BLACK HEARTS: ONE PLATOON'S DESCENT INTO MADNESS IN
IRAQ'S TRIANGLE OF DEATH
BY JIM FREDERICK
BY JIM FREDERICK
24
Dilemma and Discovery
MULTIPLE SWEEP AND SEARCH operations were conducted simultaneously
throughout the next forty-eight hours on both sides of the
Euphrates, but physical clues and human intelligence kept
leading back to the vicinity of the power plant. As that was
happening, Watt was obsessively mulling over everything Yribe had
told him, even after they made it up to Striker the next day. It
continued to nag at him. He weighed all the scenarios, he tried to
evaluate all possibilities, and it just didn’t compute, that one guy
could get into a house and control an entire family in that situation.
There was no way Green could have done it alone. No way. There
just had to have been more people. He brought it up with Yribe
several times, and each time Yribe refused to entertain the notion.
Yes,Yribe said, he took Green’s word on how it went down. No, he
never asked Barker and Cortez about it. Why not? Tons of reasons,
Yribe said: Because he didn’t really want to know, because God would sort it out in the end, because the last thing 1st Platoon
needed was more trouble, because it was already ancient history.
And because it was none of his business—and it was none of Watt’s
business either.
The search for Tucker and Menchaca was continuing. There were
TVs in the Striker chow hall tuned to Fox News or CNN and people would just keep on feeding their faces. Watt couldn’t believe it. He was so angry at these soft, smug rear-echelon motherfuckers. Look
at them, he thought. Two missing soldiers were not going to get in
the way of their sundae with sprinkles. He wanted to get up on a
table and scream at them about how this entire room of fat, pasty
fuckfaces was not worth a single one of those guys.
Going to Striker was like going to a different planet, he thought. Anytime any soldiers from 1st Platoon were up there, some NCO
from the finance corps or quartermaster corps could be virtually
guaranteed to stop them in the chow hall and get on their case for wearing the old green patches on their uniforms rather than the
ones designed for new ACU digital pattern uniforms. First Platoon’s
fury would be hard to contain. “Eat my balls, dude,” they would
say. “You’re lucky I even have a fucking patch.This is the one patch
that got handed down to me through twelve people so you could
check what division I am from before deciding it was cool to be a
cocksucker. I don’t have any other fucking patches because all of my other fucking uniforms got toasted when our fucking FOB
burned down.”
Even worse was when the “Fobbits” from Striker, as they were
called, would be forced to come to Yusufiyah. They would arrive in
their crisp uniforms and their shiny Humvees and bust out their
cameras taking pictures of all the combat squalor. The piles of wreckage, the mangled Humvees, the scruffy soldiers. Watt couldn’t
stand it. It was like it was all a show for them, all a story they could
tell their friends back home about how they had really seen some
shit back in Iraq, man. And Watt knew these rear-echelon retards’
friends would then all buy them rounds of drinks and toast their
buddies, the war heroes. It made him seethe.
Just yesterday he nearly murdered someone. A female NCO in
line at the Green Beans coffee shop was complaining about the
communications blackout in effect because the names of the missing
soldiers had not yet been released. She was irritated that she
couldn’t turn in a paper for an online correspondence course she was taking. Watt exploded.
“Are you fucking serious, you fucking bitch?” he yelled. “I’ll tell my friends to die at a more convenient time for you, you fucking
piece of shit.” He physically went for her, intending to do her some
sort of harm he wasn’t even in control of, and he had to be dragged
out of the place. Luckily, there were a bunch of infantry NCOs
there, so they let Watt’s outburst slide as long as he just got out of
there. As he reluctantly slinked off, he was glad to hear them tell her, in a much more polite manner, that she really should shut the
hell up.
Around lunchtime on June 19, Watt ran into Bryan Howard and
Justin Cross. They were returning from leave and appreciated the
chance to commiserate with a guy going through the same thing
they were. Tucker and Menchaca had still not been found, but all
around Striker, it seemed like just another day to everyone else.
Since Watt spent much of the deployment as the platoon’s
radioman, he had a better memory for where people were located
on particular days than the average soldier. As they were talking, Watt remembered that while both guys were members of 3rd Squad
at the time, Howard had been a part of the group at TCP2 that day
back in March.
Cross wandered off at one point, and Watt tried to get Howard to
talk about that day. But he decided he had to do it craftily, as if he
knew more than he actually did. They discussed all of the messed up
stuff they had seen, and Watt insinuated something about, well,
the really messed-up stuff that had happened in March. What are
you talking about? Howard asked. You know, Watt said, behind
TCP2, with the family, the ones that got waxed that day. And the
girl, the girl that got burned? Convinced that Watt did indeed know
the whole story, Howard talked about it all, at length. He filled in many of the missing pieces about Cortez and Barker and even the
extent of Howard’s own involvement. He had had to hold down the
TCP with just Scheller—and the radio that the others down at the
girl’s house weren’t responding to anyway. He told Watt about how
he still didn’t really believe them until they returned, with the
blood-stained clothes.
That night, Watt recounted to Yribe what Howard had relayed to
him. Yribe said he couldn’t really believe it, but he didn’t see what
good was going to come from digging it up. While it was bothering
Watt to the point of obsession, Yribe’s philosophy was it had
nothing to do with him.
“Watt, dude, were you there?”Yribe asked.
“No.”
“Have you talked to anybody who was personally there, at the
house, when it happened?”
“No.”
“What you know is what somebody heard from somebody else.
That’s what you know, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So you don’t really know a lot, do you?”
“I guess not.”
Watt didn’t know much, but he just knew it was true. For a while, he did try to forget about it. But he kept coming back to the
father, that was the thing that kept him up at night. He couldn’t
sleep at all anymore, and that was the image that haunted him. It was horrible, what happened to them all, especially the girl, but
Watt kept focusing on the father. Watt wasn’t a parent, he wasn’t
even married, but he supposed it was simply because he was a man
that the father was the one he identi;ed with the most. He
imagined the powerlessness, the literal impotence, of having armed men break into your house and there being nothing you could do to
protect your family. Watt ran it over in his mind again and again. What would that feel like, to realize that you and the people you
love were about to be blown away? When did all hope vanish?
When did the Iraqi man realize that he, and his whole family, were
going to die? When the gun started going off, or before? When the
bullet slammed into his skull, or before? “I’d just imagine what it would be like to spend my last moments on Earth like that,” he
said. “And I couldn’t think of a worse way to go.”
Watt called his father, who had been an airborne combat
engineer in the late 1970s. He asked his dad what he would do if
his brothers in arms had done something really bad.
“What is it?” his father asked.
“I really shouldn’t say,” Watt told him, “but it is bad beyond
anything you could imagine. What would you do?” Watt asked.
“You should let your conscience be your guide,” his father said.
“If it is as heinous as you say, you can’t let your loyalty to your men
get in the way of doing what is right.”
Watt resolved that he couldn’t just let this pass. “If I kill someone
in combat,” he reasoned, “that’s the risk that the other guy involved
has agreed to take. And I stand just as much of a chance of getting my ticket punched as the guy I am trying to kill. But civilians are
different. The guys who did this had to pay. Not to say that if I
never turned them in, they wouldn’t be paying for it, in their own
heads. Your own conscience is worse than any punishment that
anyone else can lay on you. I think that’s part of why Yribe was
saying he wouldn’t turn them in. But that’s not good enough. Not
for that shit. Not after I and all the rest of us busted our balls the
entire time. I didn’t get to go out on a kill spree because I was
hurting. We all sucked up the same bullshit and we didn’t get to wig out.”
Finally, after a mid-afternoon sweep through Rushdi Mullah on
Sunday the 18th, two detainees helped pinpoint the location of
Tucker’s and Menchaca’s bodies, which were located on Monday,
June 19, just before 8:00 p.m., about two miles northeast of the
power plant. Because it was possible they had been booby-trapped with IEDs, they had to be examined by an Iron Claw team and it
took another several hours before their remains could be recovered.
Judging from a video shot by the insurgents, this seems to be the
vicinity where the bodies were mutilated. There were about a
dozen men milling around the already dead and desecrated bodies.
Both soldiers appeared eviscerated and half-naked, dirty with caked
blood and mud, just as one would appear after being dragged
behind a truck. Tucker was decapitated, and a man, after holding
his severed head aloft like a trophy, placed it on Tucker’s own
body. Another set of hands at-temped to light both soldiers’ ACUs
on fire. The tape is particularly revolting because the men are so
nonchalant. They are slightly agitated but don’t seem worried, hurried, or anxious. As dusk appears to be falling in the
background, they are in a subdued yet celebratory mood, half singing,
half-shouting “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!”
According to a briefing by Major General William Caldwell and
an appearance on Larry King Live, coalition forces conducted over
twenty-five combat operations, cleared twelve villages, and
conducted eleven air assaults over seventy-two hours. The Air Force
logged about four hundred flight hours of fixed-wing and about two
hundred hours of unmanned drone flight time. One coalition force member died and twelve were wounded. One armored vehicle was
destroyed and another seven were damaged. They encountered a
total of twenty-nine IEDs, of which they discovered seventeen, and
twelve detonated. They killed two Al Qaeda operatives, questioned
dozens of people, and detained thirty-six.
Before the bodies were found, the Mujahideen Shura Council
(MSC) had issued a statement saying the men had been captured
and more information would be forthcoming in a few days.The day
after, another statement appeared, also purportedly from the MSC,
stating that the new leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq had slaughtered the
two himself. Significantly, considering insurgents would later claim
they mounted this attack as revenge for the rape of Abeer and the murder of her and her family, neither communiqué made any mention of the March atrocity.
In keeping with the pattern of making changes only after a
tragedy had occurred, or, as 1st Squad leader Sergeant Chaz Allen
put it, “Nothing is taken seriously until something serious happens,”
tons of defensive equipment flooded down to the JSB and the TCPs,
and a new staffing directive was issued: Every TCP needed to have
at least eight men and two trucks at all times, no exceptions.Rather
than this being welcome news, virtually everyone in Bravo despised
the new manning constraints because, without more troops, too,
just conforming to the regulation was nearly impossible. “It was
killing people on sleep. It was exhausting them even more,” said
one platoon leader.
25
“Remember That Murder
of That Iraqi Family?”
A COUPLE OF days after Tucker and Menchaca had been found, Fenlason and Norton were still decompressing. They had just lived through the most intense emotional and professional experiences of their lives. Simply dealing with the loss of three guys was enough, but to be the constant focus of, and focus of abuse from, Kunk and Edwards and Ebel and who knows who else all the way up to Division had been hard to take. No doubt, there would be investigations. The knives were going to come out, that was certain. They welcomed it in some regards. At one point, Fenlason was so fed up with Edwards’s riding him that he told him that he just wasn’t going to talk to him until the investigating officer showed up. When Edwards and Kunk had finally moved their TOC back to Mahmudiyah, Fenlason and Norton could try to focus— again—on getting the platoon back on its feet. They honestly didn’t know if it could be done this time.
Watt had looked at it from every angle. He had searched for all the ways to avoid it, but he knew he had to tell. Why did he track down Howard, trick him into revealing everything? He wished he hadn’t. He wished he could un-know what he knew. But now that he was convinced that Barker,Cortez, and Green had raped that girl and killed her and her family, there was no way he couldn’t tell. He was worried. Paranoid is not too strong a word. This was serious stuff and he was choosing to put himself in the middle of it. He was accusing his own brothers in arms of murder. The way everyone was tweaked—everybody had become borderline insane to begin with over the course of the last eight months, and now they were all grieving over Tucker, Menchaca, and Babineau—he truly could not predict how anyone was going to react to what he had to say. He wanted to keep it out of his immediate chain of command. He was worried that the reflexive impulse among junior leaders would be to protect the unit, either to dismiss what Watt was saying without investigating it or to cover it up. But he was also worried that those he was accusing might try to hurt or even kill him. He wanted to get the information in the hands of someone with the authority to actually do something about it, yet outside the regular battalion structure.
On June 23, as Watt was finally heading back from Striker to the JSB, the convoy stopped at FOB Yusufiyah to pick up Staff Sergeant Bob Davis from the Combat Stress team. After the catastrophic loss to the platoon, he was heading down to the JSB too, to visit the men.
Watt made a beeline for Davis, pulled him aside, and said, “Hey, I need to talk to you.” Once Davis had gotten the broadest outline— that Watt was not involved and had no evidence, but that he had heard a plausible story that some 1st Platoon members had committed a very serious crime and that he wanted Davis’s help in reporting it—he told Watt to stop right there. This was neither a confession nor a counseling session. He was required to report any crime a soldier told him he had committed or had firsthand knowledge of. But all Watt was telling him was hearsay, so Davis wasn’t sure how to handle the matter.
“I need to check with my own XO [executive officer] on how to proceed, and I don’t have a way to contact my own chain of command right now,” he told Watt. “I am not blowing this off, but I am gonna have to get back to you.”
This was not the response Watt was looking for. Now that he had committed to telling, he was bursting the whole ride down to the JSB. His mind was racing. He needed to talk to someone he could trust. Upon his arrival at the JSB, he got sent to TCP4 as part of an element to relieve a team headed by Sergeant John Diem. Watt was so happy to see Diem. There was literally no one in the world Watt trusted more than Diem. No one had their head screwed on straighter than Diem. No one’s moral compass was truer.
As they were doing the handoff, Watt said to Diem, “Things might get hairy in the next couple of days, so I want you to have my back. I need you to promise me that you’ll protect me.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Diem asked.
“I have some information about some fucked-up stuff that guys in this unit did, I can’t tell you about it now, but in a couple of days, some people might have it in for me, so you need to protect me.”
“Bullshit. You are going to tell me—now—what in the fuck you are talking about.”
And Watt did.
Diem went back to the JSB and immediately went on four hours of guard. While on guard, Diem decided he could not honor the promise Watt had extracted from him not to tell anyone. This was too serious. Watt’s head was not in the game, for starters, and distracted soldiers make mistakes. Plus, if Watt was in danger from some of the men, he would be more so if rumors started leaking.The only option was to get the whole mess right in front of the chain of commands nose as soon as possible. Four hours later, as soon as he came off guard, he went straight to Fenlason’s office. Norton was there, and the two were talking.
“What’s up, Diem?” one of them asked. He said he needed to talk to them. Sure, they said.
“You remember that murder of that Iraqi family? Back behind TCP2 that happened several months ago?” Diem asked.
Vaguely, they said.Rings a bell. What about it?
Well, Diem continued, it had just come to his attention, but he had good reason to believe that the perpetrators might not have been Iraqis.
“What?” they said. “What exactly are you saying here?”
Diem said that Watt had just come to him. Watt was not involved, but he had spoken to two soldiers with firsthand knowledge of that day who said that Green, Cortez, and Barker killed that family. He didn’t have any evidence and this was all thirdhand, Diem said, but he thought Fenlason and Norton should take it seriously. They said they would, but Diem had to tell them everything he knew. And he did, describing everything Watt had told him. He acknowledged his info was sketchy, and he wasn’t even sure exactly how many soldiers were involved. They talked for a while and tried to consider all angles, including what the best next step was.
“How about this?” Diem asked, thinking of Howard. “If you will give me twenty-four hours, I think I can get one of the soldiers Watt talked to to come and talk to you.”
“Yes,” Fenlason said, without hesitation. “Do it.” The closer they could get to first hand sources, he thought, the better off everybody would be. The rest of the afternoon, Fenlason and Norton worked quietly, trying to make sense of what they had just heard. At dinner that night, they separated themselves from the rest of the platoon as they ate, and Fenlason broke the silence. He had been thinking
about it, and he wasn’t sure they should be doing any waiting, first hand source or not. He looked at Norton and said, “Hey, boss, we can’t do this. We gotta get this booger off of our plate. We need to make this motherfucker someone else’s problem and quick.”
“I was just thinking the same thing,” Norton replied. Fenlason called Goodwin over the radio.
“Sir, I think you need to put together a patrol and get back down here as soon as possible.”
“Why?”
“Sir, I’d rather not say over the open radio network,” Fenlason responded, “but trust me, you need to get down here.”
“You’re going to have to give me something a bit better than that, Sergeant,” an annoyed Goodwin replied.
“Sir, let’s just say that it is worse than what just happened down here this week.”
“There are soldiers missing?” Goodwin asked, alarmed.
“No! Negative! N.O. No. No, sir. It is different entirely, but it is serious.”
“I am not going to playTwenty Questions with you, Sergeant.”
“Let me just say one word, sir,” Fenlason said. “Haditha.” Haditha is a town in western Iraq, but the name had become shorthand for an international media scandal involving a group of Marines who had killed twenty-four men, women, and children there in November 2005. A Time magazine article in March 2006 cast doubt on the military’s version of events, which initially claimed no one but insurgents had been killed, and an investigation of that incident had been ongoing ever since.
“Haditha?”
“Haditha, sir. It makes Haditha look like child’s play.” This was driving Fenlason crazy. Anyone who was listening would know something serious was going down.
“Haditha?”
“Sir, I’d rather not go into this over the radio. Just, really, sir, you need to get down here.”
“All right,” Goodwin responded, still baffled, “I’m on my way.”
Several soldiers, of various levels, who heard the exchange asked each other, “What the fuck was that all about?”
Goodwin arrived a few hours later with 3rd Platoon, and Blaisdell was pissed. It sounded a lot like more of Fenlason’s me first dramatics, as if 3rd Platoon had nothing better to do than cater to Fenlason’s histrionics. As soon as they pulled in, Blaisdell whipped out of the truck.
“Dude, who in the fuck do you think you are?” Blaisdell yelled. “This had better be fucking good, ’cause you got a lot of balls.”
“You need to calm down and back down,” Fenlason said. “Sit down and shut up. This is bigger than anything you can fucking possibly fathom. So you don’t say a goddamn thing right now. Just sit down and be quiet and listen.”
And Blaisdell did, because he could see in Fenlason’s eyes that this was as serious as he said. Fenlason and Norton briefed Goodwin and Blaisdell. They actually went through it two or three times. The first time, Goodwin just listened, eyes wide and mouth open. After that, he was taking notes and asking questions.
Just after midnight on the 24th, Goodwin called Kunk and told him what he thought had happened. The connection was bad and Goodwin was emotional, but Kunk got the gist, that some of the soldiers may have committed a very serious crime. He said he would be down there in the morning. After briefing Majors Wintrich and Salome and calling the deputy brigade commander up at Camp Striker, he departed Mahmudiyah with Edwards just before 9:30 a.m. They hit an IED near TCP3, which delayed their arrival until after 11:00. After meeting with Norton, Fenlason, Goodwin, Blaisdell, Davis, and Edwards, to get as full a story as anyone had at the time, Kunk decided to question each of the soldiers whose names had come out so far individually.
Yribe was at TCP4, helping with the now drastically understaffed 1st Platoon, so Blaisdell went to fetch him. Kunk told Yribe, as he did each soldier he spoke to that day, that he was there conducting a Commander’s Inquiry to investigate a rape and murder that may have been committed by U.S. soldiers. The purpose of the Commander’s Inquiry was to see if he thought that there was any basis for further investigation by the Army’s law enforcement officers. He read them their rights, and all agreed to talk to him freely and none asked for a lawyer. Before questioning each of them, he also gave them a little speech. In a statement he later filed, Kunk wrote, “I explained to them that the most important thing a man can go to his grave with is his own honor and integrity. How serious and the possible effects of these alleged allegations could have on the mission in Iraq and our own soldiers in First Strike. That bad news does not get better with time and that being honest and going the harder right were the most important things now.”
With varying degrees of vehemence and evasiveness, each soldier whom Watt implicated claimed to have no knowledge of what Kunk was talking about. Yribe said he had heard some rumors about Green being involved, but he didn’t have any knowledge of that, and he denied finding a shotgun shell at the crime scene.
When Yribe returned to TCP4 after being questioned, as he got out of the Humvee he gave Watt a look like “What the fuck?”
“What?” Watt said.
“What the fuck did you say?”Yribe asked.
“Nothing. What are you talking about?”
“Kunk is asking about that night, that family. Did you fucking tell them?”
“No!”
“Then who did?”
“I don’t know,” said Watt, scrambling to push the heat off of him. “Maybe Howard?”
“Well, I think I am okay. I was able to catch Barker and talk to him, to make sure of what we were saying. I hope Cortez doesn’t talk.”
Watt was terrified for his safety. This had all gotten rolling very quickly. Were they going to leave him out here? he wondered. If these dudes would kill a kid, he thought, why wouldn’t they kill the soldier who snitched? Everyone had grenades. It would be the simplest thing to just pull the pin on his vest as he was sleeping, and then say, stupid private doesn’t even know how to keep his frags taped.
Howard was the second person to be questioned, and he told Kunk that Green laughingly said he had done it. But Howard didn’t believe him and dismissed it. Howard did, however, admit to drinking alcohol down at the TCPs, along with Barker, Cortez, and Green. Barker, when questioned, was insolent and uncooperative to the point of being insubordinate. He denied any involvement, although, he repeatedly said, he had heard some “names” of people who were involved. Whenever he was asked “What names?” he replied, “You know, guys talk, just names.” Kunk and Edwards traveled to the AVLB, where Cortez was stationed.Cortez told Kunk that the crime scene was gruesome, but he didn’t know anything about Americans having a hand in it.
Kunk and Edwards then went to TCP4 to talk to Watt. At that moment,Kunk didn’t think there was anything to the allegations. It boggled the imagination, what Watt was alleging. As he spoke to Watt, Kunk was increasingly frustrated because Watt didn’t have command of even the most basic facts. “His story made no sense,” Kunk said. “None whatsoever. There was no logic, any rhyme or reason to it.”
Watt was flustered and scared. He wanted to know if Kunk was going to keep the soldiers segregated, because he was concerned they would talk and get their stories straight. Kunk thought Watt was getting way ahead of himself. He was making some serious allegations and Watt didn’t even have his own story straight.
“Do you understand what you are doing here?”Kunk thundered.
Kunk was far from convinced that there was anything to Watt’s tale, but there was enough doubt and confusion that he decided to recommend a fuller investigation. He would take Watt with him to Mahmudiyah for the time being.Kunk was close to doing nothing at all about the allegations, but, he said, “I either had to prove that this happened, or prove that it didn’t happen. Because I could not allow there to be a lingering rumor that something like that happened.”
Kunk notified the brigade, and the brigade notified the division. At 4:20 p.m. on June 24, General Thurman informed the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID), and at 7:40 p.m. they got their first briefing from Kunk about the rape and quadruple murders that American soldiers may have committed.
On June 25, 1st Platoon rotated from the JSB to Yusufiyah and then went to Mahmudiyah the next day for the memorial for Tucker, Menchaca, and Babineau. Second Platoon took over at the JSB. A lieutenant colonel down there from brigade headquarters asked the platoon leader, Lieutenant Paul Fisher, why none of his men had shaved. Fisher, after the Alamo bridge incident, after all of the work and all of the loss, couldn’t hide his exasperation.
“We drink all the water we have, sir, so that we don’t dehydrate,” he said. “We have been running non stop since our guys got abducted. We are not really concerned about our looks right now.”
“I am just trying to keep the heat off of you, Lieutenant,” the lieutenant colonel said. “You guys are not looked upon too favorably these days.”
By June 26, all of 1st Platoon had moved to Mahmudiyah, ostensibly for the Tucker, Menchaca, and Babineau memorial. But the commanders were also taking a wait-and-see approach on whether any of the investigations led to something concrete. During this time, the rumor mill among the men of 1st Platoon was working overtime, and many had pieced together the broad outlines. Watt had pretty much disappeared, and one by one Cortez, Barker,Yribe, and Howard were all being yanked from their duties. Agents from CID interviewed Watt twice on the morning of the 25th. At 5:30 p.m., separate agents began interrogating Yribe and Howard simultaneously. After nearly five hours, Howard had confessed the major elements of what happened on March 12, implicating all of the other parties, including, for the first time, Spielman. He too was yanked from duties. Over the next five days, and over multiple interrogation sessions (none of which were filmed or recorded by CID agents, despite the agency’s manual urging them to “strongly consider” doing so in cases of violent crime), Barker, Cortez, and Spielman all corroborated Howard’s overall narrative, but each, in various ways, resisted fully implicating himself.* They would disagree, and lawyers would argue, about some of those details at their trials, and after, for years to come.
Simultaneously, CID and battalion staff were working to find family members related to the murdered family, to inquire about exhuming the bodies to retrieve evidence and to make financial reparations and offer condolences for the crime. The Janabi family was only mildly cooperative. On the advice of their imam, they forbade digging up the corpses, and only a few family members (including Abu Muhammad) could be convinced to testify in various court proceedings. The U.S. Army paid the Janabi family $30,000 for the murders of Qassim, Fakhriah, Abeer, and Hadeel.
The memorial service for Tucker, Menchaca, and Babineau was held on June 26. It is standard for one soldier, usually a close friend, to eulogize each of the deceased. The men came to Fenlason to say they wanted Yribe to speak for Babineau. Fenlason hesitated. Yribe, after all, was under investigation for some sort of role in the crimes that wasn’t yet clear. Fenlason ultimately decided not to make an issue of it. “I remember thinking, Tony being Tony, and the personality and the reverence that some of the soldiers still look at Tony with, that it might actually be helpful,” he recalled. “If Tony can bring it closure, then we’re going to do it that way. I didn’t like it, but I believe it was the right decision for the soldiers.”
In his remarks, Tony said, “We have endured much pain and many losses throughout this deployment. Babs and I talked several times while we were on guard about what we would like to have said if something were to happen to one of us. He told me that he would want 1st Platoon to know, and I quote, ‘If I were to go, it would be on my own terms. They will never take me alive.’” Many men said it was one of the most wrenching memorials they had ever experienced.
Fenlason had gotten word earlier in the day that 1st Platoon was not going to go back to Yusufiyah. They were staying in Mahmudiyah. Almost exactly nine months into year-long deployment, 1st Platoon’s war was effectively over.
Captain Goodwin and First Sergeant Skidis were discussing how and when to tell the platoon about their fate when Fenlason lost it.
“Fuck you,” he told Skidis. “Nobody is telling anybody about what’s going to happen with my platoon except me.” After the memorial, Fenlason gathered all of his men in a tent and delivered the news. “We are not going back home to Yusufiyah,” he told them. “I don’t know why. My guess is, with all the people being investigated, and all the interviews that are going to have to be done, it has been deemed impractical. I don’t know what we are going to do here. That is all I know at the moment.” He left on his mid-tour leave the next morning.
The men were bewildered. Some of them were upset that they were not able to go back and “finish the job,” as Army vernacular puts it, but most were so emotionally and physically exhausted that they had ceased to care what happened to them. But a few realized right away:They were almost certainly going home alive.
A few days after the memorial, the men of 1st Platoon were summoned to the chapel tent for a meeting with Lieutenant Colonel Kunk and some other senior leaders. It was apparently designed as a kind of town hall meeting, to bring everybody up to speed on what was happening to the platoon and why.
He began by telling them, with complete unconcern for the men who spoke up, “You are right to think that there is a lot of suspicion and finger-pointing going on, because Diem and Watt came forward to tell the chain of command that five of your shitbag friends probably raped a girl and killed her whole family. And these guys are cracking, it looks like they are guilty.” But the meeting quickly degenerated into the Kunk Gun unloading on the whole platoon.
“We thought we were going to get the ‘Keep your heads up’ speech,” said one soldier. “We thought we were going to be told, ‘We’re going to keep you here in Mahmudiyah now because we don’t want anything else to happen to you,’ or something like that. Well, it wasn’t that at all. It was an ass chewing. He just crushed us.” It was, said the men of 1st Platoon, the culmination of all of the vilifications and disparagements they had ever received from Kunk. It was a tirade of abuse, scorn, and personal attack. And the message was clear: 1st Platoon was to blame for 1st Platoon’s problems.
“You, 1st Platoon, are fucked up! Fucked up! Every single one of
you!” he yelled as he scowled across the room. “When did I say it was okay to have one vehicle at the Alamo?” he demanded to
know. When someone pointed out the number of times he had
driven past when there was only one truck there, he exploded. In a
torrent of profanities and at top decibel, Kunk told them that their
friends were dead because of their failings; he told them they were
quitters, crybabies, and complainers; and he told them they were a
disgrace and were being kept at Mahmudiyah because they could
not be trusted outside the wire.
Some men tried to protest how little support and how few men
they had, others asked not to be judged by a criminal few in their midst. But the session soon devolved completely into a cacophony
of shouts and accusations. Several men broke down in tears.
Kunk later maintained that he did not remember specifics of what was said that day, but he agreed that it was contentious.
“Being honest and being forthright, it’s tough sometimes but that’s what we have to do in this business.”
After it was all over and Kunk and the senior leaders left, the
chaplain came in and said, “I don’t agree with what just happened
in here, but if you guys need any help, you can come and see me.”
“That was one of the defining emotional moments of the tour for me,” observed Sergeant John Diem. “If you talk to others about it,
they will most likely say, ‘We just got done with the memorial, and
they were telling us how fucked up we were,’ and they will leave it
at that. But nobody will step back and look at it like, ‘Wait a
second. Did they maybe have a point? Were they trying to say
something that was important? That maybe we had become
something monstrous?’ Now, the one thing that was absent was if
Colonel Kunk had gotten up there and said, ‘I fucked up too. I have
allowed you guys to turn into monsters. And I had completely
forsaken you when you needed the support that only I had the
power to provide. But I lacked the character to do it. All of you have failed. Me, and we, as a family, as 1st Battalion, Bravo
Company, 1st Platoon, all the way down the line, have failed. At
some point we failed to have the character to make the right
decisions to make it so that this never happened. Mine was the
crowning failure, but not the only one.’ If, at any point, that had
come out of his mouth, a lot of people would have snapped out of
it, like that. But nobody’s got the grit to say that. Everybody wants
to say, ‘But it wasn’t my fault.’ Including him.”
In the aftermath of 1st Platoon’s back-to-back debacles, in addition to the criminal investigations against Cortez, Barker, Spielman, Yribe, and Howard, there were two AR 15-6 investigations conducted. The first, begun on June 18, centered on “the decisions made and guidance given” about staffing at the AVLB. That investigation was finished in eleven days.
During his interview with the investigating officer, Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Daugherty, First Lieutenant Norton explained his predicament: “I had twenty-three individuals at the JSB, including the medic. With all the IEDs going off on Sportster, I am not sending less than three vehicles back to the FOB. That takes nine guys out of the fight. That leaves guards on guard for six to eight hours. As much as I push up requests, the response is, ‘Just go out and get after it.’ In order to do all those missions, still make trips to the FOB, and switch out the guards, it wasn’t enough bodies. It was pushed up and they acknowledged it, but it was just one of those things you had to do. I am 100 percent sure that I would have done nothing different that day. As a leader, you’ve got to look at what you’ve got and where you can put it.That was the best I could do at the time, sir. I have no regrets of my decisions or anything I did that day.”
Daugherty’s report put the blame squarely on the platoon’s and the company’s shoulders, declaring, “This was an event caused by numerous acts of complacency and a lack of standards at the platoon level.” It recommended that Kunk receive a letter of concern, the lowest and least serious form of admonishment, one
that carries no real punitive weight or long-term negative
implication for an officer’s career (Kunk said he never received such
a letter). It recommended that Goodwin and Norton receive letters
of reprimand (although it specifically recommended that Norton
not be relieved from his position).
For many, this smacked of another instance of pushing the blame
for bad news as far down the chain of command as possible.
“Everybody from the battalion commander on down had been past
that OP [observation post] and knew that it was bad, knew that it was a target of opportunity to get plucked,” said Alpha Company’s
Jared Bordwell. “But during that whole investigation process, it was
all focused on how messed up Bravo Company was. And there was
some fault on their end, but there was some fault on the upper end
too that I don’t think was ever acknowledged.”
Years later, Colonel Ebel remained irritated about this
investigation. He was not interviewed, and he considered the attack
at the Alamo not a lapse of discipline but a well-selected target of
opportunity by a savvy enemy. “It was a very hasty investigation,”
he said. “And it was aimed at holding someone accountable for what essentially I determined was tactical risk. The enemy voted in what was a very volatile and dynamic battlefield.”
The second investigation, begun in early July, focused on the
rape-murders, specifically looking into “how four soldiers
abandoned their post at TCP2 … without being detected” and “the
frequency and measures that the chain of command (officers and
non-commissioned officers) actually checked on and supervised
B/1-502 IN’s tactical sites.” This report was completed by
investigating officer Lieutenant Colonel John McCarthy in just five
days.Because Sergeant First Class Fenlason was on leave at the time
of the investigation, McCarthy never interviewed him and he
interviewed only eight members of 1st Platoon total. The report makes no mention of how long the duty rotation at the TCPs
actually was in March, never mentions that Lieutenant Norton was
on leave at the time of the crime, never mentions that Norton had no part in lengthening the TCP rotation beyond a week, and claims
that “Fenlason was generally commented by soldiers in the platoon
as coming by the TCPs one to two times a week.” The soldiers’
sworn statements do not support this assertion, it is implausible
that they would say such a thing about Fenlason considering he was widely ridiculed for never leaving TCP1, and he himself later
admitted that he never visited either TCP2 or TCP6 during that
entire March rotation.
The second AR 15-6 also put the blame on the company-level
leaders and below. Of the numerous procedural failures, it said, most notable “was the failure to supervise the operations and
enforce standards at the TCPs by the company commander and
platoon leader and platoon sergeant.” This investigation
recommended that Goodwin be removed from command and that
the platoon be busted up. “1LT Norton and SFC Fenlason should be moved to other duties,” it said. “SSG Allen and SSG Payne should be moved to a new unit. 1SG Skidis believes SSG Lauzier has
performed well and considers him the strongest squad leader in the
platoon.”
Norton and Goodwin knew they were marked men. “Shit rolls
downward” is an old Army phrase. They were certain they were
going to get hit, they just didn’t know how badly. When Norton sat
down with one of the investigators, he said that he knew he was a walking bull’s-eye. He said he knew that the investigator was there
to build a case against him. The investigating officer adopted a tone
of bonhomie and straightforwardness with Norton, assuring him,
no, no, no, almost conspiratorially, that that was not so.
“I can throw rocks at some of you or pebbles at all of you,” he
said, and he told Norton that he intended to throw pebbles. The
results of the investigation confirmed Norton’s suspicions. This was
going to be a stoning all along. There was nothing Goodwin and
Norton could do but wait until the brigade and the division decided
on how to respond to the recommendations of the investigators. “I
knew I was going to get fired,” said Goodwin. “It was just a matter
of when.”
* Private Seth Scheller, the other soldier abandoned at TCP2 with Howard on March 12
(but stationed away from him in the Humvee), told investigators he knew nothing
about the crimes, either on the day they happened or any time after. The co-accused
all corroborated this, and he was excluded from all further inquiries.
JULY–SEPTEMBER2006
26
The Fight Goes On
FIRST PLATOON REMAINED at Mahmudiyah, where they would stay for the
remaining two and a half months of the tour, doing not much more than pulling guard on the FOB.Charlie Company, who had
handed over significant portions of their territory to the Iraqi Army,
picked up the JSB from Bravo Company so that Bravo’s 2nd and
3rd Platoons could focus on the traffic control points and Yusufiyah.
to be continued..408s
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