PART 7:BLACK HEARTS: ONE PLATOON'S DESCENT INTO MADNESS IN IRAQ'S TRIANGLE OF DEATH

BLACK HEARTS: ONE PLATOON'S DESCENT INTO MADNESS IN 

IRAQ'S TRIANGLE OF DEATH
BY JIM FREDERICK

17 

Fenlason Arrives 

IN THE AFTERMATH of the February 1 firefight, Rushdi Mullah took on a new importance in the battalion’s battle plan. While First Strike always knew that the area was an insurgent stronghold, they were now slowly mapping that terrain, piecing together the intelligence. As Alpha and Delta Companies were having measurable success in Mahmudiyah itself, the battalion was able to focus more on pushing farther and farther west. Air assaults and patrols to the town became more frequent, with platoons being sent out there for three or four days to set up a hasty patrol base, make some trouble for insurgents, and then withdraw as another platoon arrived either immediately or a few days later. Any trip up there, soldiers knew, guaranteed a firefight. 

On February 4, Goodwin headed to Mahmudiyah for the memorial for Specialist Owens and the three other soldiers from Delta who had died in the IED strike. Sergeant First Class Jeff Fenlason had just arrived, so Goodwin met his new platoon sergeant. Over an hour-and-a-half conversation, Goodwin gave him as full a brief as he could. 

“Second and Third Platoons are running on cruise control at this point,” Goodwin told Fenlason. “They have firm leadership in place and have been running smoothly for some time. But First Platoon has been beaten up pretty bad. They need some tough love, but don’t be afraid to hug them once in a while. In the morning, we’ll get out after it.” 

Before dawn the next day, someone shook Goodwin awake. 

“Hey, sir, are you awake?” 

“I am now. What’s up?”

“Hey, sir, your TOC’s on fire.” 

“What?” 

“Sir, your TOC is on fire.” 

“They’re in contact?” 

“No, sir, not taking fire. On fire. In flames.Your TOC is on fire.” 

“Okay.” Goodwin paused to take it all in. 

“Sir, are you okay?” 

“Yeah, why?” 

“Sir, your TOC’s on fire.” 

“Right. I got it.Roger.” 

Goodwin threw his top on and hustled up to the Battalion TOC. He went over to the J-Lens that was focusing in on Yusufiyah, and sure enough, there was a big cloud of black smoke. Goodwin called over and tried to figure out what was happening, but he could get only bits and pieces. After a couple of minutes, he realized this was futile. He sent someone to get Fenlason and everybody from Bravo to get a convoy together as soon as possible. 

First Platoon’s 3rd Squad was at TCP5. Specialist James Barker had just woken up for an early morning guard shift. He got his gear on and went to the roof. The sun was not completely up yet, just enough for him to be able to see without night-vision goggles. He asked the guy he was relieving if there was anything going on. The guy said he wasn’t sure, but he thought FOB Yusufiyah might be on fire. Over to the north there was a dark column of smoke that looked about where the FOB would be. Calls were passed over the radio. Yes, Yusufiyah confirmed, we are on fire. Barker called everybody out to the roof to take a look. All they could do at this point was laugh. 

“Look, there goes my laptop.” 

“Do iPods go to heaven?” 

“Which is worse? Losing all my photos of my family, or my porn? Family, porn? Porn, family?”

Everybody had known the FOB was a firetrap, that something like this was not a matter of if but of when. A short had caused an overloaded set of outlets in the MiTT team bay to catch fire and the blaze quickly spread throughout the barn. The structure was engulfed in flames in thirty minutes. Battalion had requested a full complement of fire extinguishers at FOBs Lutufiyah and Yusufiyah and the JS Bridge in December, but defense contractor KBR responded that it was obligated to provide such support only on Camp Striker. Battalion repeatedly sought assistance from both KBR and Army engineers on Striker, but they got little attention. Two KBR electricians had come down to FOB Yusufiyah to inspect the wiring a few weeks before, but their repairs were minimal. Just nine days earlier, soldiers fighting a fire in the Iraqi area of the FOB had nearly expended all twenty-nine of the FOB’s extinguishers. First Sergeant Laskoski sent most of them to Mahmudiyah for an emergency refill, and on January 30 he filed a dire written assessment of the FOB’s fire-readiness, plaintively requesting fire extinguishers, fire axes, and crowbars. 

Six days later, the inevitable happened. No one was killed, or even injured, as Laskoski walked through the nascent inferno yelling, “Get up, get up, get up! We are on fire. Out, out, out. Just take what you are wearing. Don’t grab anything, don’t stop. Out, out, out. Move, move, move.” In the MiTT bay itself, some of the men barely escaped with their lives, gulping down large swallows of acrid smoke as the fire spread fast. Others directed what few sputtering extinguishers were left on the FOB at the flames. One soldier said it was less than a minute from the time he was awakened by the blaze to the time he was pushed out of the room by the spreading smoke and heat. 

The loss was devastating to morale. Men snatched what handfuls of personal stuff they could as they left, but almost everything the men owned was gone: clothing, equipment, weapons, pictures, letters, journals, photos, movies, DVDs, music, laptops. Goodwin lost his wedding ring. Goodwin’s wife had sent every man in the company a Valentine’s Day present, but those were burned before they could be distributed. Norton lost a rosary given to him by his favorite, and recently deceased, uncle. 

Most of 2nd Platoon and Bravo Company’s headquarters staff were milling around. Some were wearing T-shirts and ACU bottoms, others had their PT uniforms on, and a couple of guys were wearing just towels and flip-flops. Almost nobody had their vests or helmets. Goodwin thought to himself, “I have a platoon that is not mission capable with a new platoon sergeant, I have thirty-five guys without equipment or weapons, and two more platoons who just lost all of their personal possessions. At least no one is dead, but what else could go wrong?” 

That’s when the mortars started coming in. A column of smoke makes a great target beacon for long-range weapons, and insurgents took advantage of it. In addition, the company’s own ammunition stores started to cook off. First the small-caliber rounds began to go. They sound like popcorn, but then the .50-cals started to discharge, and their sound was deafening. Finally, all the big stuff—white phosphorus rounds, grenades, and AT-4 rockets—ignited in big thunderous booms and showers of sparks. 

Battalion Operations Officer Rob Salome arrived on one of the many convoys the battalion started sending in to ferry whatever supplies they could scrape together on short notice, though the complete refitting of the company would be a months-long process. Brigade and division headquarters tried to push down as much new equipment and clothing as they could, but shortages lasted for weeks, if not months. A box of socks would come in, for example, but they would all be size small. One soldier says he wore the same uniform for seventy days in a row before he got issued a spare. Until housing tents showed up a few weeks later, Bravo lived with the IAs in their barn “hot bunking”—sleeping in whatever cot was open, when it was open, regardless of who supposedly owned it. 

Blaisdell had been out on an overnight patrol with most of 3rd Platoon. He walked into the FOB midmorning. 

“Hey, sir,” he said to Salome. “Looks like our building burned down.” 

“Yep,” said Salome. 

“Anything we can do?” 

“Nope, not really. I think we got it all covered.” 

“No help at all?” 

“Really, I’d tell you.There’s nothing to do at the moment.” 

“Well, in that case, we’ll just go back out on patrol.” 

Third Platoon turned around and headed back into Yusufiyah. After the immediate emergency of the fire was taken care of, Fenlason headed to TCP6 and made that the staging area for 1st Platoon to sift through what they did and did not have. It did not take him long to formulate an opinion of his men. “My initial impression of that platoon was that they were a joke,” he said. The first time he got the whole platoon in one place, he addressed them as a group. “The first words out of my mouth when I addressed this platoon that night, I said, ‘Okay, I’m Sergeant Fenlason. I’m the new platoon sergeant.There are no more victims in this platoon.’” 

He found 1st Platoon to be undisciplined, disrespectful, and defiant. They were wallowing in self-pity. They were unprofessional. They talked back. When he first arrived and began issuing orders, they would frequently buck against them, saying, “We don’t do it that way.” 

“Excuse me, soldier?” he would reply. “This ain’t a democracy, bud.” The platoon had gotten the impression that they could run things by committee, that they were a voting body, a notion Fenlason intended to curtail immediately. He instituted boot camp– style routine and discipline. “We started with basic stuff, like first call is at five-thirty a.m.,” Fenlason said. “Shaved and dressed by six- fifteen.” They had morning formations and uniform inspections, which the men thought was idiotic: one mortar round hits right now, they said, looking around nervously, and the whole platoon is dead.

Fenlason told Blaisdell, “You gotta break them down before you build them back up.” To Blaisdell, talk about breaking guys down in the middle of a combat zone sounded insane. 

The men pushed back immediately. In their eyes, Fenlason may have had rank, but he had no authority. He may have had a Ranger Tab, but he had zero combat experience. To them, no combat experience meant he didn’t know anything. “So, who the fuck is this asshole?” said medic Specialist Collin Sharpness. “This is his first combat tour? He’s been in staff the whole time? And he’s coming in here fucking pumping his chest?” 

Fenlason knew that the men did not hold his career in high esteem, but he didn’t care, because he was none too impressed with their supposed battle-hardening either. “I’m not going to pay a whole hell of a lot of attention to that anyway,” he rejoined. “You know, Private Snuffle-upagus, who has been in a firefight, that doesn’t necessarily make him Johnny Rambo. So his experience level is still somewhat small.” 

Fenlason knew that it would take a while for 1st Platoon to come around, but that was okay. Unlike the other platoon sergeants, he wasn’t going anywhere. Early on, he hit upon the idea of the immovable object—he was the immovable object. “The resentments were already beginning,” he said. “The men didn’t like the idea of being told when they were going to do certain things and when they weren’t.” 

Since Fenlason knew 2nd Squad’s squad leader,Chris Payne, from Fort Campbell in 2003, he drew him close to help him get up to speed on the platoon. Payne tried to preemptively play the peacemaker, advising Fenlason on how to talk to Lauzier. “I tried to say, ‘Look, he’s wild and he’s unpredictable and he shoots a lot, but he’s a good leader,’” recalled Payne. Payne saw the clash coming. Lauzier was temperamental and very particular about the kinds of leaders he esteemed, while Fenlason was blunt to the point of being tactless and convinced there was his way to do something, or the wrong way. “I said, ‘You need to be careful with Lauzier or you’ll lose him,’” Payne remembered. “And he did. It didn’t take long" 

“I heard you like to shoot a lot,” were the first words Fenlason spoke to Lauzier. The relationship went downhill from there. Fenlason came to see Lauzier as a loud, immature bully who constantly abused, needled, and micromanaged his men and overcompensated for battle eld risk with excessive force and firepower. Lauzier thought Fenlason was a tactically incompetent desk jockey who hid out in his office atTCP1 all day long. Lauzier took offense at Fenlason’s insinuation that he was some sort of loose cannon. How could Fenlason assess battlefield risk, Lauzier wanted to know, if Fenlason never put himself on the battlefield? “I would say, ‘Hey, you’re out of touch here, pal,’ but he wouldn’t listen to me,” Lauzier lamented. “He thought I was a cowboy.” 

Lauzier was not the only soldier Fenlason formulated a quick opinion on. It wasn’t long before he’d identified several soldiers he felt were particularly problematic cases. He was the one who had put Barker in anger management classes back in 2003, and he didn’t see anything in Barker out here to change his opinion that he was a punk. Cortez, he concluded, was a pout and a borderline malingerer who routinely declared he wanted out of the platoon whenever anything didn’t go his way. And he quickly learned all about Green and his extreme hatred of Iraqis. Green had recently rejoined the platoon after a few well-behaved weeks working at the FOB following his altercation with Gallagher. But of all the soldiers who dwelled on the past, who simply could not get over the deaths of Nelson and Casica, Green was, in Fenlason's estimation, the worst. All day long from Green, it was Nelson and Casica this, Nelson and Casica that. 

Throughout the rest of the deployment, Payne tried to be the translator and peacemaker between Fenlason and the rest of the platoon; he felt that he understood both parties better than anyone else. It was a role he thought was important even if it made him less popular. “Everybody hated Fenlason,” said Payne, “and I don’t think that the guys can understand why I always defended him. But the way I saw it, I needed to be able to go to Lauzier and Yribe and say, ‘This is what he said. This is what he wants,’ as opposed to them having to hear it from Fenlason, who didn’t know how to talk to everybody. He has a condescending way of talking, like, ‘I know more than everybody in this whole company. I know more than everybody in this platoon. You guys are fucked up, and I’m here to fix it.’” 

Staff Sergeant Chaz Allen, who replaced Phil Miller, joined 1st Platoon the same time Fenlason did. He was surprised not just at how divorced the platoon was from the rest of the company, but even at how disorganized it was from within. There was very little cooperation between squads. “There was no distribution plan for water and chow,” he said. “It was every dog for himself. Each squad, in their own little TCP, they would get in their vehicles and drive up to Yusufiyah, get what they needed, and come back.” And combat credibility for the new guy, regardless of rank, was always an issue. “I received so much flak, like borderline mutiny,” Allen recalled. Men would throw down their weapons, refusing to take orders from him because, they declared, he had never been in combat before. But he had been shot at, he had been blown up before. “So it was them not understanding who I am, and me not understanding who they are.” 

Allen tried to undo the bad habits the squad had acquired. The men, for example, did not keep guard rotation schedules, telling Allen that whoever was able to stay awake took guard. Once, when he asked who was going to relieve a soldier who’d been on guard for six hours, several troopers shouted, “Not it!” as if they were in grade school. 

During one of his first days on the job, Fenlason was at TCP1. Some of the men were giving him a tour of the house. They were on the roof when an insurgent shot a rocket at the TCP from a broad eld to the southeast. It did not reach the TCP, and did not even detonate. But the gunner on the roof thought he spotted a puff of smoke, so he began banging away on the machine gun. Before long, several soldiers had joined him at the walled edge of the roof, shooting at the field with their M4's. Within a few seconds, almost the entire checkpoint was up there, eleven or twelve guys and several IAs, slamming rounds into the field. Fenlason couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He yelled for them to stop shooting. 

“What the fuck are you shooting at?” he yelled. “Stop shooting!” 

“No, Sergeant, no!” 

“Yeah, stop! I’m telling you to fucking stop now. Hold your fire! Hold your fire!” He threw a soda can at one soldier who wasn’t stopping. 

“What?” One by one, the soldiers ceased firing and turned toward Fenlason. 

“What in the fuck are you shooting at? Do you have a target?” 

“It’s a suspected enemy location.” 

“The whole frigging country is a suspected enemy location. What are you shooting at?” 

“There’s a probable …” someone started. Fenlason was livid. 

“No. I will tell you what you are shooting at. You are shooting at nothing. When you just go up here and start shooting at everything in sight, that’s not doctrine. It is not correct. It never has been the answer.You got a target, you got a sector of fire. In that target area, you engage your sector of fire. You control the rate and distribution of fire. But you don’t just shoot just for shits and grins. You are wasting ammunition. You want to put a patrol together and go try to find the bad guy? Let’s do that. Let’s go find evidence of the launch. Let’s do something. But you just wasted five minutes and hundreds of rounds of ammunition up here fucking around shooting at nothing.” 

Soon after that altercation Fenlason told somebody over the radio, “Well, I guess I got my CIB!” The CIB is the Combat Infantryman’s Badge and it is one of the most prestigious medals in the Army because it indicates that you weren’t simply an infantryman in a war zone but that you took direct enemy fire. Guys from real combat units had nothing but contempt for the rear echelon types up at Striker who would go running in the direction of a mortar impact that landed harmlessly two hundred yards away so they could try to convince their superiors that they were “under fire” and get their CIB, or its non-infantry equivalent, the Combat Action Badge. And now, 1st Platoon sneered, they were being led by one of these pogues. Fenlason later said he had no recollection of saying such a thing and doubted he would have. “It’s not the kind of thing I would have cared about one way or another,” he stated. 

Norton and Fenlason had no problems getting along. While no platoon sergeant would probably ever live up to Norton’s idealization of Lonnie Hayes in Charlie Company, Fenlason was, in Norton’s eyes, an improvement over Gallagher. Though Fenlason usually did most of the talking, Norton felt he could have real conversations with him about goals and progress for the unit and the area. Fenlason thought they should be doing a lot more community outreach, more counterinsurgency. That sort of stuff was a high priority up at Brigade, and other companies were moving far ahead of them in that regard.Bravo wasn’t even trying in Fenlason’s eyes. Part of the problem was that these platoons were moving around too much, especially in and out of the TCPs. The people of Mullah Fayyad and surrounding villages could hardly get to know, much less trust, any of the soldiers if they were always just passing through.There should be more ownership, Fenlason thought. 

Norton definitely agreed, at least in theory. He was wary of doing anything drastic, however, because he did believe that Bravo’s sector was hotter than the other companies’. Maybe this area wasn’t quite ready to make the big transition to community building yet, Norton wondered. Or maybe it was. Maybe it was something to try, or at least think about, but Norton reminded Fenlason that he was going on leave on February 22. He assumed they would pick up the discussions after he returned in about a month. 

As Fenlason settled in, the men determined another thing they could hate him for: He almost never left the wire. He rarely patrolled. He never went on IED sweeps. He seemed never to ride along on a Quick Reaction Force when anyone got into a scrape. And the thought of Fenlason pulling guard the way Gallagher had made the soldiers laugh out loud. Fenlason always made sure to get a full night’s sleep, they said. “Sergeant Fenlason didn’t do anything,” said Sergeant Daniel Carrick, one of the battalion’s young stars, who was transferred from 3rd Platoon to give 1st Platoon better junior NCO leadership. “He sat around smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and that’s it. He’d do patrols once a month to go talk to some leaders.” 

Fenlason conceded that he did not get out very often. “I did one IED sweep my first few days there,” he said. “I did a half a dozen walks in Mullah Fayyad. And I did the two walks out and back to Rushdi Mullah.” But he does not see this as a failing. “Iraq in 2006 was a squad-level fight. The patrols were squad-level patrols, or fire-team-level patrols. I don’t go on fire-team-level patrols. Why would I? I never considered the perception of the soldiers or even the junior leaders. It never occurred to me to look at it through their eyes.” [Talk about a screwed up mindset or maybe just a coward DC]

In the early morning of February 22, about a dozen men, possibly dressed as policemen, entered the venerated Shi’ite Askariya mosque in the city of Samarra, wired it with some five hundred pounds of explosives, withdrew, and detonated it remotely. Zarqawi was among the suspected masterminds, and AQI’s umbrella organization, the Mujahideen Shura Council, issued a statement celebrating the Shi’ite outrage that followed. AQI never explicitly took credit for the attack, however, and several of the bombing’s characteristics were atypical of an AQI hit. Regardless, it was spectacularly provocative and successfully ushered in a new escalation in the civil war between Shi’ite's and Sunnis, throughout Iraq and in the Triangle of Death. 

The Samarra bombing galvanized and more motivated Muqtada al Sadr and his Mahdi Army (also known as Jaish al-Mahdi, or JAM) to push into locales they had not been operating extensively in for months, including Mahmudiyah. More Iraqi civilians were killed in Baghdad during the first three months of 2006 than at any time since the end of the Saddam regime. Sectarian killings now claimed nine times more lives than car bombings, and executions had increased 86 percent in the nine weeks after the February mosque bombing. 

According to Captain Leo Barron, the 1-502nd’s intelligence officer, this trend played out much the same way in Mahmudiyah. Ethnic tensions erupted anew and violence spiked past all previous levels. Less than a week after the bombing, Alpha Company witnessed the first open gun battle in Mahmudiyah they had ever seen between the Mahdi militia and a local Sunni tribe. Alpha did not get involved. “I don’t want to get in the middle of that,” Alpha company commander Bordwell told Stars and Stripes at the time, but added, “If that were to continue, that would be a real concern.” 

It did continue. In fact, an all-but-government-mandated Shi’ite counterattack was already beginning before the Samarra bombing. On February 7, seven masked men in IA uniforms and one in allblack clothing carrying AK-47s and 9mm handguns had “arrested” the Sunni mayor of Mahmudiyah, who had been elected by a council of elders Kunk had organized several weeks before. Four men pulled security outside his office and told anyone who asked that they were working “for Baghdad.” Inside, the other team presented the mayor with an arrest warrant that appeared to have been issued by the previous mayor, the same one who had been arrested just as First Strike was taking over this area. That first mayor, is, today, the mayor of Mahmudiyah, and the second mayor has never been heard from again. 

Prior to the Samarra bombing, Barron said, violence in the area was dominated by Sunni locals planting IEDs for money. AQI or other Sunni insurgent groups paid up to several hundred dollars to locals to lay an IED. But after the Samarra bombing, Barron saw an increase in violence committed by Shi’ite's and then a counter reaction from Sunnis who started fighting back, not for money but out of hate. In this spiral of violence and battle for control, JAM became even more brazen. “Shiites took over many of the city council positions in Mahmudiyah, they were pushing Sunnis out of their neighborhoods,” Barron said. “What started as threats and propaganda turned into intimidation and then murder and assassination. Over time, the demographics of the city changed completely. It flipped from being a mixed city to one with an overwhelming Shiite majority.” 

First Strike was not powerless to stop this ethnic cleansing: they were ordered not to. “We had a massive amount of intelligence on JAM,” said Barron. “We knew JAM’s hierarchy inside and out. But the orders were very explicit: Go after Al Qaeda. Do not worry about JAM.” A reluctance by U.S. commanders to antagonize the Shi’ite-dominated Iraqi government, many of whose highest-ranking members had long-established ties to the militias, drove such decisions, but it badly damaged U.S. forces’ credibility among Sunnis in places like Mahmudiyah. “It was very frustrating,” Barron admitted. “Sunni sheikhs came in and asked, ‘So how many Shiites are in your jail?’ And the answer was, not a lot. Part of the reason the Sunni insurgencies were having so much success, especially in Bravo’s AO, was because the locals, Sunni locals, did not see us as evenhanded.” 

On February 28, almost five months to the day since the deployment started, Lauzier was scheduled to go on a month’s leave. He didn’t want to go. He was afraid of what would happen if he left his men. Not every squad leader went on a lot of patrols, but Lauzier went on every one he could. “He would try to take point on every mission, and it got to where it bothered me because I would be like, no, man, I got it, you know?” Specialist James Barker recalled.But Lauzier couldn’t bear the thought of sending somebody out and them not coming back. If that happened, how could you live with not having been there? Now that he was going on leave, who would lead in his place? He would have been confident leaving Sergeant Tony Yribe in charge, but Yribe had been moved to 1st Squad after Nelson and Casica got shot. Specialist Paul Cortez and Specialist Anthony Hernandez were his team leaders, but they weren’t even sergeants yet. He loved his guys, but without him, he was worried they were going to get killed. 

The truth was, for all his bluster, this deployment was wearing Lauzier down. Under Lieutenant Britt and Platoon Sergeant Miller, Lauzier had been far and away the favored squad leader, but with Fenlason in charge, Lauzier had lost status fast. He felt marginalized. The new golden-boy squad leader was Payne, which made Lauzier bitter. 

“Sergeant Fenlason and I didn’t talk too much because he wasn’t around,” said Lauzier. “But when we did talk, it never went well. Whenever I offered a suggestion, Fenlason would shoot it down straight away. ‘Oh, did you read a book?’ he would say. I called Norton, Fenlason, and Payne the Circle of Three. I was not included in their little club.” 

Lauzier’s fall from favor was obvious to most in the platoon, and many thought it was unfair. “Lauzier was very, very tactically sound and very tactically minded,” opined Sergeant Roman Diaz, who served in both 1st and 3rd Squads. “Weapons were always clean, night vision and optics were always functioning. Lauzier took his responsibilities very seriously. Things like noise and light discipline were very important to him. Third Squad had this reputation for being cowboys, but we jumped when we had to jump, and we ran when we had to run, and we operated like an infantry squad.” 

Halfway into his second deployment Lauzier was rapidly losing his taste for combat. “Killing AIF is useless because there are ten more to replace each one,” he said. “It is a pointless light. When you first get here it’s like, yeah, let’s go kick butt. But that ends real quick. It gets to the point where you hear a gunshot and all the strength zaps out of your legs.” His body was breaking down, too. He was suffering from painful back problems, and a worsening bone spur was making it difficult for him to walk. 

Increasingly alienated, Lauzier started falling back on the men from his squad for support, especially Barker. “The Army would probably say I’m a shitbag soldier for that because I’m confiding in one of my subordinates. But I had no one to talk to,” he confessed.“What am I going to do? I’m human. You get real close out there, closer than a mother’s bond with her child. That’s how it was for me. Those men were my responsibility. I’m their mother, I’m their father, their counselor, police officer, principal—whatever you want to call it, that’s what I am.” 

The affection was reciprocal. “He would have done anything for us and we would have done anything for him,” said Barker. When asked what kind of leader Lauzier was, Cortez said, “By the book, led from the front, took care of his guys first, looked up to by everybody. Loved.Respected.” 

But outsiders to the 3rd Squad dynamic said Lauzier was, in fact, losing control of his men. “They were a bunch of loose cannons,” pronounced Sergeant Carrick. “He was either babysitting one guy or he was trying to stop that guy from kicking in some girl’s face, just because he could.” This was the difference between control and influence. “Yes, he had control if he was there watching them all the time,” said Sergeant Diem. “But nobody supervises their subordinates that much. He had no influence over his squad. He had no power over their behavior when he wasn’t there.” And even though Lauzier thought highly of his men, many of the other guys in 1st Platoon thought some of the characters in 3rd Squad, especially Barker and Cortez, were just hoodlums who happened to be wearing uniforms. 

Cortez was particularly tweaked these days. Just before Lauzier’s leave, 3rd Squad got the call to go fill in some IED holes off of Fat Boy. It was, the men thought, a typically dipshit mission. “That was the order: Go out there to fill holes, so that the insurgents could put bombs back in them and blow the fuck out of us again,” said Lauzier. “If you wanted to fill the holes with concrete and do an overwatch until it was all dry, that’s one thing, but this was just dumb—and we got ordered to do stuff like this all the time.” 

It was common for soldiers to complain, even vehemently, when sent on these types of missions. A soldier screaming, “This is fucking bullshit!” and then throwing something across the room was a normal occurrence, but it would always be followed by his picking up his helmet and continuing to suit up. He might be grumbling to himself the whole time about how he didn’t sign up for this shit, this was the dumbest fucking thing he’d ever done, this is the dumbest fucking idea in the motherfucking history of warfare and he can’t wait to get out of the Army so he can go to the White House himself and shove an IED so far up George Bush’s ass that they are going to have to pry his teeth out of the walls. But he would continue to suit up and be ready to go when it was showtime. 

With Cortez, this time, it was different. He was teary-eyed, sometimes blubbering, sometimes shouting, hysterical about how he was sick of it, he couldn’t do this anymore. 

“They don’t give a shit about us!” he shrieked. “They don’t fucking care if we die, they don’t fucking care. This is suicide, every day is another suicide mission, day after day after day! I’m not doing it!” 

Lauzier tried to talk him down for a minute or two, but that wasn’t working. He tried to get him into a separate room, away from the other men, because Cortez’s losing his mind was now freaking them out. Either freaking them out or, for the guys who didn’t like Cortez, confirming that he was a little bitch after all. Lauzier wanted to punch him. 

“You’re a specialist, for chrissake!” Lauzier yelled once he had gotten him into a semi private corner. “You’re about to get promoted. Everybody feels the stress. Go ahead, have a breakdown! But you can’t do it in front of the men.” Cortez continued to spout hysterics. Lauzier decided he really didn’t have time for this, so he got angry. “Fuck it, Cortez, then stay back!” he yelled. “If you don’t want to go, then don’t go. Just stay the fuck back, okay? We got it covered.You’re good, all right? You’re good. Don’t worry about it.” 

Lauzier and his squad-sized patrol headed out. Lauzier stewed on it during the patrol, and when he got back he happened to pass Norton and Fenlason while he was still fuming. They asked him what was wrong, and he vented. Fenlason called Cortez in.This was not what Lauzier wanted to have happen. He should have held his tongue. He did not want Fenlason involved. 

Fenlason chewed Cortez’s ass. “I will bust you a rank and make you a SAW [squad automatic weapon] gunner if you pull shit like that again!” Fenlason yelled. Lauzier took Cortez aside and apologized for losing his temper, and apologized for getting Fenlason involved. 

“But,” Lauzier told Cortez, “you can’t pull that shit in front of the guys. If you are freaking out, you need to talk to me in private. I am going on leave soon and Fenlason has it in for all of us. He is gunning for us, waiting for us to fuck up. So when I am gone, you have got to be shit hot and wire tight, you hear me?” 

“I hear you,” said Cortez.

MARCH 2006

18 

Back to the TCPs 

BEGINNING MARCH 1, 1st Platoon rotated back out to the TCPs. Norton had gone on mid-tour leave in the third week of February, so Fenlason had sole control of 1st Platoon. Goodwin was aware that morale had not come around, but he was optimistic, and he had expected the adjustment to Fenlason to be rocky at first. “About thirty days into it, they’re at the lowest point,” he recalled. “This is when everybody is just fed up. They hate each other. The guys just are pushing back. It’s what happens. New guy comes in. There is always a downturn. Then the body adapts.” He was hoping the body would adapt soon. 

But 1st Platoon was at a far lower point than even those who were supposed to monitor it realized. The psychological isolation that 1st Platoon had been experiencing throughout the deployment was becoming nearly total. “First Platoon had become insane,” declared Sergeant Diem flatly. “What does an infantry rifle platoon do? It destroys. That’s what it’s trained to do. Now turn that ninety degrees to the left, and let slip the leash, and it becomes something monstrous. First Platoon became monstrous. It was not even aware of what it was doing.” 

Some of the mental states that the men describe are well documented by psychologists studying the effect of combat on soldiers. The men spoke about desensitization, how numbed they were to the violence. They passed around short, graphic computer video compilations of collected combat kills and corpses found in Iraq. One, with a title card dedicated to “Mr. Squishy Head”—a dead body whose skull had been smashed in—was set to the track of Rage Against the Machine’s “How I Could Just Kill a Man.” It was a horror parade of stills and short clips of gore and carnage. 

Justin Cross, who had been promoted to private first class in March, admitted he talked with some of the other men about how the social breakdown and the extreme Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence around them would be a perfect cover for murder. “I was on guard one day and they radioed in to be extra alert because people were rioting,” he said. “At that point in time, in that state of mind, I had this bright idea. I said, ‘You know what’s funny, man? Go behind the TCP, kill anybody. Kill anybody. And fucking blame it on the riots. And we’d get away with it.’ After saying that shit, everybody looked up and was like just looking at each other. Barker and Cortez were just staring at each other. It was like, ‘That’s a damn good idea.’” 

Iraqis were not seen as humans. Many soldiers actively cultivated the dehumanization of locals as a secret to survival. “You can’t think of these people as people,” opined Yribe. “If I see this old lady and say, ‘Ah, she reminds me of my grandmother,’ but then she pulls out a fucking bomb, I’m not going to react right. So me, I don’t see them as people.” Children were considered insurgents or future insurgents, and women were little more than insurgent factories. 

Some began hoping they would die. “I don’t know if you have ever honestly prayed for death, but there were times we would just fucking take our helmets off,” remarked Private First Class Justin Watt (who had also been recently promoted). “We’d be sitting in a guard tower and be like, Please, please put me out of my fucking misery.” Cross described an almost identical experience: “I had my first breakdown right there, where I was like, ‘Fuck this shit.’ I took off my helmet, threw it down, and just sat there. I stood up on top of the turret and started yelling, ‘Fuck this shit.You want to fucking kill me, just kill me, please. Somebody, sniper, come on, shoot me!’” Charlie Company’s First Sergeant Dennis Largent said, “My soldiers passing through Bravo’s AO would tell me about their soldiers saying, ‘It would be easier if I got shot or blown up. At least this shit would be over.’” 

Specialist James Barker described the paradoxical yet typical swings that combat-weary soldiers have between thinking they are doomed and thinking they are invincible. “I knew I was going to die, it was just a matter of time, so I just didn’t care. I would run straight at somebody shooting at me instead of taking cover. That was my mentality: I’m already dead so, fuck it, what can anybody do to me? I’d gotten shot at so many times and blown up so many times and hadn’t taken a scratch that it’s like, ‘Oh fuck, I’m untouchable. I am a bad ass and nobody can fuck with me.’” 

Second Platoon and 3rd Platoon survived, stayed sane, and arguably even thrived in the exact same environment in great part due to their outstanding platoon sergeants and their daily, active effort to combat the hate 1st Platoon had given in to. But 1st Platoon did lose more men, including three leaders killed in a two- week period, which they did not. The disarray caused by those losses was compounded by a consistent leadership vacuum. And emergent dysfunctions were magnified further by the higher command’s constant unfavorable comparison of 1st Platoon with Bravo’s better-functioning platoons. “You can see what happens when the pressure on a set of leaders—junior leaders—becomes so great that men’s decision-making processes start to break down,” observed the battalion’s executive officer, Major Fred Wintrich. “Moral decision-making processes. And that’s what leadership is supposed to mitigate.” 

House searches turned extremely violent. “A lot of people got dragged out of their house by their hair and beat down,” recalled Diem. “I want you to imagine just for a second that you and your wife are watching TV one day, and then the door gets kicked in and some soldiers come in and drag your wife out by the hair and smack the piss out of you in your living room, asking you questions in a language you’ve never heard, holding guns to your head.” Most of the time, this violence was not strictly random. Usually there was a shred of evidence or a whiff of suspicion before such force was employed. But the trip wire was thin. “It’s not like we did it for no reason,” Diem said. “We worked off suspicion. It was sort of like Puritan witch-hunters.” 

Suspected insurgents were beaten as a matter of course, with the full blessings and, in fact, insistence of some team leaders and squad leaders. Sergeants would egg the younger soldiers on, making fun of privates who didn’t hit detainees hard enough. 

During patrols, Green frequently volunteered to kill anyone his NCOs wanted him to. “I was always saying, ‘Anytime you all are ready, you all are the ones in charge of me. Anytime you all say the word “go,” it’s on,’” he recalled. “One time, we pulled these guys off the road and took them in this house and we were hitting them and trying to make them tell us what they were up to, and Yribe was talking about shooting them. And I was like, ‘I’ll do it! I’ll take them out right now and shoot them. All you gotta do is tell me to.’ And Yribe started talking to Babineau, like, ‘Oh, Babs, but you wanted to shoot them, right?’” That’s when Green realized Yribe had been pulling his leg the whole time. 

Many of the men say the beatings began in earnest when they watched the men they had detained get released by higher headquarters.The way they saw it, they were just taking justice into their own hands because the battalion or the brigade could not be trusted to keep the men trying to kill them behind bars. Brigade commander Colonel Todd Ebel countered that 85 percent of the brigade’s detainees went to prison, a statistic he points to as proof that raids were well targeted and backed up by a judicial system that worked. The men of 1st Platoon say that number does not come close to their experience. “We would turn them in to Mahmudiyah and what happens?” said one. “They’re released. Not enough evidence. It came to the point where we had to have criminal investigation packets thicker than a book to send these assholes to jail. We couldn’t rely on Army intelligence to put these guys in jail, so we had to let that town know that we were in charge.” 

Many men believed it to be a fact that the battalion and brigade not only did not care if they lived or died but probably even conspired against them. Their disenfranchisement and their apathy would get them into more trouble, which in turn would then further convince them that they were being singled out. further convince them that they were being singled out. 

“I probably didn’t help it sometimes with my platoons, since our AOs bordered each other,” said Alpha Company commander Jared Bordwell. “One of my platoons would be in contact and would send a report up, or an explosion would happen in B Company’s area and we would send up a report of ‘We just heard an explosion 600 meters this degrees.’ And they would ping Bravo. ‘What the hell is going on in your AO?’ And the TCPs were like, ‘Oh, yeah. There was an IED that just went off.’ Those guys had gotten to the point where they were like, ‘Whatever.’” 

At the beginning of the March TCP rotation, Fenlason sent 2nd Squad to TCP5. He, the headquarters element, and 1st Squad went to TCP1. And he sent 3rd Squad to cover both TCP2 and TCP6. Fenlason said that there was no difference in the dangers between TCP1 and TCP2, that the TCPs were equally dangerous, but this is not true.By March,TCP1 had been running continuously as the TCP mission headquarters for four months. It was a sturdy two-story house with working, generator-driven electricity, good sight lines in every direction, and defenses that were still crude but that had been improving steadily. This TCP was also the most heavily staffed, usually with a full squad plus the medic, radioman, platoon sergeant, and a squad of Iraqi soldiers. 

Fenlason would not have known about the relative safety of TCP2 anyway, because he had never been to TCP2, either before this rotation or at any time during it. TCP2 had just been reopened for the first time since it had been shut down in mid-December. This time, at least, the men were allowed to take over a house on the northwest corner of Sportster and the small, unnamed canal road. It was a hovel, more a collection of rooms than a home, each no bigger than 150 square feet, laid in an end-to-end, almost serpentine arrangement. Many of the rooms did not have windows, and of those which did, the windows were just small, paneless holes a foot or two square. There was no electricity, no running water, and no furniture except for cots, plastic patio chairs, and tables fashioned from sheets of plywood laid atop cardboard boxes. tables fashioned from sheets of plywood laid atop cardboard boxes. The latrine was a plastic chair with the seat cut out where soldiers would defecate into a WAG Bag. There was a wall along the Sportster side and about ten feet of wall on the canal road side. The rest of the house’s yard was exposed. To mitigate this danger, there were several HESCO Barriers, but not having been filled with dirt, they were useless. 

With Lauzier on leave, Fenlason gave 3rd Squad the job of manning TCP2 and TCP6 because he believed it to be the easiest. Unlike Blaisdell and Gebhardt, who preferred switching up guard rotations every few hours, Fenlason ran TCP2 and TCP6 as static positions. The men would live out there the whole time. Even though Fenlason once declared that he would not have sent Specialist Cortez to the promotion board to become a sergeant if he had been platoon sergeant at the time, he maintained that this duty was an appropriate tasking for Cortez. “Cortez was going to go to TCP2,” he explained, “because all I wanted him to do was pull guard. That’s it. IED sweeps and pull guard. Which is tactically and technically well within the realm of someone of his experience and pay grade.” 

Fenlason had a fondness for static positions, seeming to think they were easier to man than dynamic positions. It was an infantry philosophy that many of his men could not fathom, and one that the other platoons did not subscribe to. Fixed positions invite attack. Said one squad leader from a different platoon: “A static position like a TCP was a no-go for us. In order to keep them from attacking us, we had a constantly roving patrol out there.” When they are boring, static positions breed complacency, and when they are dangerous, they are mind-rackingly stressful. 

Indeed,Cortez was not coping well with the added responsibility. He was focusing intently on the dangers around him and becoming increasingly bitter about his sense of abandonment. “A lot of time you couldn’t sleep,” Cortez said. “There were windows where somebody could walk right up and just drop a grenade and you wouldn’t even know it.” Fenlason maintained that no one ever expressed anxiety to him about the dangerous conditions at TCP2, but several soldiers contradict this assertion. “I kept asking to get the HESCO baskets filled,” said Cortez. “I asked for more concertina wire, more sandbags to fortify the position. All they kept telling me was ‘No, don’t worry about it. We will get it later on. We don’t need it right now.’ So basically we were just told to just sit there and wait to get killed, that’s the way I took it.” 

An Achilles in Vietnam, psychologist Jonathan Shay describes how the long-term debilitating effects of combat are exacerbated exponentially when a soldier’s sense of “what’s right” is violated by his leaders. “The mortal dependence of the modern soldier on the military organization for everything he needs to survive is as great as that of a small child on his or her parents,” he writes. During his clinical treatment of Vietnam veterans, one of the most persistent causes of stress soldiers described was the perception that risk was not evenly distributed. Shay continues: “Shortages of all sorts—food, water, ammunition, clothing, shelter from the elements, medical care—are intrinsic to prolonged combat…. However, when deprivation is perceived as the outcome of indifference or disrespect by superiors, it arouses menis [the Greek word for ‘indignant rage’] as an unbearable offense.” This rage, Shay writes, is instrumental in the soldiers’ own “undoing of character” and “loss of humanity” essential to the commission of war crimes. 

Even though TCP2 was only three-quarters of a mile from TCP1, Fenlason never went to evaluate TCP2’s defenses or to see how his soldiers were performing there over the next three weeks. With Platoon Leader Norton and 3rd Squad Leader Lauzier both on leave, and with 3rd Squad headed by a soldier Fenlason knew to be a poor leader, not once did he go to TCP2 in the next twenty-one days to assess how Cortez was enforcing standards or fortifying a brand-new battle position. 

Fenlason justified his absenteeism as a reflection of the degree of trust he suddenly had in his men—whom he had originally assessed as a “fucking bucket of crap”—after just a month of leading them. The men down at the TCP didn’t know why Fenlason did not come down, but by this point that suited them just fine. He was the last person they wanted to see. “Fenlason was reliable, I will give him that,” said Specialist James Barker, one of the soldiers stationed at TCP2 with Cortez. “We knew he would never, ever come check on us, so we could do whatever we wanted.” 

While 1st Platoon’s attention was focused on the TCPs, Kunk and the rest of the battalion, in fact all of 2nd Brigade, were looking west, to the Yusufiyah Power Plant. On March 2, a brigade-wide effort called Operation Glory Light kicked off. A weeklong initiative, it was one of the largest missions of the war since the invasion. It began with joint air assaults by U.S. and Iraqi troops into the town of Sadr-Yusufiyah, just north of the power plant, by troopers from both infantry battalions of the Deuce. Though the effort was spearheaded by the 2-502nd, the 1-502nd’s Charlie Company and Alpha Company both contributed a platoon or two, flushing terrorists from one of the most lawless areas of the brigade’s AO. “This could be the final crushing blow for the anti Iraqi forces in the Baghdad area,” Kunk told Stars and Stripes at the time, something he could not possibly have believed. 

Parts of Bravo’s 2nd Platoon moved with Captain Goodwin into Rushdi Mullah as a blocking element to prevent insurgents who were fleeing the main thrust from coming their way. They rolled in first thing on the morning of March 4 and cleared the entire village. Then they took over a house and laid in for several days of overwatch. They suffered intermittent fire in various forms, including mortars and small arms. They had a sniper dogging them, who was particularly aggravating because he was extraordinarily patient, firing perhaps as few as ten shots in thirty-six hours, from as far away as three-quarters of a mile, and he moved after every shot. They sent some snipers of their own to lie in wait for him, but they never found him. They tried making a “Scare Joe,” a helmet on a stick that they would pop just above the rim of the walled roof, but he never fell for that. Goodwin also sent out patrols into town every few hours to maintain a presence and keep the townspeople on their toes. 

Just after 4:00 p.m. on March 5, twenty-one-year-old Specialist Ethan Biggers got out of one of the Humvees parked in front of the house and went inside and up to the second-floor balcony, which had a protective four-foot wall running around its perimeter. He needed to stretch his legs, get a change of scenery. He was Bravo’s radioman, the communication link between Goodwin, the rest of the company, and higher command, so he had been practically living inside the truck for two days straight to be near the radios. Some people were always up on the balcony, either getting some air or as part of the guard rotation. Because of his job, everybody in Bravo knew Biggers, and because of his personality, everybody loved him. He was the entire company’s little brother, who never had a sour word about anyone. He and his fiancée, Britni, were expecting their first child. 

Goodwin was up there too, inside one of the two rooms on the second floor, and so was Platoon Sergeant Jeremy Gebhardt. Gebhardt had his vest on but his helmet off, and others, even those on the balcony, were in similar states of disrobe. It was against regulations to have anything but “full battle rattle” on when outside, but on days-long missions like this, even leaders thought that was not really realistic. Gebhardt allowed soldiers to remove some of their protective gear as long as they kept their heads below the lip of the wall, because this was the tallest house in the neighborhood. Goodwin knew about this and tacitly approved the relaxation of the rules.

Upstairs, Biggers sat down on the outdoor stairwell leading up to the third floor with his head still below the outer wall, took off his helmet, and started talking to one of the medics. Several minutes later, first one shot rang out, from far away. But it was quickly followed by a second, perhaps as close as a hundred yards.This one hit the wall behind the stairwell, ricocheted, struck Biggers above his left eyebrow, and exited out the back of his head, each hole about an inch wide. 

Jesus, that was close, some of the soldiers exclaimed.But then the unit’s interpreter noticed that Biggers was not moving. “He’s hit, he’s hit!” he shouted. Soldiers dragged Biggers inside and started first aid, but blood and brains were spilling out of his skull. There was so much blood, a bandage would not stay on his head. A medevac bird arrived quickly and rushed him out, but he had lost a substantial amount of his brain and was in a coma.* 

* Shortly after his injury, after he had been sent back to the United States, Biggers and his fiancée were married by proxy, and a few months later she gave birth to their son. Biggers would remain in a coma for nearly a year, until his family took him off of life support. He died on February 24, 2007.

Another arguably avoidable casualty was a further blow to Goodwin’s status. “That shooting became a huge thing,” remarked Alpha commander Jared Bordwell. “Diagrams, trying to figure out the trajectory and all that stuff. They were trying to figure out not only how it happened but who they could blame. Who can we blame for this happening?” 

The first lieutenant who investigated the event found Biggers’s head shot preventable, and Colonel Ebel agreed. Ebel recommended that letters of reprimand be issued to Goodwin and Gebhardt. He chastised the commander and the NCO for “failure to ensure a climate of leadership that demands strict adherence to published standards…. In this case the commander bears the responsibility for enforcing policy.” As with Nelson’s and Casica’s deaths, however, the men who were there insisted that a helmet would not have stopped the shot. “If you were there and actually saw where the bullet was, it wouldn’t have even hit his helmet,” said one of 2nd Platoon’s squad leaders. 

While far from the final crushing blow to the insurgency in the Baghdad area, Operation Glory Light was declared a success. U.S. soldiers cleared significant amounts of new territory, found nearly two dozen IEDs, uncovered two weapons caches, and detained seven suspects. 

On the morning of March 8, Kunk’s convoy was returning from the area of the power plant as Glory Light was winding down. “We had to come down Sportster,” he said. “Stopped at every one of those battle positions. Talked to every one of the soldiers. Everything was going good.” His convoy headed up Fat Boy, where it hit an IED but no one suffered any casualties. Twenty minutes later and three hundred yards up the road, the convoy got hit again. This time Kunk suffered a puncture wound to his left calf. The wound got infected and he was relegated to bed rest from March 12 to March 19. 

19 

The Mayor of Mullah Fayyad 

DURING THIS TCP rotation, Fenlason decided to begin a community building initiative he had been mulling over for several weeks. Having most recently been assigned to the brigade’s community affairs office, Fenlason was in tune with the counterinsurgency ideas that were gaining traction around this time. And upon his moving into this AO, the town of Mullah Fayyad had caught his attention. A cluster of a couple of hundred houses and other buildings in a compact area that bordered Sportster and was the home of TCP1 and TCP5, Mullah Fayyad seemed to him the perfect target to begin a serious effort to help locals get better control of sewerage, water, electricity, education, and other basics of civilized life. “I went to Goodwin with the idea of changing the focus,” he said. “Let’s do the CMO—the civil-military operations stuff. We are not finding insurgents in Mullah Fayyad, we’re not getting anywhere with these IED sweeps, except finding IEDs, because we’re not really establishing ourselves in Mullah Fayyad in any way that makes sense.” 

They were already five months into this deployment and Mullah Fayyad was still only a town in the sense that it was a dense collection of houses. There was no government, and due to vagaries of demographics and tribal dynamics, the town was so mixed that there was no dominant sheikh or local strongman there. Fenlason wanted to jump-start a campaign that would put the town on its feet, or at least start to. He believed he could do this by providing the Iraqis continuity, familiar faces. Rotating soldiers through every three to five days was not enough time to get anything done. “Every patrol that went out, my guidance to them was to engage people, talk to them, find out what is going on,” he said. He told 1st Squad to make contacts and ask them what they needed and what they thought the Army might be able to do for them. 

Alpha and some of the other companies throughout the battalion were successfully beginning such programs, and some were quite advanced, but Bravo, because of its restive area, lagged. Blaisdell was adept at achieving a rapport with the locals and had developed an extensive network of Iraqis who liked him and worked with him, but Fenlason had grand plans to bring a whole town to a higher level of healthy functioning. Encouraged by the progress he said he saw in just a week, and believing stability to be paramount, he lobbied Goodwin to let 1st Platoon stay in place while he tried to get something going. 

Goodwin was encouraged. “They started doing minor patrols outside of the TCPs,” Goodwin said. “They’re starting to improve, starting to clean things up.” Fenlason told him he wanted to stay a month, Goodwin remembered, but Goodwin responded, “Let’s see how it goes.” 

Fenlason got this extension without speaking to Blaisdell or Gebhardt, which irritated them immensely; each move a platoon makes—or does not make—impacts the other two. “I was fucking pissed,” Blaisdell admitted. “We had shit going on in Mullah Fayyad too. We could have shared that shit. I remember yelling at him on the radio, ‘Who in the fuck put you in charge of the goddamn company?’” 

Gebhardt, as usual, was more understated. “It was a unilateral call by one platoon sergeant. There was no discussion. I think that’s what upset people more than anything.” He acknowledged that one reason he wasn’t as upset as Blaisdell was because his platoon was down at the JSB, which was the choicest of the three missions, and he certainly wasn’t dying to have 2nd Platoon cover the TCPs. “If there is one position that the privates hated, it was the TCPs,” he said. “But it was bearable because you did it seventy-two hours or so.But weeks at a time? That would drive me crazy.” 

The impact the extended TCP rotation was having on 1st Platoon was manifest, said Gebhardt. “A lot of his guys were upset by that. And that was obvious, just as you drove through. If you ever drive through the TCPs, platoon passing another platoon, there’s friendly waves and chit chat as you go through. But they wanted none of that. They didn’t want to talk to anybody. They were just mad. Not that I blame them. I’d be mad too.” 

Charlie Company’s First Sergeant Largent remembered driving through Bravo’s sector and looking at the soldiers manning the checkpoints. “You know, you see guys in the movies, and they’ve been in combat for months and they’re just ragged and dirty and filthy and they got that thousand-yard stare and they’re just burnt out?” he says. “And they’re not all there mentally? That was Bravo Company.Those guys were strung the fuck out.” 

Fenlason was operating in a cocoon. He wasn’t talking to the other platoon sergeants, nor was he communicating the mission, the importance of it, or the success he was having to any of the TCPs but his.Those not stationed at TCP1 had no idea what was going on when they radioed about when they were rotating back to the FOB. Fenlason said he couldn’t tell, because he himself didn’t know: the mission was results-dependent and could end at any moment. 

Private First Class Justin Cross had one of a couple breakdowns around this time. “My brain was overheating. I started sweating, got really light-headed. I just fucking broke down, started crying and shit. There was no end to this. When the fuck is help coming? Shit, how long are we going to do this?” Cross was ultimately evacuated to Camp Striker during this TCP rotation for a complete psychological evaluation and a stay at Freedom Rest. 

With the TCP mission now indefinite, Fenlason instituted a complex system where nine out of the approximately thirty-five soldiers in 1st Platoon rotated back to the FOB every day for four or five hours to take a shower, grab a hot meal, make a phone call, use the Internet, pick up their laundry, or get supplies for the TCPs. That left, on any given day, two dozen or so soldiers spread across four battle positions, which resulted in some of the thinnest staffing scenarios the men had ever experienced. TCP2 and TCP6 were routinely left with three or four people to man each spot. Staffing became so strained that at least once a single U.S. soldier got stranded alone with four or five Iraqi soldiers at a checkpoint. Despite this regular, methodical rotation system, which required nine soldiers to travel back and forth to Yusufiyah every day, Fenlason not only never visited TCP2, he never arranged for the men to receive better defensive supplies or hot food because, he said, “You don’t want to travel if you absolutely do not have to.You don’t want to travel predictably.Those are two things that are going to get you blown up.” 

One major initiative Fenlason got under way was a local leaders’ meeting. During the few times he went on patrols himself, he asked old men, anyone who looked as if they qualified as an elder, whether they would come to an informal meeting. Many men, including a veterinarian and the town’s only doctor, said they would attend. The meeting took place late in the first week of March, with Fenlason and a translator alone in a large room at TCP1 with about a dozen Iraqi men who showed up. Fenlason asked them what they wanted. They responded, overwhelmingly, that they wanted security. They wanted the insurgents to go away. Fenlason tried to align America’s interests with theirs, telling them that if they would just tell the Americans where the bad guys were, he and his men could go get them. “So we just kind of went around and around in circles for about two hours, just sort of saying the same things over and over again,” he recalled. “They had some food that a friendly family next door had made, and the group ended with an agreement to meet again in a few weeks.” 

Goodwin was getting an uninterrupted stream of good news from Fenlason about how great everything was at the TCPs. “Fenlason was calling me,” Goodwin recollected, “and he is saying, ‘Hey, we’re talking with so-and-so, we’ve got this, and we’ve got this.’ It’s like, holy crap. They’re coming back with information that I just haven’t seen in a while. I’m sitting there thinking, ‘This platoon is doing great stuff.’” 

Unfortunately, the men of 1st Platoon did not see it that way.“The chain of command cared more about what was happening in Rushdi Mullah than what was happening to us,” said Cross. “The frustration got to the point where pretty much everybody at the TCP started taking it out on people coming through. It kind of became a competition, bragging who’s fucking them up better.” 

Drinking and drug use were on the rise, frequently right under Fenlasons nose. “The vast majority of the Joes were drinking,” Private First Class Steven Green acknowledged. “Most of the NCOs. Of course, the NCOs were all like twenty-two years old, though. Since I can chug a pint of whiskey, Sergeant Yribe would be like, ‘Hey, chug that bottle.’ By February or March, I was doing some type of intoxicant every day. A lot of Valiums, and a lot of these pink pills that were some kind of a hallucinogen. A lot of other guys were taking those too. Iraqi Army guys would sell them to us. TCP1 was where all of the drugs were coming from, because that’s where the most IAs were, and then they were getting spread to the other TCPs.” 

Some soldiers had started getting drunk and going out looking for Iraqis to beat up. “Cortez, Barker, and them, they’d get on whiskey and shit,” said Cross. “They’d get rowdy. Cortez and Barker at one point went on a two-man drunken patrol. They were like, ‘Fuck this shit, let’s go find some people and fuck them up.’ They took off by themselves. We had to send another soldier, who was sober, over there to keep an eye on them so nothing happened.” These rogue patrols were not uncommon. “They’d go out in Mullah Fayyad and beat up some people,” recalled Collin Sharpness, the medic. “They’d tell me all about it when they got back. There was a lot of shit going on. You got a twenty-two-year-old, a twenty-three-year old in charge of a bunch of nineteen-year-olds? Controlling a checkpoint? Who knows what they’re doing?” 

On March 9, with so many 3rd Squad soldiers on leave, Cortez needed two more soldiers from the other squads to fill his ranks. Private First Class Jesse Spielman begged Cortez to take him, just so he could get away from Fenlason. No matter how bad TCP2 was, it was better than being around him, Spielman said. Fenlason’s approval was easy to secure. He simply didn’t care what personnel, in what combination, went down to TCP2. “Turns out to be Spielman and Green,” he said. “Which, sure, why not? As long as I’ve got nine, I don’t really give a shit.” 

Around two or three in the morning of March 10, TCP1 got a call from TCP2 saying they had detainees they needed help bringing in. They had been on their way to the house of an informant known as Mr. B when someone fired a rocket at them. They followed the rocket back to the house they thought it came from and now they had some suspects. Sergeant Yribe got Babineau and a couple of guys in a truck to go help out the guys from 3rd Squad. They didn’t really know where the house was, so Babineau and Yribe got out and started filing down some of the alleyways as Cortez guided them in over the radio using landmarks. Finally, they were within shouting range. 

“Cortez, that you?” 

“Yeah, over here!” 

Yribe walked into the house. Cortez, Spielman, a couple of other soldiers, and an interpreter were all there. In the room there were some electrical works, fuse boxes, wiring. Definitely shady, Yribe thought, so, okay, good grab. But walking in, Yribe could smell alcohol. And looking around, he could see that the soldiers had been drinking. The guys down at TCP2 were drinking at least every other day these days. Tonight they were so drunk they were practically falling down. They were trying to stand the detainees up, so they could punch them again or kick them, but they were so wasted, sometimes they wouldn’t even connect and fell to the floor themselves. Realizing just how serious the situation was in terms of their safety as well as their getting into trouble, Yribe tried to take control. He had no problem roughing up Iraqis.Catching a guy who shot at you, or tried to blow you up, and putting a lot of hurt back on him? Not a problem. But you have to do it in a controlled, even methodical way. This was way, way, insanely out of control and,maybe more important, they were in danger of getting caught. 

“What the fuck are you doing?” Yribe asked. “Cortez, you need to get a grip.” 

“What?” said Cortez, slurring. 

“You guys are way out of line. What if it was anybody but me and Babs who came after your call? You’d be fucked. Where is your brain? We need to get these guys back and you need to get your stupid asses back to TCP2.” 

“Fuck you, motherfucker.”Cortez always was a belligerent drunk. 

“Whoa, who are you talking to here, dude?”Yribe responded. 

“You’re a fucking dick,” Cortez slurred. Every time Yribe turned around, one or the other of the soldiers would shout at the Iraqis. 

“Fucking motherfucker! You probably helped kill Nelson and Casica!” Spielman yelled as he tried to stomp on one of them. 

“Bro, you just need to stop, all right?” Yribe repeated to Cortez. “You’re drunk. You don’t know what the fuck’s going on. I’m trying to make it to where you don’t get busted here, okay?” There was a brand-new soldier there, Private Nicholas Lake, who, according to platoon rules, had not earned the right to beat suspects. He was guarding the women and the children. 

“All these Hadjis are motherfuckers!” one of the other drunk soldiers yelled. “We ought to just kill them all now.” Another soldier butt-stroked one of the guys across the jaw. Blood went flying across the room. The man was knocked out cold, his jaw hanging in an unnatural way. 

“Dude,” Yribe yelled, “did you just kill him?” He hadn’t, but the man was knocked out. Babineau and Yribe managed to wrangle the detainees and herd the drunk soldiers back to the truck. The whole time, Cortez was indignant that Yribe was not being cooler about this, saying he would have expected him to have his back. Spielman was an emotional drunk, telling Babineau how much he loved him and how Babineau had always been there for him. Yribe and Babineau got the guys from 3rd Squad back to TCP2, and they passed the detainees over to the IAs. No beating was ever reported

next

The Janabis 327s

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