie Miked,” he said, using Army slang for “Continued Mission.” “I will take the responsibility for every casualty when I was in charge. If they want to blame me, then so be it. Those were my guys. And they still are, whether they’re here today or six feet below. But to blame me, and make me a squad leader, and still keep me around in the same platoon? No, that ain’t gonna cut it.”[I can definitely relate to what Miller says,all I have read so far is soldiers on duty 24-7,and brass with their heads up their ass DC]
After rotating down to the JSB for the 3rst time, Gallagher assessed the Alamo bridge as even more dangerous a position than the TCPs, and he pulled his men off of it. How to properly treat the AVLB had been a controversial issue throughout the year and would continue to be so for the rest of the deployment. The battalion’s order was to “secure” it. According to the U.S. Army’s Field Manual 3-90: Tactics, “secure” means to prevent a unit or facility from being damaged or destroyed by the enemy. Obviously, there are a number of ways to secure something, a point that Operations Officer Rob Salome said he consistently tried to impress upon Captain Goodwin. “I don’t have to physically have my hand on something to secure it,” he pointed out. “I can secure it by fire or overwatch or with a patrol, not necessarily by occupation. John didn’t understand those critical pieces of those definitions, so he couldn’t articulate those to his NCOs either.”
Kunk asserted that it was possible to see the Alamo from the JSB patrol base’s crow’s nest and thus it was securable from there. Everyone else disputed this. The bridge may have been technically visible, but sight lines were not clear enough to make it securable, especially at night, especially since there were recessed routes to the bridge via the canal banks that could be checked only from very close distances. Before late June 2006 the battalion never issued written guidance to Goodwin on how the position should be manned, rationalizing that squad-level staffing decisions are customarily a company commander’s job. Goodwin, for his part, never issued any kind of guidance to the platoons. “I let the platoons figure out their staffing down there,” Goodwin said.
So it is unclear who ordered Gallagher back out to the bridge, and it is unclear whether he received instructions that he had to have men literally on top of it, but he was under the impression he had no choice. “I had to send people back out there,” he explained. “So I sat my best NCOs down and told them these are dangerous missions. I told them what could happen if they go out and not do the right thing. ‘You need to be on your guys’ ass. You need to not be fucking around, or these will be the implications if you do not obey,’ I told them. ‘You will be on Al Jazeera getting your head chopped off.’”
Second and 3rd Platoons found other ways of securing the bridge without always having men standing next to it. Sometimes 2nd Platoon would run patrols down there, or they would overwatch it from an ambush spot, or they would just run a Humvee back and forth from TCP4 to the AVLB to the JSB and back at irregular intervals. Blaisdell would employ all of these tactics as well, saying that he never put a Humvee down there in exactly the same location twice. He used the truck, he said, “like a roving TCP.”[Got a feeling we are about to hear a bad story about this bridge DC]
Regardless of how they varied the detail, it was still common for there to be just two to four men and a truck guarding the AVLB. No one passing by, from Brigade on down, ever corrected them. Captain Shawn Umbrell and other company commanders said the staffing down there was common knowledge. “Sometime in November or December, I remember in a meeting being briefed that the truck at the AVLB took some small-arms fire,” Umbrell recalled. “And I think they said there were like four guys at that position with one truck. And that was the first I heard of it. And I remember thinking, ‘Holy cow! We’re manning a TCP that shorthanded? Four guys in one truck?’ I’m looking around and trying to gauge the looks on other people’s faces, and I don’t recall Colonel Kunk ever saying, ‘That’s unsatisfactory.You need to up the numbers down there.’ But I remember hearing Colonel Kunk talking later, ‘I never knew we had three or four guys!’ And I’m thinking, ‘What do you mean, you never knew? We all knew.’”
Their relationship already strained, Sergeant Major Edwards and Sergeant First Class Gallagher almost came to blows in January. An Iraqi base was being constructed adjacent to the JSB, which required earthmovers, bulldozers, dump trucks, and other heavy support machinery. On the day Edwards came to visit, it had also been raining. There was not enough room at the JSB to harbor all this equipment and the terrain was messy, so the place was sloppy.
“I think what upset him the most was when his PSD came in— because he had a large entourage, there was not enough room for him to move around,” Gallagher said. “His discomfort getting in prompted much of this.” Edwards sought out Gallagher and began to berate him about how messy the JSB was. He was especially irritated that he had also seen some soldiers relaxing, playing a video game. This was not the first time that Gallagher had heard Edwards’s concerns about tidiness, but he frankly thought they were misplaced and mistimed, and, given everything that was going on, he had less patience for Edwards’s yelling than ever before.
“I am not really worried about trash right now, Sergeant Major,” Gallagher replied. “I am worried about my guys getting some rest.” Edwards did not like that response and started to yell some more, so Gallagher volunteered to go pick up the trash himself rather than disturb the men. He started walking around plucking cigarette butts out of the mud. This response was also not acceptable. The discussion, according to Gallagher, went downhill quickly, turning personal and almost degenerating into a physical altercation. “The conversation was very volatile, and I took some offense to the fact that the conversation degraded to a nonprofessional basis,” Gallagher said.
Not long after Gallagher’s run-in with Edwards, he tangled with Green, who had continued his downward slide. No one thought he was an exceptional soldier, but he was not terrible. While not extraordinarily brave, Green was no coward, either. He never ducked a combat mission or froze under fire. But his performance and his attitude, even his hygiene, were declining rapidly. Many in the platoon, when they thought about him at all, were split on whether he was just a little messed up or a turd through and through. Some could not countenance all his talk about blacks or Jews or his increasingly frequent assertions that they should lay waste to the entire country. Others admit to having an odd kind of affection for him, like a disturbed, runty little brother they wanted to protect.
Lieutenant Norton remembered having a couple of late-night bull sessions with him as he made the rounds checking on guard positions. “He was very mad with everything that happened,” Norton said, “but the more you talked to him, the more you realized just how demented his thinking was. Pretty much everybody besides himself was bad. Democrats were bad. Republicans were bad. JFK was an idiot. Abraham Lincoln was a dumbass. Everybody outside of his town in Texas was an idiot. But then, all the people inside of his town were idiots too. ‘If we just killed everybody in Iraq,’ he’d say, ‘we could go home.’ In conversation, he’d come around and see that, no, we can’t kill everyone. In fact, we need to be nicer to Iraqis than they are to us. But it was like Groundhog Day. The next day, it was back to ‘Everybody’s a dumb ass.Everybody deserves to die.’”
Gallagher could not figure out why the NCOs allowed Green to coast by on lower standards than those applied to everyone else. On this particular day in late January, when the whole platoon was back in Yusufiyah, Gallagher was especially high-strung. He was getting in everybody’s face about rolling down their sleeves, cleaning their area, making sure stuff was picked up. Lauzier grabbed a toothbrush and started scrubbing away on a doorjamb or a piece of equipment in elaborate and mocking protest against Gallagher being so fussy. Green walked by, with sunglasses atop his off kilter cap, his ACU top unzipped, and his trousers slung low, almost falling off his butt. Gallagher could not believe what he was seeing. The lack of discipline, the insolence, the completely unsoldierly bearing were simply dumbfounding to him. The final outrage: The crotch of Green’s pants was ripped and his genitals were exposed.
“Green, get the fuck over here!” Gallagher bellowed. “What is your motherfucking problem, son? You had better get your uniform straight or I will kick your ass.” He told Green to hit the floor and start doing push-ups. Green grudgingly did so as Gallagher continued to upbraid him for his slovenly appearance. “You are a fucking scumbag, Green, you know that?” Gallagher yelled. The word “scumbag” hit a nerve. Green popped up and stepped to Gallagher.
“I’m a scumbag?” he screamed. “Fuck you, you fucking bitch!” Incensed and eyes wide at this insubordination, Gallagher squared his chest to Green, whom he outweighed by at least sixty pounds, and shook his pointed finger to the side of his face, in the classic drill-sergeant pose. He yelled every syllable ponderously.
“Stand down, Private. Get yourself squared away, Green, or you will regret it.”
“Oh yeah? Let’s go, right now!” Green yelled. “You want to make it personal? Well, come on, motherfucker, let’s go.”
Gallagher was again dumbfounded. He had never experienced anything remotely like this. “I seriously contemplated, after eighteen years in the Army, throwing away my career to physically abuse him,” Gallagher later recalled. They stepped up to each other even closer, chest to chest, a ridiculous picture because Gallagher outsized Green in every way.
“Do it, motherfucker!” Green continued to yell. “Come on, motherfucker, do it!” Squad leaders and others leapt to separate the two. As soldiers pulled Green away and led him off, he shouted behind him, “You are driving me crazy! You are driving us all fucking crazy!” Green pushed his rescuers away and stormed off, hurling expletives as he went. Before leaving the room, he swung a kick at a pallet of one-liter water bottles, but he missed completely, the momentum of his leg throwing him up and over, and he landed on his back with a thud. “Goddammit!” he shouted as he pulled himself up and continued to curse as he sulked off. Some soldiers rushed off to console Green, while others talked to Gallagher, trying to convince him that Green was a unique case who needed special handling.
Gallagher had tried to be tolerant considering everything 1st Platoon had seen, but this was way over the line. He went to First Sergeant Laskoski to get Green removed from the platoon. “I required him to take all of his belongings and all of his gear and get it out of our platoon area, because I didn’t want him associating with any of my soldiers,” said Gallagher. After hearing about the altercation, Laskoski gave Green an administrative job up at the TOC where he didn’t have much contact with the rest of 1st Platoon.
As part of a broader battalion strategy, Bravo started running more frequent missions to the west, toward a small town called Rushdi Mullah. Lieutenant Norton and Captain Goodwin planned a platoonwide mission into the nearby town of Al-Toraq, which is about three miles northwest of Yusufiyah. Norton and Goodwin would go with the main effort and Gallagher would stay behind with the support and relief element. They would push out from TCP5 and head down Mullah Fayyad Highway. The main element was to move into town while the support element would pull off and wait until the mission was over.
Reviewing the map, Goodwin told Gallagher, “You are good up to this point on Mullah Fayyad Highway. But at this intersection, turn right and stay off the road. We will call you. Head east and we will link up with you there.” He lost count, he said, of how many times he told Gallagher: “Do not drive on Mullah Fayyad Highway past this point. If you go past this point, you’re going to die.”
They headed out after nightfall and a firefight took place. Some insurgents shot at them. They returned fire. Nobody hit anybody, but the platoon searched several houses and detained three men. As they were leaving, Norton called Gallagher to meet at the linkup point. Through his night-vision goggles, however, Goodwin could see vehicles way past the no-go line and headed in the wrong direction. A soldier in Gallagher’s convoy said, “He took us down this road, up to these fields, and everywhere in the world. We’re driving Humvees through fields in the middle of the night like a bunch of morons. It was a mess.”
“Rob,” Goodwin called over the radio, “where you at?”
“I don’t know,” Gallagher responded. “I’m lost.” Goodwin couldn’t tell which road, if any, Gallagher was on either, but he could see the convoy crawling back and forth. Goodwin was getting worried, and angry. They were overdue for the pickup, and now the men were just sitting there, a juicy, stationary target. A mosque’s speaker system crackled to life.
Goodwin’s translator listened and said, “That is not a call to prayer. It is telling people that we are here. They know we are here.” Goodwin radioed some Apache helicopters that he had on call.
“Hey, can you see my Humvees?” he asked.
“Roger,” came the reply.
“Can you direct them to our linkup point?” Goodwin gave the Apaches the grid coordinates, and over the next couple of minutes, the helicopters guided Gallagher back to Goodwin.
As they were waiting, Goodwin said to Norton, “Were we not perfectly clear?” Both Goodwin and Norton had seen enough. They knew that Edwards had been displeased with Gallagher from the start, but after a potentially life-endangering operational screw-up like that, Goodwin decided he was not taking any chances.
Goodwin told Laskoski, “Hey, go talk to Sergeant Major. I need another platoon sergeant.” Laskoski responded that that would not be a problem, since Edwards had wanted Gallagher gone within the first three days.
Even before Goodwin demanded a new sergeant, Edwards had been telling Brigade Sergeant Major Stall that things were still not clicking with 1st Platoon. Edwards wondered who else was available. Stall had an idea. How about Fenlason? Jeff Fenlason was a thirty-seven-year-old sergeant 3rst class from Springfield, Massachusetts, who had just moved from the brigade MiTT office to its Civilian Affairs shop up at Striker. How about him? He’d just had a little problem with his previous boss, which is what facilitated his most recent move, but overall he had a reputation as a good logistician, an organized administrator, and a meticulous planner. He was Ranger qualified and he had been a drill instructor, so he knew a thing or two about discipline. And he’d done a good job in 2004 and 2005 as 3rst sergeant setting up Echo Company, First Strike’s support company, so he was already a known entity to the rest of the battalion. Kunk, in fact, had known Fenlason since 1993 and considered him very much what Kunk liked to call “an engaged leader.”
Blaisdell and Gebhardt thought 2nd and 3rd Platoons had a couple of strong staff sergeants who could step up, but after Miller, Edwards felt 1st Platoon needed a sergeant 3rst class. Blaisdell even volunteered to take the platoon, which might have happened, Edwards told him, if he wasn’t running 3rd Platoon without a lieutenant.
Several times throughout the winter, First Sergeant Laskoski had also offered to take over 1st Platoon. In several regards, he seemed like an ideal candidate. He had been with this deployment from the beginning, so he had extensive combat experience, and he had seen firsthand all of the losses that 1st Platoon had suffered. But as an outsider, he also maintained a certain psychological distance that Gallagher and Miller didn’t have. He felt the losses that they had suffered, but he did not dwell on them. The men may not have loved Laskoski, but they respected him. “I tried my damnedest to take that damn platoon,” he recalled. “I don’t think any of the platoon sergeants that they had made them understand what the hell they were doing there, and how important it was. They just needed the right frigging dude in there.” The higher ranks discussed the merits of Laskoski versus Fenlason, but they decided to keep Laskoski where he was and put Fenlason, who had never been a platoon sergeant before, down with 1st Platoon.
Second Squad leader Chris Payne had gotten to know Fenlason when they were stationed at Fort Campbell together during OIF1 and found him to be a canny careerist, always aware of résumé gaps and how best to fill them. Payne had just arrived on base in August 2003, and even though it was late in the 101st Airborne Division’s first rotation of the war, he was eager to get to Iraq.
“Whoa, slow down,” Fenlason said. “What’s your situation?” Payne, then a sergeant, told him that he had just gotten married and he had a child at home, but he had talked to his wife and she supported his desire to deploy. Fenlason wanted to know if Payne had been to Primary Leadership Development Course (PLDC), a school he needed to attend to get promoted again. Payne hadn’t. Fenlason told him, “You need to go to PLDC now so that you have the chance to get promoted if the opportunity comes about.” And that, said Payne, taught him a lot about Fenlason’s perspective. “He’s very much, ‘I’m going to make sure that I have my ducks in a row, so that if the opportunity for me to advance comes along, I will be ready for it.’”
Fenlason’s briefing from Stall was short but direct. Stall told him his charter was to fix a platoon that had been hit by several leaders’ deaths and was now suffering from low morale and bad discipline.
“Go down there and just do the basics,” Stall told Fenlason. “Don’t pull anything special, don’t try any heroics, just get the platoon back on its feet.”
“What’s the issue with the platoon sergeant down there now?” Fenlason asked.
“Sergeant Gallagher is all about Sergeant Gallagher, and not necessarily taking care of the platoon,” Stall replied. “Go do what you do.” Fenlason, who never betrayed any doubts about his own abilities, leadership style, or decisions, knew he was up to the job. “I knew what I needed to do and I knew how to do it,” he said. “It wasn’t difficult. I knew exactly where we needed to go and exactly how we were going to get there.”
If the battalion’s decision to plug Gallagher back into 1st Platoon had raised eyebrows, the brigade’s decision to tap Fenlason was downright shocking. The Army tries to cultivate a culture of universal proficiency, but the fact remains that not every officer or NCO is good at every task. Among the most persistent skills split is that between “line guys” and “staff guys.” Fenlason was the consummate staff guy. He had spent most of his career in support positions and did not have any combat experience. Before this deployment, his only foreign posting during his fifteen-year career had been a one-year tour to South Korea in the late 1990s. He’d spent all of OIF1 at Fort Campbell as 2nd Brigade’s rear detachment NCO in charge and the four months of this deployment up at Striker.
“He helped stand up Echo Company as their first sergeant,” commented HHC commander Shawn Umbrell. “But he didn’t have a platoon for very specific reasons. Some guys are not platoon sergeants for a reason. And now we’re sticking him in there, in combat? It didn’t make any sense.” Charlie’s First Sergeant Largent, as usual, was blunter. “The reason we take NCOs and put them in jobs away from soldiers is generally because they can’t lead soldiers,” he said. “You can type fast, you can do your computer stuff, you can follow orders, and that’s great. But following orders and being an effective leader of men in combat are so far apart it’s not even funny. Fenlason should never, ever, have been put in charge of soldiers in combat"
Some members of 1st Platoon said the ongoing shuffle of platoon sergeants was just proof that the chain of command was not taking 1st Platoon’s problems seriously. “I’m just a sergeant,” remarked John Diem, “but I would say this: If we had really gotten what the Army calls ‘inspired leadership,’ if someone had honestly taken the time to seriously fix 1st Platoon, they wouldn’t have just sent a sergeant 3rst class with a gun to his head to do it without any support. They wouldn’t have just sent a lone lieutenant to make the impossible happen. They have a lot of tools and a lot of flexibility up there that they did not use. Because the ‘basics’ shit wasn’t working.
"And when soldiers start to feel isolated, throwing a new platoon sergeant down there is just going to isolate them more. And if every time you go down to see your soldiers, you tell them that they’re fucked up, then guess what? They don’t want to see you anymore. And they will do just enough to not get your attention. But they aren’t going to trust in you as a commander, and as a leader you have no in-uence. And when the formal chain of command breaks down, the informal command steps up, and then you are entering dangerous territory, because nobody has any idea where the informal leaders will take the group.”
Gallagher knew that his superiors didn’t think he was getting off to a strong start. He knew that something needed to be done, and he was entertaining several different ideas about how to fix the situation. On February 1, 2006, a little over a month since Gallagher had returned to 1st Platoon, First Sergeant Laskoski called him into his office. Gallagher was expecting a frank discussion about how to knock things back on course. But when he entered, Sergeant Major Edwards and Staff Sergeant Miller were both there already as well. Obviously, something was afoot. Edwards and Laskoski got straight to the point: Miller and Gallagher were being moved to new jobs, effective immediately.
In his final analysis, Gallagher felt he, and the platoon, were being punished because he wouldn’t stop telling his superiors things they didn’t want to hear. “Essentially,” he concluded, “it was easier to move me than to satisfy me.”
FEBRUARY 2006
16
February 1
WORD ABOUT GOODWIN’S office habits was getting around the battalion.
He rarely left the TOC. Almost daily, he would fall asleep in
his chair. When one of the other captains visited, they would say, “Hey, man, you need to get to your hooch. You need to get out of here at least a little bit.”
“But I can’t leave the radio,” he’d say. “What if someone calls?”
“John, your rack is right there,” they’d reply. “They will come and get you if they need you. That’s the way it works.” Usually passing out just before dawn, sometimes he wouldn’t wake up until 10:00 a.m. He looked unhealthy. He said he didn’t have time to eat. His eyes were vacant, hollowed out. His own men, ranks as low as private, were worried about him.
Kunk saw that Goodwin had the famous battle-fatigued “thousand-yard stare.” Kunk had already tried to remove Goodwin from command several times, but Ebel wouldn’t sign off on it.Keep working with him,Ebel told Kunk. Work with what you have.
“I think you need a break, John,” Kunk told Goodwin. “I am sending you up to Freedom Rest for a few days.” During Vietnam, soldiers on R&R got to go to Saigon, or even Hong Kong. These days, however, they went to a former Iraqi Army officers club in the Green Zone called Freedom Rest. The complex could accommodate 135 soldiers on four-day passes in the closest thing Baghdad had to four-star-hotel standards.There was still no alcohol, but the food was good, the cotton sheets were clean, the climate control always worked, and a giant, immaculately chlorinated pool featured an array of Olympic-standard diving boards.
“Thanks very much, sir, but I don’t want to go,” Goodwin responded. “I’d rather stay here with my men.”
“I am not giving you the option to decline, John.”
On the evening of January 29, Goodwin caught a Black Hawk to LZ (landing zone) Washington in the center of the Green Zone and got a ride to Freedom Rest. He could not believe his eyes. Although the perimeters of the Green Zone were well defended, the interior of the heart of Baghdad was not. It was the only place in the country that even approximated normal city life anywhere else in the world. People, even Western civilians, were just walking around, unarmed, as if it were nothing. Goodwin’s Yusufiyah alert system was still firing. “Where is the security?” he wondered. Most of the vehicles were soft-skinned cars and SUVs. He looked around and saw undefended lines of sight, ideal perches for snipers, and innumerable points on the roadside that would be perfect places to hide an IED. “This place is a death trap,” he thought. “Oh my God, I am gonna die here.” Goodwin checked in and, as was standard, left all of his gear at the front desk. He went to his room and fell asleep immediately, but only fitfully, waking at 3:00 a.m., again at 4:00, again at 5:00. With morning finally arriving, he headed off for breakfast. Every time a helicopter passed overhead, he’d tense up, waiting for it to take fire. Every time he heard a shot, no matter how far off, he’d jolt. But after going for a swim, talking to his wife over IM, and reading a little, he was, by the end of his first full day, starting to unwind, actually starting to relax. By the second day, he was feeling even better. Hanging out, eating good food, not worrying so much for the first time in months. On the third day, February 1, he woke up refreshed and in a good mood, looking forward to the day. “Maybe things are looking up,” he thought.
At 8:45 a.m., 3rd Platoon’s Sergeant Daniel Carrick was leading his fire team on an IED sweep down Sportster when they spotted a suspicious object. They called it in to Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) to do a controlled detonation. EOD said they needed confirmation that it was really an IED before heading out there. Carrick knew what was going to happen. He and another soldier walked up to it to get a better look, and it blew up on them. Carrick broke his finger and the other soldier suffered a herniated left calf.
A 1st Platoon convoy was nearby. Carrick’s finger needed an Xray at Mahmudiyah, so the 1st Platoon men ferried him over. After Carrick got his knuckle looked at, 1st Platoon was hurrying-up-and- waiting around the motor pool to drive back to Yusufiyah. Kunk walked by.
“How you all doing?” Kunk asked. There were inconclusive, unhappy mutterings.
“Except for getting blown up twenty-four/seven, we’re just fine,” went one response.
“Pretty shitty, sir,” went another.
Kunk was not in the mood for bad attitudes. Surprisingly often, Kunk would discipline lower-ranked soldiers directly, and even more surprisingly, those sessions would frequently turn into profanity-laced arguments with entire squads or platoons that disintegrated into wide ranging castigations of all the soldiers’ faults. This was one of those times.
“You are getting blown up because you are not following the proper tactics and procedures,” he declared. He upbraided Bravo Company for not doing their IED clearances as well as Alpha Company. He invoked the deaths of Britt and Lopez, saying they were dead because they hadn’t cleared the route well. The men responded with a furious outpouring of fire, shouting that Britt had wanted to clear the route but he had been denied. Kunk pronounced this claim to be bullshit. He looked at Carrick. “What the fuck happened to you today?” he demanded. “What the fuck were you doing? Probably just walking down the fucking street not paying attention.”
Carrick flushed with anger. “I did everything by the book, sir,” he said. “EOD told me to get closer.”
“Bullshit!” Kunk yelled. “You were not following the proper tactics, the proper methods.”
“Fuck you, sir,” Carrick said, walking off as the men from 1st Platoon continued the row.
Sergeant First Class Blaisdell was at Yusufiyah trying to get a mission under way. A few days earlier, they had caught some suspicious types driving around and found several weapons in their truck, boxes of propaganda, a few artillery shells, and a handheld GPS device. Today, Blaisdell and parts of 3rd Platoon were planning on investigating some of the coordinates they had pulled off that GPS, a couple of spots in and around Rushdi Mullah. But the IED that took out Carrick had left him short-handed a fire team. He spotted Lieutenant Norton.
“Oh, hey, sir, how you doing?” he said.
“Hey, Blaisdell, what’s up? I heard what happened. Your guys okay?”
“Just a few scrapes. Everybody will be fine. Hey, you ever been to Rushdi?”
“Never been.”
“You wanna come?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Dude, I need a favor. Can you get like five guys? Because we’re strapped with all those guys back at Mahmudiyah getting checked out.”
“Yeah, I think I can work it.” Norton found his platoon. “Hey, I need a fire team to do this joint mission with 3rd Platoon.”
“Why?” some of them muttered. “They never help us. Fuck them.” Jesus, Norton thought, typical.
“Look, I am not playing this game,” Norton said. “We’re not rolling like that anymore. Bravo is Bravo, period, and we help each other out. So, who’s with me?”
Sergeant Roman Diaz volunteered, along with Specialist David Babineau, Specialist Thomas Doss, and Specialist James Gregory. They talked to Bravo and battalion commands and wrote up the order. Everybody headed to TCP1 to stage. They prepped their gear and checked the maps and Blaisdell briefed the men.
“You like it?” he asked Norton about the plan.
“Love it,” Norton said. Norton held the superior rank, but this mission was Blaisdell’s show. Norton would be overseeing Diaz’s fire team, but Blaisdell was calling the shots.
Leaving at around 3:00 p.m., they started walking the three miles toward town. Norton’s five-man fire team split off and veered to the west to investigate one set of coordinates, toward what the map suggested was a farmhouse. They would inspect the scene, a suspected cache site, and also lie in wait and support two 3rd Platoon fire teams, led by Staff Sergeant Chris Arnold and Staff Sergeant Joe Whelchel, who all continued toward the other grid closer to town. Rounding out Blaisdell’s crew were a handful of IAs and an interpreter. In a decision that would be second-guessed later, Blaisdell did not bring a medic.
Norton arrived at the farmhouse quickly. As his team approached, two men jumped into a blue hatchback, peeled out of the driveway, and sped off. Diaz asked if they should shoot.
Norton told him to hold fire, “but let’s get to that house, call Blais, and tell him that car might be coming his way.” They half knocked on, half barged in the door and, typically, the only person there was an older woman. She was flustered and upset. Norton had studied Arabic in college, and after spending four months in country, he knew how to say most of the important questions. And while he couldn’t follow the paragraph-long answers he frequently received, he could usually get the gist.
“Who just left in that car?” he asked.
The woman started talking and did not stop: “Car? …What car?… I don’t know what you’re talking about….”
“The car we just saw leave. Where’s the man of the house?”
“He’s not here…gone…long time….” Her favorite phrase was “maku,” which means “there’s isn’t any.” She repeated it often. Norton told the men to search the house. They found a CD hidden in some blankets, but they had no idea what was on it, and an AK47, which was not incriminating because U.S. policy allowed every family to have one rifle. Then they uncovered some propaganda leaflets, a laminating machine, and other ID-making equipment. All of which was more suspicious, but not worth arresting a fifty-year old woman over.
Norton ordered Gregory and Diaz to dismantle the weapon, take the ammo, and start searching the field out back while he continued to talk to the woman. Don’t go far, he told them, no more than seventy-five meters out. They went outside and less than a minute later—dit, dit, dit—rounds from what sounded like a machine gun started hitting around the house.
“Jesus Christ!” Norton exclaimed. “Babineau,” he said, “get Blaisdell on the radio and see what is going on,” and he headed out the back door to find Gregory and Diaz.
As Babineau was trying to call Blaisdell, Blaisdell and the men of 3rd Platoon were diving for cover. Insurgents had set up at least two firing positions with multiple men each. They had pinpointed both U.S. elements and had opened fire on them simultaneously. This was a sophisticated group. Minutes ago, 3rd Platoon had reached their target house and taken it down flawlessly. Whelchel and his fire team kicked in the door and secured the family inside, some women and an old man, quickly and with no violence, while Arnold and his fire team secured the perimeter. As Arnold set up a hasty tra c control point on the road about a hundred and Gfty yards from the house, he noticed a woman walking with a couple of her cows. A few moments later, he watched her split off from her cattle, leaving them in the road as she ducked into a house’s courtyard. Uh-oh, Arnold thought. courtyard. Uh-oh, Arnold thought.
The rest of Blaisdell’s men had searched the house and were digging around the yard and scanning it with a metal detector, but they weren’t finding anything. “We were getting ready to go,” said Blaisdell, “when the world just fucking erupted with machine gun fire.” Some soldiers ran up to the roof to see where the shots were coming from. The shooters were northwest a couple of hundred yards. “I think we stumbled upon some kind of meeting, and they got scared thinking we were there to raid them,” Blaisdell said. “We weren’t even planning to go anywhere past those two objectives. My guys by the road said a bunch of cars started taking off when the firing started. I think they left a fire team back just to deal with us, pretty much to die in place if we decided to fight them.” There were several gunmen, perhaps many gunmen, on the move and shooting straight down the street.
Whelchel, Specialist Kirk Reilly, Specialist Anthony “Chad” Owens, and Specialist Jay Strobino started to maneuver to the shooters, who seemed to be consolidating at a house farther up the road. Whelchel’s Gre team headed out of the house and met up with Arnold and his men, who were behind a berm. From that position, Arnold had been able to set up a base of return fire. As they were talking about next moves, they saw a heavily armed fighter run across the street toward the house. Several of them opened fire, but the man successfully scampered to his destination.
With Arnold’s guys laying down more covering fire, Whelchel, Strobino, and Reilly crossed the street and headed toward the new target house. Blaisdell and the rest of his men joined Arnold’s support position. Sneaking down a back alley, Whelchel’s team stumbled upon an old man cowering behind the external staircase of his house. Trembling, he gestured one house over. They approached that house, which had a large hedgerow too thick to bowl through, so Strobino flung himself over the top. Landing in the corner of the yard, he could see two insurgents milling around a Toyota pickup, no more than fifty yards away. They were walking arsenals, wearing suicide vests and carrying AKs. There was another insurgent in the pickup bed loading it with mortars, RPGs, and insurgent in the pickup bed loading it with mortars, RPGs, and packs of explosives. Past them was the side of the house.Reilly and Whelchel were trying to make it over the hedge, while Strobino’s mind went into overdrive. “My guys are making too much noise,” he thought. “But I can’t tell them to shut up, ’cause these Hadjis will hear me. But it’ll take too many shots to get them all before one of them gets me.” All he could do, he decided, was to try to catch one of his buddies’ eyes, while also hoping one of them got over the hedge quickly and quietly.
Outside the farmhouse, Norton found Diaz and Gregory, prone and returning fire toward multiple muzzle Mashes a few hundred yards away. Norton wanted to flank them to the west. He told Diaz and Gregory to keep occupying the shooters.
“We don’t know where Blais is,” Norton yelled, “so watch where you’re shooting! Only shoot at targets you can hit!” He grabbed Doss, planning to head west to the back of the field and then hook hard north and open another position of fire on them. Doss and Norton started running through the farm, which was like an open manger. Within a few strides, they were covered in manure from a variety of species. Rounds started zinging around their heads, too. “Shit,” thought Norton, “more gunmen than I thought!” Norton changed course and doubled back to where Diaz and Gregory were. Just as he approached them—fwomp, kaboom—a rifle-mounted grenade shell exploded right behind them, knocking Norton and Doss off their feet. Norton didn’t like this at all. The four of them were exposed in an open field and they had accurate fire bearing down on them.
“Get back, get back to the house!” he yelled. “Break contact, break contact!” They withdrew in twos, with Diaz and Gregory laying fire while Norton and Doss headed back to the house, and then Norton and Doss firing as Diaz and Gregory backed up. “Babineau! You got Blaisdell yet?” Norton asked. They could hear multiple explosions, more than several distinct rifles and machine guns firing in the distance.
“I ain’t got shit,” said Babineau.
The two insurgents outside the pickup turned to talk to each other, and something Strobino’s way caught their attention. Just as they turned, Strobino opened fire on them both. Both men went down, just as Whelchel dropped down beside Strobino and opened fire on the man in the truck’s flatbed. One of the downed men was still going, reaching for his weapon. Whelchel shot him several more times. As Reilly heaved over the hedge, Whelchel and Strobino saw an AK muzzle and two hands poke around the corner of the house and spray them with fire.They all hit the ground.
Whelchel said, “I’m going to throw a grenade.”
Strobino said, “I’ll follow.” Whelchel untaped it, pulled the pin, and lobbed it over to the front of the house. The moment after it exploded, Strobino sprinted to the wall of the house flush with them, while Whelchel and Reilly ran as far as the truck. His back against the wall, Strobino could see Whelchel and Reilly in front of him, behind the truck. Peeking around the corner to the front of the house, he could see a small piece of the insurgent’s muzzle poking out the front door. He thought for a second that he could sneak along the front wall and grab the muzzle while shooting the guy by holding his own rifle like a pistol. But there was a large front window between the corner and the door that the insurgent could see him through. He snapped back around the corner to think.
Whelchel yelled, “Is he there?”
Strobino gave him a shut-the-fuck-up face and whisper-yelled, “Yeah, he’s right fucking there!” Strobino’s split-second plan: Speed. He’d jump around the corner as fast as he could, never mind the window, and maybe he’d have time to slap the barrel out of the way long enough to get a shot off. He put his M4 on its three round burst setting and flung himself around the corner. He almost bumped into the insurgent, who had also decided on a bold frontal attack. Strobino got his shots off first, and the three rounds knocked the man backward. As the man fell away, he pulled his own trigger, spraying Strobino with bullets. Strobino caught one bullet in the forearm and his hand involuntarily flung his weapon away. He took another bullet to his leg that snapped his femur, so the very next step he took backwards, his momentum carried him around the corner, but he fell to the ground, landing on top of one of the insurgents they had killed a minute earlier.
From behind the truck, Whelchel yelled, “What happened?”
“I hit him but he’s still going,” said Strobino.
“Are you hit?”
“Yeah, I’m hit. I can’t move my arm or my leg.”
“Give me your grenade,” Whelchel said as Reilly started moving forward to “pie the corner” as Strobino had just done. While trying to open his grenade pouch with his one good arm, Strobino saw a grenade come flying from the front of the house over the top of the truck. Whelchel dropped down behind the truck, where fuel was pouring out of a punctured gas tank. Whelchel caught sight of the fighter’s foot stepping out from the corner and popped a three round burst from underneath the pickup, hitting just above a pair of black tennis shoes.
Strobino heard the grenade go off and Reilly scream. And he heard nothing from Whelchel. “They’re both dead,” he thought. Then the insurgent came flying around the corner. “This is it, I’m dead too,” Strobino thought. The emotions that washed over him were more anger and depression than fear. “How come I have to die in this horrible country?” he thought. But either the man was surprised to see Strobino lying there, or he was recoiling in pain from Whelchel’s shots, because he jumped back around the corner, pointed his weapon down, and started pouring more bullets into Strobino. Strobino rolled into the dead man he was lying on top of, taking four bullets in the front of his vest, two in his side, two to the back of his vest, two more in the leg, and a tracer round to the neck. Having been shot a total of seven times in the flesh and six times in the vest, he did not feel much pain. His bigger worry was whether the insurgent was coming back. He was more afraid of whether the insurgent was coming back. He was more afraid of getting captured alive and being tortured than dying, so he pretended to be dead. After a few seconds, it became clear the insurgent must have retreated again. Whelchel started calling him again.
“Bino! Bino! Are you alive?”
Strobino felt a wave of euphoria wash over him. “Not only am I alive, but Whelchel is alive too!” he thought, suddenly in a deliriously good mood.
“Yeah, I’m here,” he replied.
“Do you still have that grenade?” It had fallen out of Strobino’s pouch when he got shot, so he rolled over, picked it up with his left arm, and tried to throw it to Whelchel. But being a natural righty and severely injured, he could only flip it halfway. The look of disappointment on Whelchel’s face as it plopped between them was heartbreaking and comical to Strobino all at once. Reilly, who had taken shrapnel in his legs and groin from the grenade, ran up to Strobino, grabbed him by the loop of his vest, and started pulling him toward the back of the house. “Oh, wow,” Strobino thought, “Reilly’s still alive too. This is great! We’re all alive!” As he got dragged, however, the pain came on hard. Every inch he was dragged, his leg, gushing blood and oozing flesh, hurt worse than anything he’d ever experienced.
“Somebody get down here! I need more guys,” Whelchel screamed into his radio. He had taken some shrapnel near his eye, and blood was running down his face. Blaisdell and several soldiers moved forward to help Whelchel. Whelchel lobbed the grenade at the front of the house and then pulled back to pull security on Reilly as he gave Strobino first aid. Reilly wrapped the leg, applied a tourniquet, and asked Strobino if he was ready. Strobino had seen the movies. He knew what was going to happen. Reilly would crank the tourniquet, the pain would be so unbearable that he would pass out, and then he’d wake up in a few days in a nice hospital in Germany with pretty nurses and strawberry ice cream.
“Yeah, I’m ready,” Strobino said. Reilly cranked, Strobino screamed. And screamed, and screamed, fully conscious excruciating pain.
Blaisdell responded to Babineau’s hails. “I need you guys up here now. I got multiple wounded.” Ordinarily, that would be bad news, but all Norton could think was, “Thank Christ. They’re not all dead.”
“Okay. Where you at?” he asked.
“Just head up the center road and you’ll see us.” Since the fire to their farmhouse had petered away as soon as they took cover inside, Norton grabbed the bolt from the dismantled AK-47, which rendered it useless even if the woman could reassemble it, left her there, and took his guys to meet 3rd Platoon.Blaisdell radioed for a medevac and sent several guys to prep a landing zone and several more to secure the perimeter of the house.
This was far from the only emergency that the battalion was dealing with that day, however. At almost exactly the same time that Blaisdell was calling for a medevac, soldiers in Delta Company were facing a catastrophe themselves. Just before 5:00 p.m., a two vehicle convoy hit a massive IED on a road parallel to Route Tampa.The IED’s location was chosen well and the explosives were perfectly concealed. Made of two or three 155mm artillery shells, the bomb rested in a sharp dip and curve in the road. Even traveling slowly, soldiers in Humvees would have had a hard time spotting it before they were practically on top of it. The detonation was perfectly timed, ripping the center of the truck apart and leaving the front and the back relatively untouched. Platoon leader First Lieutenant Garrison Avery, gunner Specialist Marlon Bustamante, and driver Private First Class Caesar Viglienzone were all killed instantly, their bodies ripped to flaming pieces and thrown, along with massive hunks of the truck, as far as seventy-five yards by the blast.
The 1st Platoon fire team spotted Whelchel, who waved them forward. The medevac chopper, which had just come from the Delta IED site, started its approach toward the landing zone about two hundred yards away. Because Strobino could not move his leg and was in agonizing pain, it took about six people to carry him to the bird. Blaisdell supported one of Strobino’s arms while members of 1st Platoon took his other arm and legs. Reilly ran alongside pushing up on his hips. As they loaded him into the chopper and Reilly hopped in as well, Blaisdell looked Strobino in the eyes and then kissed him on the forehead. Fully loaded, the medevac lifted off at 5:40 p.m.*
Back at Freedom Rest, Goodwin was feeling better than he had in months. Since it was getting to be a reasonable hour in the morning back in the States, he had just logged on to IM and pinged his wife.
“Did you hear?” she typed.
“Hear what?” he responded.
“There is a communications blackout down in Yusufiyah. I was talking to Justin and all of a sudden the line went dead.” It is not uncommon in the information age for the company commander’s wife or some other representative of the family support group back home to get daily updates on the unit’s goings-on. In this case, Goodwin’s wife just happened to be getting an update from Bravo’s executive officer, Justin Habash, at exactly the moment things started getting hairy.
“No,” Goodwin typed. “I gotta go. I’ll talk to you later.” Goodwin’s heart began to race and blood rushed to his head. He was having trouble thinking. “This is exactly why I didn’t want to go,” he thought, “if something happened when I wasn’t there. And now it has. Phone. Need a phone.” Goodwin rushed to the front desk and said, “I need a phone, I need a phone. Now.” He dialed through to Habash. “Hey, Justin, what’s going on?”
“We’ve been in a firefight. Third platoon. Rushdi Mullah. Looks bad.”
“Freedom Rest is over,” Goodwin thought. He started calling around, trying to get on a Black Hawk back to Yusufiyah. “Sorry,” he was told, “there are none available until the morning.”
There was a lull. A long lull. The helicopter had evacuated the wounded, but there was still one fighter inside the house. They couldn’t tell if he was dead or wounded. Maybe he had boobytrapped the house, maybe he was just lying in ambush. Whatever he was doing, he wasn’t firing anymore. The 3rd Platoon and 1st Platoon men conferred. An Apache Longbow combat helicopter buzzed overhead.
“How do you want to go about this?” Blaisdell asked Norton. After floating several options, they decided to do a “mad minute,” shooting rounds into every window and lobbing rifle-fired grenades in there as well, hoping to kill the insurgent or, if he survived, enrage or frighten him into shooting back. They shot hundreds of rounds and several grenades into the house. The grenades ignited something in the house. Smoke began to leak out of one window. When they ceased fire, nothing. No response from the house.
“Now what?” asked Blaisdell.
“Air strike?” Norton offered.
“Just what I was thinking.”
“Requesting destroy,” Blaisdell radioed to the pilot.
“Roger,” replied the Apache. But, the pilot followed up, “We’re not sure which house it is. Can you confirm?” Blaisdell and Norton looked at each other.
“Um, it’s the one that’s on fire, over.”
“Sorry, still can’t make it out.Can’t see a fire.”
“Okay, we’ll point some lasers at it.” Everybody had a PEC2 laser pointing device, which can be seen only with infrared optics. Blaisdell called the men around and had them lay a beam on the house.They had more than a dozen targeting the house.
Sorry, came the word from the Apache, can’t make anything out. We can’t read PEC2s.
“Seriously, what the fuck,” Norton said to Blaisdell as Blaisdell radioed the pilot. “Um, how about a Phoenix?” A Phoenix is also an infrared signaling system, but it’s a throwable beacon about the size of a baseball, powered by a nine-volt battery.
“Roger, that’d be good,” said the pilot.
Norton turned to the men. “Who wants to go throw this on the house? Anyone? Anyone?”
“Fuck it,” responded Diaz, “I’ll do it.”
“Be careful,” Norton said, “that guy might have set up a shooting position by now.”
Diaz grabbed the Phoenix, ran out about a hundred yards into the street, and heaved it. It landed short of the house, bounced in front of a car out front, and, in a one-in-a-million throw, flew into the car’s open window. Diaz returned out of breath.
“Strobe is activated, can you read?”
“Negative” came the call.
“Motherfucker!” Blaisdell shouted. The roof of the car might be blocking the signal, the guys hypothesized. Maybe it broke. Diaz shook his head, swore, rousted himself, and sprinted back out, all the way to the car, where he reached inside, pulled out the strobe, and put it on top of the car, then hauled back. “How about now?” Blaisdell asked the pilot.
“Roger,” he replied.
“Thank God,” they exclaimed.
“Request destroy,” Blaisdell said.
“I am not approved for Hellfire,” the pilot said, referring to the rockets that are the Apaches’ main weapons system. “What is the point of being out here, then?” one of the guys muttered. “We are approving you,” said Blaisdell, looking at Norton, who nodded. “We are the on-ground commanders.”
“Negative,” said the pilot. “That is a no-go. I need clearance from my chain of command.”
Another round of “what the fuck” mutterings from all the men.The pilot came back a moment or two later and said, “Hellfires denied.” The men let loose with a long and committed round of profanities.
“But I can do a gun run,” said the pilot. Apaches have a 30mm cannon for strafing.
“Roger, do it,” said Blaisdell. Apaches are like hovering tanks. They are designed to move slowly, rise up out of the tree line, unleash a hellacious HellGre barrage on big targets such as bunkers, armored vehicles, and artillery batteries, and then recede. Unlike nimbler helicopters, Apaches are not particularly good at close quarters combat or strafing. “You’re gonna need to push your cordon out,” the pilot said.
“Roger.” The men moved about Gfty yards farther back from the house, finding refuge in a stable filled with livestock.
“Okay, we are coming in,” said the Apache. “Guns are hot, and we are cleared.” The Apache came in drastically short, hitting very close to the stable where the men had taken refuge. Doss was sitting near a mud-wall berm when the first of the Apache’s rounds impacted twenty to thirty yards away from him, blowing that part of the berm to particles. Doss, taken totally by surprise, was blown off his seat and accidentally squeezed a burst from the light machine gun he was carrying. The first run completely missed the target house, shooting up the livestock field between them and the house. One of the cows got hit and started moaning in a sickening and nerve-racking wail.
“Describe effects,” said the pilot.
“Describe effects?!” shouted Blaisdell. “You almost hit us, you jackass! That shit is danger close! You did not, repeat not, hit the target!”
After a minute or two of the cow caterwauling and writhing in pain, Norton said, “I can’t fucking stand this,” stood up, and shot the cow in the head. It gave a final moo-gasp and fell to the ground. Sheep and goats and chickens scurried around the men in various states of distress. The Apache swung around and returned, this time moving much more slowly. It almost hovered above the house and fired six to eight rounds that blew some sizable holes into and through the house, but the structure remained standing.
“Okay, you’re good,” said the pilot, who pulled back to circling distance.This was not at all what they had had in mind.
“What in the fuck do I have to do to get a house blown up around here?!” Blaisdell yelled. “Seriously,” he asked Norton, “what do I have to do?”
“I don’t know, man, I don’t know,” replied Norton. “We told him everything.”
Blaisdell and Norton conferred between themselves and talked to the TOC and they decided to breach the house. Arnold took the lead, with Specialist Owens and Specialist David Shockey behind. They threw a frag grenade into the foyer and piled through the front door. They did not have a floor plan, and they had discussed how they had no idea what the layout of the house would be, but Arnold found the entryway even more confusing than expected. It was a tiny vestibule with four doors leading off of it, each covered with a sheet, and the house was filled with a haze of smoke. Moving clockwise, they cleared the first two rooms. They had all just regrouped back in the foyer and Arnold had started moving into the third room when the insurgent, in the fourth room, started firing into the foyer. Owens got hit with multiple rounds, slumped, and started screaming. Shockey, the number-three man, tripping up on Owens, took several bullets too. Arnold, whose momentum had carried him out of the line of fire, stepped to the side of the doorway and pumped rounds through the sheet covering the fourth door as Shockey pulled Owens out. Arnold followed them both.
Norton, Diaz, and Gregory rushed forward to pull Owens out of the front yard, and Blaisdell called in another medevac. Arnold prepped a grenade and threw it into the house. Norton, Diaz, and Gregory started working on Owens. He’d been shot several times and his breathing was labored. He could not speak and was barely responsive. Shockey had been hit in the leg. He was in pain, but he would be fine. By 6:25 p.m., the second medevac had arrived, taking Owens and Shockey. Shockey did not want to leave the battlefield and had to be ordered onto the bird. Owens’s injuries looked serious, but the men were optimistic. Everybody had seen worse, and they were getting him to the hospital well within the golden hour. He was not speaking, but he squeezed Blaisdell’s hand as they loaded him aboard.
Goodwin was still trying to get on a flight, but nothing was opening up. He called Habash back and found out that the situation had deteriorated. Owens, Habash told him, was dead. He died from massive internal bleeding forty minutes after the medevac picked him up. Goodwin headed straight to the front desk of the hotel. “When you guys checked us in, you said we could talk to Combat Stress,” Goodwin said. “I need them now. Right now. I don’t care where they’re at. I don’t care if they’re at frigging chow. I need to talk to them right now.” Goodwin spent three hours talking to two different members of Combat Stress. Topics ranged from the responsibility he felt when soldiers under his command died, to his relationship with Kunk, to his constant sensation that he was barely keeping his head above water. After he finished with them, he made more calls about finding a helicopter back to Yusufiyah. Actually, came the answer, if you get down to LZ Washington, we might be able to get you a flight tonight. Goodwin walked back to the front desk. “I need my gear,” he said. “I need to get out of here.”
Owens was dead, another soldier had been injured, and the men in Rushdi Mullah were right back where they were several hours ago. There was an insurgent in the house and they did not know if he was alive or dead. Blaisdell got back on the radio to request Hellfire destruction of the house. He was tired of putting his men at risk when there were multimillion-dollar choppers out there that could end this with one missile. This time, Blaisdell’s request was approved. “Another scenario where somebody has to die in order to get what you want,” Norton later observed.
It was 9:00 p.m. The bird came back in. Again, it could not acquire the target house. It’s the same house you guys already fired on, Blaisdell said, incredulous. It has dead insurgents in front of it, and it is on fire—what more do you need? Negative, came the response from the helicopter, we can’t see it. Again, they shined lasers and threw beacons at it and, again, nothing worked. Finally, Blaisdell ran up to the house so he could capture an eight-digit grid location of it, and he passed the exact coordinates up to the helicopter.
With the grid in hand, the helicopter fired one rocket. It missed.
“I think I’m going to hit it again,” said the pilot. The men looked at each other: Again? He circled around and Gred two more missiles, both of which slammed home, Gnally reducing the house to smoking rubble. A patrol to the house confirmed that the final insurgent was finally dead. That night, Blaisdell’s and Norton’s men took over a house nearby to wait for EOD to show up the next day to deal with the suicide vests and to make sure more insurgents didn’t try to retrieve the bodies. First Sergeant Laskoski and a Bravo relief patrol showed up bringing food, water, and more ammo.
Back at LZ Washington, Goodwin spotted two of his men, Shockey and Reilly. “What are you guys doing here?” Goodwin asked.
“We got tore up, sir.” Medevaced out, they had been treated and released. Now they were looking for rides back to Yusufiyah themselves.
Third Platoon left the next morning as elements from Headquarters and Headquarters Company, Explosive Ordnance Disposal, and more relief units arrived. EOD retrieved the insurgents’ explosives and, after photographing and analyzing the vests, blew them up. Passports found on the fighters indicated one was Yemeni, one was Lebanese, and two were Syrians. The mission was not over, however. Word came down that Brigade wanted to air-evacuate the insurgents’ bodies out. This was not unheard of, but after a daylong battle and an overnight away from the FOB, most of the men were not excited about babysitting and playing taxi service to a bunch of dead enemies.
The helicopters never arrived. The delays were various: The birds had to refuel, so they sent another tandem from another base. But they got diverted into another mission, so the original copters were back on the job. But one had a mechanical malfunction, so they headed back again. One hour stretched into three and then five.
Norton called up to ask if photos of the insurgents were good enough, distinguishing marks, scars? Negative, came the call, higher headquarters wants the bodies. Kunk was getting involved on the radio chatter too, and he was getting heated. He wanted his men out of there, but Ebel or somebody higher than him was insisting on retrieving the bodies. Sitting in the same position for hours on end, the men started taking mortar fire and sporadic small-arms Gre. Bravo was getting more and more irritated. Norton called in to see if they could get some mortars to counterfire on the insurgents’ mortar positions.
“Negative” came the word. “There are high-tension power wires in the area, and there is collateral damage risk.”
“Okay, when one of their mortars hits us, I will let you know,” Norton snapped back. “And if you don’t hear from us, it’s because we’re dead.”
They were still waiting for the helicopters when some men pulling guard on the roof noticed lots of women and children fleeing Rushdi Mullah. More than a hundred of them, in an orderly evacuation. They had donkeys, carts, and shopping bags filled with clothes and goods. Soon after that, three or four Bongo trucks drove up from the power plant and parked on the outskirts of town, at up from the power plant and parked on the outskirts of town, at different points, like they were cordoning off the town from the west, just as the Army had done from the east the night before. This was not looking good.
HHC commander Shawn Umbrell had been dismayed that the Bravo relief group had not arrived with as much weaponry and supplies as he would have expected. Now he was downright alarmed and frustrated. “I was thinking we were not ready for a fight here,” he said. “We needed to get the hell out of there.” The officers and NCOs conferred. This is a fight we’re dying to have, they told each other, but we’re just not prepared for it.
“Where are the birds?” they asked the higher command.
“Still an hour, hour and a half out.”
“That is not doable,” Norton said. “We cannot stay here any longer. We have multiple Bongos cordoning the town, women and children fleeing, and we are taking fire. We need to get out of here.”
“The order is to hold your position” came the response. Norton just about lost it. He threw the mic to his radioman, because he did not trust himself to remain civil on the radio.
“You tell those motherfuckers, if they want to goddamn identify these people, I will gladly cut off their fucking heads, put them in my bag, and fucking throw them right on top of Ebel and Kunk’s desks.”
The radioman translated like a pro: “Uh, Bulldog 1-6 says it is getting pretty hairy out here, and he is in favor of, uh, alternative means of identifying these bodies. And, uh, I don’t think anyone is going to be thrilled with what he’s come up with, over.”
Umbrell got on the radio. Laskoski got on the radio. Minutes of heated discussion ensued. Finally, word came down. Kunk was putting an end to this, regardless of what Brigade or Division wanted. “You’re good to go,” they were told. “You’re cleared to walk out. Just leave the bodies there.”
* Strobino would undergo dozens of reconstructive surgeries over the next year, but he would retain both limbs and make an almost 100 percent recovery. He would also receive the Silver Star, the military’s third-highest award for valor.
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