BLACK HEARTS: ONE PLATOON'S DESCENT INTO MADNESS IN
IRAQ'S TRIANGLE OF DEATH
BY JIM FREDERICK
BY JIM FREDERICK
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.
Sequestered from the rest of 1st Platoon, Watt spoke frequently with Lieutenant Colonel Elizabeth Bowler, the psychiatrist who
headed up the battalion’s Combat Stress team. After starting
strongly, Bowler’s relationship with Kunk had deteriorated
drastically over the past few months. They clashed often. Kunk was
frequently abusive, disparaging, and disrespectful of her. She was,
through one of the oddities of the Army Reserve world, and by
virtue of her education, the same rank as Kunk, and she frequently
acted like it. Others on the FOB found this grating, notwithstanding
any issues she may have had with Kunk. She had a brusque and
superior manner with some of the company commanders, whom
she technically outranked, and they found that ridiculous.
Upon Bowler’s first meeting with Watt, she became concerned
about his mental health, and his safety. The stress of turning in his
friends was weighing heavily on him. She thought that the risks he
faced from soldiers seeking revenge were real enough, and
debilitating enough to his psyche, that he should be moved to
Baghdad, if not evacuated from the theater entirely.
Kunk, however, called her a drama queen and told her that she was going far beyond her authority to be suggesting something like
that.
“He’s lucky I don’t take him up on charges for making false official statements!”Kunk bellowed, a comment that Bowler did not understand but that disquieted her very much. In the civilian world, as a prison psychiatrist, she worked with skillful liars every day, and she was quite sure Watt was not lying about anything. Kunk later denied that he threatened such a thing. “That’s ludicrous,” he said.
On June 30, Associated Press reporter Ryan Lenz, who was embedded with a different unit north of Baghdad, wrote a brief story about the investigation now unfolding on Mahmudiyah, relying on anonymous sources who had intimate knowledge of the details of the case. He wrote a much fuller account the next day. What would come to be known as (oddly, for its geographic inaccuracy) the Mahmudiyah Massacre, ballooned into an international scandal in a matter of days. Lenz’s stories included accurate, minute details about the crime: one of the bodies being burned by a Flammable liquid, one of the victims being a young child, and one of the accused having already been discharged from the Army. The story infuriated Kunk, who thought the investigation was too premature to appear in the news. Since Lenz had recently been embedded with the 1-502nd, there was rampant speculation that his source was someone on FOB Mahmudiyah. Kunk became convinced that Bowler was the source, something that both she and Lenz have denied.
Back in the States, Green saw the news stories streaming out of Iraq on all the cable news channels about the investigation. While he suspected it was just a matter of time before he was arrested, a part of him actually thought no one would bother with him. “My mind was so fucked up about Iraqis, I wasn’t even really sure I was going to get in trouble. To my mind, it was like, ‘No one’s going to be mad about Iraqis. They’re Iraqis.’” In fact, the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division had notified the FBI about Green on June 27, and they had been working on an affidavit and arrest warrant ever since.
Since his discharge on May 16, Green had wandered around
aimlessly. “I was still kind of tripping from the war. All I was doing was drinking and smoking weed and driving around with a pistol
and an AK in my car. That was it, all day long.” He visited a cousin, who was appalled that he didn’t have any change of clothes, so she
took him shopping and bought him several outfits. He met up with
old friends, who thought he looked haggard and unwell.
Occasionally, when he was drinking, he would tell one or the other
of them that he had seen horrific things, including a rape by
American soldiers. In the morning, he would tell them to forget he
had said anything.
In early July, Green flew to Washington, D.C., to attend David
Babineau’s funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. While in the
area, he stayed with Noah Galloway, the 2nd Platoon soldier who
had lost an arm and a leg during the December 19, 2005, IED
explosion. After the funeral, Green drove to Nebo, North Carolina,
to visit his maternal grandmother. That’s where FBI agents stormed
the property and arrested him. “I wish you had called,” he told the
agents. “I would have turned myself in.”
In the first few days of July, Cortez, Spielman, and Barker were
all moved to Camp Striker, where they would spend the rest of
their deployment. They’d had their weapons confiscated and been
placed under arrest since they first started confessing, but since their
chances of fleeing from Camp Victory were deemed to be
infinitesimal, they were not placed in pretrial confinement.
Although they had to have an armed escort with them at all times,
they were allowed, more or less, to go wherever they wanted on
the base, and since they had no real duties except to meet with the
Army defense lawyers assigned to their case and continue to be
questioned by CID, they could do pretty much as they pleased.They were simply agog at how comfortable life was up at Striker, where
the chow halls had steak and lobster night every Friday, some of the
soldiers were actually pretty girls whom they could at least look at
if not talk to, and many of the palaces converted into barracks or
offices still had functioning swimming pools. What would become of Howard and Yribe was still very much unclear, but Barker,
Cortez, and Spielman knew, one way or another, that this was
almost certainly their final few weeks of anything that resembled
freedom.
First Platoon may have been relegated to pulling guard duty on
FOB Mahmudiyah, but for the rest of Bravo and the rest of the
battalion, the fight was as hard as ever. Bravo’s 2nd and 3rd
Platoons continued to engage and patrol around Yusufiyah, while
Alpha,Charlie, and Delta also tried to keep their sectors running.
In fact, the battle was getting tougher. All throughout Iraq,
sectarian violence was increasing.The summer of 2006 would usher
in some of the fiercest and bloodiest partisan slaughters of the
entire conflict.Baghdad became an open battlefield, with the Mahdi
Army and Sunni groups engaging in gun battles and trading tit-for-tat
car bombings that would kill dozens and wound scores more at
a time. This kind of violence hit the Mahmudiyah area hard. On
July 17, a large group of Sunni insurgents drove into the market in Mahmudiyah and killed over seventy people, mainly Shi’ites, with
grenades and rifles.
And the headlines about the rape and murders committed by
101st Airborne soldiers in the Triangle of Death weren’t making
anyone’s job any easier. The Iraqi government and the locals were
outraged. Kunk claimed that the Mahmudiyah government and the
Iraqi Army were understanding. They were upset, he said, but they
understood that criminals exist and perpetrate crimes in every
society and subculture, including armies, and they did not view the
crime as representative of the unit as a whole.
The locals were harder to convince. Al Qaeda exploited the
outrage for maximum propaganda value. On July 10, the Mujahideen Shura Council issued a five-minute video depicting the mutilated corpses of Tucker and Menchaca. The tape’s audio
includes clips of Osama bin Laden’s and Zarqawi’s speeches, as well
as the message that the video was being presented as “revenge for our sister who was dishonored by a soldier of the same brigade.” The narration stated that the MSC had known that Americans were behind the rape when it happened, but “they kept their anger to themselves and didn’t spread the news, but were determined to avenge their sister’s honor.” This seems unlikely, however, considering that the first message claiming responsibility for the attack in June did not mention revenge or provide any other indication that insurgents were aware that Americans had perpetrated the March 12 massacre. On September 22, the MSC released a longer clip that included an animation of Green’s mugshot (which was widely available on the Internet by this time) being engulfed in flames, footage of Tucker and Menchaca being dragged behind a truck, and a television interview by Al Jazeera with Muhammad Taha al-Janabi, one of the murdered family’s relatives.
The crime had a palpable negative effect on the men on the ground in the Yusufiyah area. “We were having some form of violence pretty much every day of the week during the month of August,” said one platoon leader in the area. “Before that, it wasn’t great, but it hadn’t been that bad. Until the horrible events of June, things were getting better.” Charlie, which absorbed parts of Bravo’s AO, felt renewed bitterness from the locals. “Let me tell you, those were some pissed-off folks,” said Charlie’s executive officer, First Lieutenant Matt Shoaf.
Violence targeted against coalition forces would continue to the very end. Alpha lost a soldier, Private First Class Brian Kubik, during another dramatic firefight in Rushdi Mullah. On August 30, Al Qaeda attacked fourteen Iraqi Army checkpoints simultaneously, though the attacks have to be considered a failure because Al Qaeda didn’t manage to injure a single soldier.
Even though 1st Platoon was not engaged in direct combat operations anymore, they were living a new nightmare all their own. For months many people in the battalion and brigade had considered 1st Platoon to be First Strike’s problem children. Now, however, the men of 1st Platoon were outright pariahs. “That was the worst part, being in Mahmudiyah getting treated like shit by
guys that didn’t see a quarter of the shit we saw,” said one 1st
Platoon soldier. “We were looked at as the enemy after that.” Even
2nd and 3rd Platoons got caught in the perception that all of Bravo was a disgrace. “When the sector got divided up to other
companies, we started hearing, ‘Oh, we’re down here to save Bravo
Company’s ass,’” remarked 2nd Platoon’s leader Paul Fisher. “It was
awful. It was an awful time.”
Kunk moved Norton to a job running parts of FOB Mahmudiyah’s
headquarters over the night shift. Norton was stunned at how bad
the perception was of the two forward-deployed companies. “I
started working up in the TOC,” recalled Norton. “And the
perspective up there of Bravo and Charlie Company was so
negative. I tried to tell people there, ‘These are companies in your
battalion, this is your unit, they are not the devil, you know?’”
Norton’s move to the TOC left Fenlason, upon his return from
leave, to run the platoon pretty much alone. “We were just existing
at that point,” he said. “I talked to the squad leaders every night
about the stuff we needed to get done. We had some equipment
issues. We didn’t have all of our stuff. I didn’t know at that time
that the reason we couldn’t go back to Yusufiyah was CID was going
through everybody’s stuff. It had basically been locked down as a
crime scene. I didn’t know that there was an FBI team that was
going to come in. I didn’t know any of that stuff. We didn’t have a
lot of allies. I just didn’t have a lot of friends at that point. Nobody wanted to be me, that’s for goddamn sure,” added Fenlason. “I wasn’t getting a whole bunch of people coming up telling me, ‘It’s
going to be all right, brother.’ The only person that did that when we were in country was Phil Blaisdell. Blaisdell never, ever left
FOB Mahmudiyah if he was up there without stopping in and
visiting us. Rick Skidis can’t say that. John Goodwin can’t say that.
And I’m grateful for that. The fact that he didn’t abandon us says a
lot about Phil Blaisdell.”
Sergeant Major Edwards hatched a plan to break up the platoon.
He was going to send the squad leaders throughout the brigade, and the soldiers would be divided up among the battalion. But the plan floundered because the other first sergeants from the battalion
vociferously resisted. They didn’t see the point, this late in the
deployment. Plus, nobody wanted to take in any 1st Platoon
soldiers. Just leave them where they are, the first sergeants argued
to Edwards. It is too complicated to try to integrate new blood,
especially given the circumstances and especially this late. Just
leave them alone. Ultimately,Edwards relented.
On FOB Mahmudiyah, HHC commander Shawn Umbrell was in
charge of overseeing the wayward 1st Platoon. His priority, he
explained, was to treat them as normally as possible. “We got some
pretty weird guidance from Battalion. We were told to come up with a training plan, indicating how we were going to re-instill
discipline,” he said. “And my first sergeant told them, ‘The soldiers
don’t need a training program. What the soldiers need are leaders who can show them what right looks like. Until now, they haven’t
had that.’”
That is something Umbrell thought about ever since. “Clearly a
lot of what happened can be attributed to a leadership failure,” he
remarked. “And I’m not talking about just at the platoon level. I’m
talking about platoon, company, battalion. Even I feel in some way
indirectly responsible for what happened out there. I mean, we were all part of the team. We just let it go. And we let it go, and go,
and go. And these things happened. And you can say, ‘It was
Green’s fault. He was a criminal.’ But it goes beyond that. We failed
those guys by letting them be out there like that without a plan.”
27
“This Was Life and Death Stuff”
FRUSTRATED, BORED, ANGRY, and demonized, much of 1st Platoon were at
each other’s throats during this period. While most of the soldiers
agreed that Watt did the right thing, there was talk that a few
were plotting to take violent revenge on him. Watt had been moved
to a different area of the FOB, but anybody who wanted to find him
on Mahmudiyah could. Private First Class Shane Hoeck, one of
Watt’s best friends, tipped him off, telling him to watch his back;
some soldiers were saying some stuff about making him pay.
But that wasn’t the only way platoon unity was fracturing. A
rumor got around that CID thought 1st Platoon was a kind of
Murder, Inc., kill squad, complete with blood rituals and civilian- murder initiation requirements for new soldiers. Word was, CID was trolling now for any suspicious killings that they could turn
into murder probes. Early on, investigators had heard rumors that
there was more to the story about the woman Sergeant Tony Yribe
had shot and killed at TCP3 on November 18, 2005. Some soldiers
alleged that the account of the vehicle refusing to stop that day was
not merely a lie to make an accident sound more plausible, but a
cover for a cold-blooded murder. By July 17, CID had begun
investigating the incident as a potential murder, questioning
everyone who was there multiple times during an inquiry that would drag on for more than two years before being dropped for
lack of evidence.
Paranoia skyrocketed. Lauzier, for one, was not coping well. He
felt a blinding anger and crushing disappointment at what Cortez
and Barker were accused of. TCP2 was 3rd Squad’s mission that
March day; Cortez was his designated proxy while he was on leave.
It was a personal betrayal. But he also felt tremendous guilt. If one of the truest tests of leadership is how your people perform when
you are not around, how could his example be considered anything
other than a failure? It was debilitating, disorienting, dispiriting.
How could they do this? he wondered. How could they think they would get away with it? How could they not consider how it would
impact the rest of the unit? Was this what he led them for? Is this what he taught them? And, as he ground himself up inside, no one was putting his arm around Lauzier’s shoulder, telling him not to
take it so hard. In fact, he was treated like an outcast and
encouraged to think of himself that way by this chain of command
and the ironclad Army traditions that hold that you are directly
responsible for everything your immediate subordinates do or fail
to do. “In a way, the individual soldier is a perfect being,”
remarked Justin Watt. “The soldier is never late, the soldier never makes a mistake—any failure on the soldier’s part is a failure of his
direct supervisor.That’s what Lauzier was dealing with.”
A few weeks earlier, Lauzier had been one of the best-regarded squad leaders in the company. On June 13, for example, Kunk approved a recommendation from Bravo’s leadership that Lauzier receive a Bronze Star for meritorious service throughout the deployment, and he passed that recommendation up to brigade headquarters. On the routing sheet, Kunk wrote, “SSG Lauzier led from the front in the most lethal area of AO Strike. He is a warrior. Outstanding duty performance under the most dangerous environments.” Now he was being treated like a cancer, under suspicion for being the ringleader of some kind of death squad. His interviews with CID were more like interrogations, as if they were trying to pin something major on him too. “This isn’t over, you know,” investigators would say to him at the end of every session. That phrase alone almost gave him a nervous breakdown. He couldn’t bear to hear it.
His men found his obsessive tendencies steering into borderline psychosis. If any of his possessions looked different from the way he had left them, he would freak out, yelling, “Who is the mole, who is working for CID!?” Once, he left a piece of official paperwork with his home address and his parents’ address on his cot for a few minutes. When he returned and the paper was gone, he pulled his 9mm pistol on the handful of 1st Squad and 3rd Squad men standing there.
“I don’t know who is fucking with me,” he said, “but if anything happens to my wife or my family, I will waste everything the motherfucker who did it holds dear and kill him last.” Stunned, the men put their hands up and sputtered that they did not know what he was talking about. Cross approached, trying to calm Lauzier down, but Lauzier cocked his pistol. “Take one more fucking step, Cross, and I will shoot you right here. I’ve got nothing to lose.” Cross backed off and Lauzier lowered his gun. Shortly after that episode, Lauzier decided he was probably long overdue for his 2rst visit to Combat Stress.
Watt was having trouble coping with the strain of being a whistle-blower as well. Despite his ultimate conviction that he had done the right thing, the feeling that he had been a rat was inescapable. And the thought that some of his former friends wanted to kill him was utterly terrifying. Over several consultations with him, Lieutenant Colonel Bowler became worried about Watt’s mental state. She felt Kunk was not taking the psychological burden of what he’d done seriously enough. She likewise thought the whole battalion was taking the threat that Watt felt far too cavalierly. She increasingly implored Watt to protect himself legally. Demand a lawyer, she told him. They are not going to protect you, they may even come after you. Do not talk to Kunk or CID again without a lawyer, she advised.
When Kunk got wind that Watt was acting on that advice, demanding a lawyer before he said another word, he became unhinged.
“Hey, Sergeant Davis,” Kunk asked Bowler’s deputy, “is your doctor a lawyer?”
“No, sir,” Davis responded.
“Well then, what the fuck is she doing handing out legal advice?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Get your commander down here as soon as possible.” When Davis did so,Kunk told the mental health commander, “If you don’t get her off my FOB in the next forty-eight hours, I will have her up on charges like that.” The commander went back to the Combat Stress tent and told Bowler to pack her stuff, she was going back to Baghdad.
Though banished, Bowler over the next several weeks kept in touch with Watt via e-mail, in which she continued to beseech him to get legal help. She also tried to arrange for him to get sent out of theater, something she said should have happened as a matter of course. On Camp Victory, she spoke to another Combat Stress psychiatrist about Watt’s case, who spoke to an attorney, and, again via e-mail, she relayed the attorney’s advice to Watt. She told him to write a sworn statement about the threats he was receiving, and then the battalion would be forced to take action.
On July 25, Watt did just that, writing a sworn statement about a specific incident that had happened the night before. At about 8:00 p.m. the previous evening, Hoeck approached him in the chow hall to say that while several 1st Platoon soldiers were grumbling about Watt’s being a snitch, Private First Class Chris Barnes in particular was talking about making him sorry, whether here in Iraq or once they returned home. Another soldier told Watt that Barnes had been trying to find Watt’s new tent.
When Watt told Sergeant Major Edwards later that night what he’d heard, Edwards replied, “That should be the least of your worries. It’s the people who talk that you don’t need to worry about.” Edwards told Watt, “I’ll take care of it,” but offered no specifics.
Barnes later acknowledged, “I might have said something to someone else. Supposedly I said ‘I’m going to cut his fucking throat.’ I might have said it, being pissed off. But I never actually threatened Watt.” Barnes said he never intended to do Watt any harm, but to this day he doesn’t support Watt’s decision to come forward. “What they did was wrong,” he explained. “But war is fucking hell, and the shit they went through, if they went crazy, whether it’s three minutes or three fucking hours, I can see how it happened to them. I would never have turned them in. They’re your brothers, you know? There has to be some kind of loyalty there that you don’t break no matter what. Let God judge them. If they’re not sorry, they’ll go to hell. And if they are, if they really are, they’re going to have to live with that for the rest of their life.”
Bowler had arranged for two members of a Combat Stress team who were heading down to Mahmudiyah on other business to meet with Watt. After speaking with them about Watt, she was confident they would recommend he be moved up to the Victory Base Complex, away from the battalion. To Watt, it looked like a done deal.
But it was far from a done deal. When the two mental health specialists returned to Camp Victory, Bowler was expecting to see Watt in tow. He was not there. When she asked about him, one of them, a psychiatrist, replied, “He’s doing great, he’s doing fantastic. He is a strong young man with a lot of inner strength.”
Bowler was floored. Whatever may have happened, she was certain that Watt could not have given the impression that he was doing fine. “I was stunned,” she said. “What kind of mental gymnastics did they have to go through as clinicians to come back and tell me that he was doing great, fine, fantastic?” When she started to protest that that was impossible, she was, she said, told to back off; she was overly involved in this matter. Shortly thereafter, she was ordered to have no further communication with Watt. “It was crazy,” she felt. “A whistle-blower in a case like this should have been moved out of theater immediately. All of these friends of these people who are now arrested and charged with rape and murder are running around with guns and he’s the whistle-blower? The way Watt was treated was just unthinkable.”
The same day that Watt met with the psychiatrist, Sergeant Major Edwards informed him that he was being sent down to Lutufiyah, where he would complete his tour as a member of Charlie Company.
After expecting to get the ax immediately, Goodwin was at first confused and then hopeful as July turned into August and no moves were made against him. The end of the deployment in September was looming ever closer. The advance parties of the 10th Mountain Division, which was relieving First Strike, would be showing up in their AO soon for their right-seat, left-seat rides. After expecting every day to be his last, Goodwin had begun to allow himself the fantasy that he might be allowed to finish the deployment in command of Bravo Company. “I was like, wow, maybe I’m going to make it through this,” he said.
That was not to be. On August 15, Kunk came to Yusufiyah for a routine circulation through the AO. But the next day, he came back for an unscheduled visit. The soldiers working the radios at Bravo’s TOC let Goodwin know that Kunk was en route.
“He is coming down to Yusufiyah?” Goodwin asked.
“Roger that, sir.”
“What for?”
“We don’t know, sir. They didn’t say.” Goodwin knew that was it. He walked back to his hooch and started packing up his stuff. When Kunk arrived, they talked privately for half an hour, during which the battalion commander told Goodwin that he was out of a job. “Kunk was probably the most cordial he has ever been to me in his life that day,” Goodwin remembered. “We had a very decent conversation. Almost person to person.”
Sent back up to Striker, Goodwin had time to draft rebuttals to the AR 15-6s and the letter of reprimand he had received. His rebuttals were, Goodwin said, filled with emotion, finding errors and bad leadership at every level in the chain of command.
Ebel called Goodwin into his office. “So this is how you feel?” Ebel asked.
“Sir, that’s exactly how I feel,” Goodwin responded.
“To include Battalion,Brigade, and Division?”
“Sir, I’m not backing down,” Goodwin replied. “I fucked up. Tim fucked up. Squad fucked up. Battalion fucked up. You fucked up. Division fucked up.There were mistakes at every level.”
“It didn’t really help my cause,” Goodwin mused later. Perhaps not, but it probably didn’t hurt, either, since Ebel never thought Goodwin’s conduct warranted harsh judgment. Colonel Ebel, who had always resisted removing Goodwin from command, clarified that even now Goodwin “was not relieved in its purest sense. He had just met his timeline” for one year in charge of a company and was simply being reassigned. “I told him I won’t relieve him because the fact is this guy’s a hero too,” he said. “He had incidents of breaches of discipline I had witnessed in other commands. His just happened to all fall at the wrong time and the wrong place.” Bravo Company’s executive officer, Justin Habash, who had been promoted to captain in July, was given command of the company.
On August 14, First Lieutenant Tim Norton had received a letter of reprimand from General Thurman citing both the AVLB attack and the rape-murders. On August 16, he got a letter from Ebel suspending him from his position. Like Goodwin, he also was never technically “relieved for cause” from his position. He was simply suspended and never reinstated. No punitive or disciplinary action was ever taken against Sergeant First Class Jeff Fenlason. He finished the deployment as 1st Platoon’s platoon sergeant, and he continued in that role after the unit’s return to the States.
On August 21, Captain Bill Dougherty, the commander of Charlie Company, took it upon himself to write a personal e-mail to Rick Watt, Justin Watt’s father. The ongoing rape-murder investigation was making international headlines and Justin’s name had surfaced in the press as the whistle-blower. Dougherty wanted to assure the elder Watt that his son had found a supportive home.
“I have told your son that I am proud of him for coming forward,” Dougherty wrote. “It took moral courage. I am sure that you are proud of him and I am glad to have him in my company. I know that he has been through a lot and I am looking out for him to make sure he is ok…. I can assure you that the Soldiers in Charlie Company all agree that he did the right thing and support him fully.”
Dougherty encouraged Rick Watt to stay in touch regarding his son, and he passed along word that Goodwin and Norton had been relieved of their positions (he did this, he later said, in case Rick Watt was wondering why he had not heard from either man himself). Dougherty assured him that Justin “is not wrapped up in anything concerning them being fired. Right now he is driving on with normal activities of an Infantryman serving in South Baghdad.”
It was the only direct communication that Rick Watt had received (and would ever receive) from anyone in a leadership position in 1st Battalion. Rick Watt was desperately worried about his son’s well-being and had been writing e-mails to commanders and senators, trying to get his son removed from Iraq entirely. Delighted finally to have any validation or expression of support for his son’s actions from someone in a position of authority, Rick Watt passed the letter on to Gregg Zoroya, a reporter from USA Today.
When USA Today ran a story about Justin Watt’s anguish, the paper included a short snippet of Dougherty’s e-mail. Kunk and Ebel were furious. Rather than commend Dougherty for thinking of Watt’s and his family’s well-being (though perhaps recommending he do a better job of ensuring that his correspondents kept his e- mails confidential), Ebel issued Dougherty a letter of reprimand for “the gross error in judgment you displayed recently by sending an e-mail communication to PFC Justin Watt’s father.” Even though Rick Watt prevailed upon Zoroya not to mention anything in print about Goodwin’s situation, Ebel accused Dougherty of betraying his peer, writing, “You acted recklessly and worst of all you did so without any consideration for the professional courtesy and loyalty due your fellow commander and this brigade…. The most profound impact of your poor choice is the attention that your negative comments will draw away from the hard-won accomplishments of the Soldiers of Strike Brigade: secure streets, open shops,flourishing businesses, and hopeful people.” The reprimand was, to Dougherty, as demoralizing as it was nonsensical: There was nothing attributed to Dougherty in the article that could be even remotely construed as negative. It was baffling.
As the deployment wound down, men from all of the FOBs began handing over responsibility to the 10th Mountain Division throughout early September, packing up and preparing for the trip home.
After two weeks of transition, the last remnants of First Strike left Mahmudiyah in mid-September and arrived at Fort Campbell shortly after. For a frontline deployment such as this one, it was common for NCOs or officers in positions of squad leader or above to receive a Bronze Star. First Platoon’s squad leaders—Chaz Allen, Eric Lauzier, and Chris Payne—were not awarded Bronze Stars. First Lieutenant Tim Norton also did not receive a Bronze Star for his 2005-2006 tour of duty, but Sergeant First Class Fenlason did.
Following several weeks of battalion-wide leave, the usual changes in leadership and the routine discharges and transfers of men into and out of the unit commenced, but with this added difference: Bravo Company’s 1st Platoon was being disbanded and would be reconstituted with almost entirely new personnel. Despite all they had been through, it was, for many of the men, one of the saddest, toughest days of the entire experience. Bravo’s new company commander, Justin Habash, choked up as he delivered the news. “Nothing I could say to them would erase their feelings of betrayal or feeling like the black sheep for all that they had been through,” Habash said, “but they were not to blame for the murder or other things that they felt they were carrying black marks for.” He declared the breakup an unnecessary step, opining that 1st Platoon could and should be allowed to continue the rebuilding it had already begun.
That would not come to pass. Most of the men of 1st Platoon soon got scattered throughout Fort Campbell and across the rest of the Army, and the 1-502nd Infantry Regiment began the business of training up for their inevitable return to Iraq. First Strike would deploy again, this time to Baghdad, in the fall of 2007.
“This was life and death stuff,” concluded Sergeant John Diem with respect to the 2005-2006 deployment, of which he and all the men of Bravo are still trying to make sense. “You line up three people in a row, and one of them dies. That’s the kinds of numbers we are talking about. In ways that are important to young men, like what you do, what you stand for, and what you are willing to put on the line, this was the defining moment in a lot of people’s lives. And I don’t think their actions will withstand their own scrutiny. I know mine don’t. But I know what kills soldiers now. I know what kills them. Not in the physical sense, but in the psychological sense; what causes soldiers to fail themselves, and what command can do to set them up for failure or not. It was the feeling of isolation at all levels of command that caused what happened. There’s only one reality.There’s only one thing that is happening, and there’s only so many variables that surround it. It can be figured out and responsibility can be meted out and then problems can be fixed. If people continue to treat this like a mysterious event that came out of nowhere, and we don’t change how we lead soldiers, and we don’t honestly look at what caused this to happen, it’s going to happen again. I mean, this isn’t the only time. It’s just the most notorious time.”
next 426s
EPILOGUE
The Triangle of Death Today and Trials at Home
A few weeks earlier, Lauzier had been one of the best-regarded squad leaders in the company. On June 13, for example, Kunk approved a recommendation from Bravo’s leadership that Lauzier receive a Bronze Star for meritorious service throughout the deployment, and he passed that recommendation up to brigade headquarters. On the routing sheet, Kunk wrote, “SSG Lauzier led from the front in the most lethal area of AO Strike. He is a warrior. Outstanding duty performance under the most dangerous environments.” Now he was being treated like a cancer, under suspicion for being the ringleader of some kind of death squad. His interviews with CID were more like interrogations, as if they were trying to pin something major on him too. “This isn’t over, you know,” investigators would say to him at the end of every session. That phrase alone almost gave him a nervous breakdown. He couldn’t bear to hear it.
His men found his obsessive tendencies steering into borderline psychosis. If any of his possessions looked different from the way he had left them, he would freak out, yelling, “Who is the mole, who is working for CID!?” Once, he left a piece of official paperwork with his home address and his parents’ address on his cot for a few minutes. When he returned and the paper was gone, he pulled his 9mm pistol on the handful of 1st Squad and 3rd Squad men standing there.
“I don’t know who is fucking with me,” he said, “but if anything happens to my wife or my family, I will waste everything the motherfucker who did it holds dear and kill him last.” Stunned, the men put their hands up and sputtered that they did not know what he was talking about. Cross approached, trying to calm Lauzier down, but Lauzier cocked his pistol. “Take one more fucking step, Cross, and I will shoot you right here. I’ve got nothing to lose.” Cross backed off and Lauzier lowered his gun. Shortly after that episode, Lauzier decided he was probably long overdue for his 2rst visit to Combat Stress.
Watt was having trouble coping with the strain of being a whistle-blower as well. Despite his ultimate conviction that he had done the right thing, the feeling that he had been a rat was inescapable. And the thought that some of his former friends wanted to kill him was utterly terrifying. Over several consultations with him, Lieutenant Colonel Bowler became worried about Watt’s mental state. She felt Kunk was not taking the psychological burden of what he’d done seriously enough. She likewise thought the whole battalion was taking the threat that Watt felt far too cavalierly. She increasingly implored Watt to protect himself legally. Demand a lawyer, she told him. They are not going to protect you, they may even come after you. Do not talk to Kunk or CID again without a lawyer, she advised.
When Kunk got wind that Watt was acting on that advice, demanding a lawyer before he said another word, he became unhinged.
“Hey, Sergeant Davis,” Kunk asked Bowler’s deputy, “is your doctor a lawyer?”
“No, sir,” Davis responded.
“Well then, what the fuck is she doing handing out legal advice?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Get your commander down here as soon as possible.” When Davis did so,Kunk told the mental health commander, “If you don’t get her off my FOB in the next forty-eight hours, I will have her up on charges like that.” The commander went back to the Combat Stress tent and told Bowler to pack her stuff, she was going back to Baghdad.
Though banished, Bowler over the next several weeks kept in touch with Watt via e-mail, in which she continued to beseech him to get legal help. She also tried to arrange for him to get sent out of theater, something she said should have happened as a matter of course. On Camp Victory, she spoke to another Combat Stress psychiatrist about Watt’s case, who spoke to an attorney, and, again via e-mail, she relayed the attorney’s advice to Watt. She told him to write a sworn statement about the threats he was receiving, and then the battalion would be forced to take action.
On July 25, Watt did just that, writing a sworn statement about a specific incident that had happened the night before. At about 8:00 p.m. the previous evening, Hoeck approached him in the chow hall to say that while several 1st Platoon soldiers were grumbling about Watt’s being a snitch, Private First Class Chris Barnes in particular was talking about making him sorry, whether here in Iraq or once they returned home. Another soldier told Watt that Barnes had been trying to find Watt’s new tent.
When Watt told Sergeant Major Edwards later that night what he’d heard, Edwards replied, “That should be the least of your worries. It’s the people who talk that you don’t need to worry about.” Edwards told Watt, “I’ll take care of it,” but offered no specifics.
Barnes later acknowledged, “I might have said something to someone else. Supposedly I said ‘I’m going to cut his fucking throat.’ I might have said it, being pissed off. But I never actually threatened Watt.” Barnes said he never intended to do Watt any harm, but to this day he doesn’t support Watt’s decision to come forward. “What they did was wrong,” he explained. “But war is fucking hell, and the shit they went through, if they went crazy, whether it’s three minutes or three fucking hours, I can see how it happened to them. I would never have turned them in. They’re your brothers, you know? There has to be some kind of loyalty there that you don’t break no matter what. Let God judge them. If they’re not sorry, they’ll go to hell. And if they are, if they really are, they’re going to have to live with that for the rest of their life.”
Bowler had arranged for two members of a Combat Stress team who were heading down to Mahmudiyah on other business to meet with Watt. After speaking with them about Watt, she was confident they would recommend he be moved up to the Victory Base Complex, away from the battalion. To Watt, it looked like a done deal.
But it was far from a done deal. When the two mental health specialists returned to Camp Victory, Bowler was expecting to see Watt in tow. He was not there. When she asked about him, one of them, a psychiatrist, replied, “He’s doing great, he’s doing fantastic. He is a strong young man with a lot of inner strength.”
Bowler was floored. Whatever may have happened, she was certain that Watt could not have given the impression that he was doing fine. “I was stunned,” she said. “What kind of mental gymnastics did they have to go through as clinicians to come back and tell me that he was doing great, fine, fantastic?” When she started to protest that that was impossible, she was, she said, told to back off; she was overly involved in this matter. Shortly thereafter, she was ordered to have no further communication with Watt. “It was crazy,” she felt. “A whistle-blower in a case like this should have been moved out of theater immediately. All of these friends of these people who are now arrested and charged with rape and murder are running around with guns and he’s the whistle-blower? The way Watt was treated was just unthinkable.”
The same day that Watt met with the psychiatrist, Sergeant Major Edwards informed him that he was being sent down to Lutufiyah, where he would complete his tour as a member of Charlie Company.
After expecting to get the ax immediately, Goodwin was at first confused and then hopeful as July turned into August and no moves were made against him. The end of the deployment in September was looming ever closer. The advance parties of the 10th Mountain Division, which was relieving First Strike, would be showing up in their AO soon for their right-seat, left-seat rides. After expecting every day to be his last, Goodwin had begun to allow himself the fantasy that he might be allowed to finish the deployment in command of Bravo Company. “I was like, wow, maybe I’m going to make it through this,” he said.
That was not to be. On August 15, Kunk came to Yusufiyah for a routine circulation through the AO. But the next day, he came back for an unscheduled visit. The soldiers working the radios at Bravo’s TOC let Goodwin know that Kunk was en route.
“He is coming down to Yusufiyah?” Goodwin asked.
“Roger that, sir.”
“What for?”
“We don’t know, sir. They didn’t say.” Goodwin knew that was it. He walked back to his hooch and started packing up his stuff. When Kunk arrived, they talked privately for half an hour, during which the battalion commander told Goodwin that he was out of a job. “Kunk was probably the most cordial he has ever been to me in his life that day,” Goodwin remembered. “We had a very decent conversation. Almost person to person.”
Sent back up to Striker, Goodwin had time to draft rebuttals to the AR 15-6s and the letter of reprimand he had received. His rebuttals were, Goodwin said, filled with emotion, finding errors and bad leadership at every level in the chain of command.
Ebel called Goodwin into his office. “So this is how you feel?” Ebel asked.
“Sir, that’s exactly how I feel,” Goodwin responded.
“To include Battalion,Brigade, and Division?”
“Sir, I’m not backing down,” Goodwin replied. “I fucked up. Tim fucked up. Squad fucked up. Battalion fucked up. You fucked up. Division fucked up.There were mistakes at every level.”
“It didn’t really help my cause,” Goodwin mused later. Perhaps not, but it probably didn’t hurt, either, since Ebel never thought Goodwin’s conduct warranted harsh judgment. Colonel Ebel, who had always resisted removing Goodwin from command, clarified that even now Goodwin “was not relieved in its purest sense. He had just met his timeline” for one year in charge of a company and was simply being reassigned. “I told him I won’t relieve him because the fact is this guy’s a hero too,” he said. “He had incidents of breaches of discipline I had witnessed in other commands. His just happened to all fall at the wrong time and the wrong place.” Bravo Company’s executive officer, Justin Habash, who had been promoted to captain in July, was given command of the company.
On August 14, First Lieutenant Tim Norton had received a letter of reprimand from General Thurman citing both the AVLB attack and the rape-murders. On August 16, he got a letter from Ebel suspending him from his position. Like Goodwin, he also was never technically “relieved for cause” from his position. He was simply suspended and never reinstated. No punitive or disciplinary action was ever taken against Sergeant First Class Jeff Fenlason. He finished the deployment as 1st Platoon’s platoon sergeant, and he continued in that role after the unit’s return to the States.
On August 21, Captain Bill Dougherty, the commander of Charlie Company, took it upon himself to write a personal e-mail to Rick Watt, Justin Watt’s father. The ongoing rape-murder investigation was making international headlines and Justin’s name had surfaced in the press as the whistle-blower. Dougherty wanted to assure the elder Watt that his son had found a supportive home.
“I have told your son that I am proud of him for coming forward,” Dougherty wrote. “It took moral courage. I am sure that you are proud of him and I am glad to have him in my company. I know that he has been through a lot and I am looking out for him to make sure he is ok…. I can assure you that the Soldiers in Charlie Company all agree that he did the right thing and support him fully.”
Dougherty encouraged Rick Watt to stay in touch regarding his son, and he passed along word that Goodwin and Norton had been relieved of their positions (he did this, he later said, in case Rick Watt was wondering why he had not heard from either man himself). Dougherty assured him that Justin “is not wrapped up in anything concerning them being fired. Right now he is driving on with normal activities of an Infantryman serving in South Baghdad.”
It was the only direct communication that Rick Watt had received (and would ever receive) from anyone in a leadership position in 1st Battalion. Rick Watt was desperately worried about his son’s well-being and had been writing e-mails to commanders and senators, trying to get his son removed from Iraq entirely. Delighted finally to have any validation or expression of support for his son’s actions from someone in a position of authority, Rick Watt passed the letter on to Gregg Zoroya, a reporter from USA Today.
When USA Today ran a story about Justin Watt’s anguish, the paper included a short snippet of Dougherty’s e-mail. Kunk and Ebel were furious. Rather than commend Dougherty for thinking of Watt’s and his family’s well-being (though perhaps recommending he do a better job of ensuring that his correspondents kept his e- mails confidential), Ebel issued Dougherty a letter of reprimand for “the gross error in judgment you displayed recently by sending an e-mail communication to PFC Justin Watt’s father.” Even though Rick Watt prevailed upon Zoroya not to mention anything in print about Goodwin’s situation, Ebel accused Dougherty of betraying his peer, writing, “You acted recklessly and worst of all you did so without any consideration for the professional courtesy and loyalty due your fellow commander and this brigade…. The most profound impact of your poor choice is the attention that your negative comments will draw away from the hard-won accomplishments of the Soldiers of Strike Brigade: secure streets, open shops,flourishing businesses, and hopeful people.” The reprimand was, to Dougherty, as demoralizing as it was nonsensical: There was nothing attributed to Dougherty in the article that could be even remotely construed as negative. It was baffling.
As the deployment wound down, men from all of the FOBs began handing over responsibility to the 10th Mountain Division throughout early September, packing up and preparing for the trip home.
After two weeks of transition, the last remnants of First Strike left Mahmudiyah in mid-September and arrived at Fort Campbell shortly after. For a frontline deployment such as this one, it was common for NCOs or officers in positions of squad leader or above to receive a Bronze Star. First Platoon’s squad leaders—Chaz Allen, Eric Lauzier, and Chris Payne—were not awarded Bronze Stars. First Lieutenant Tim Norton also did not receive a Bronze Star for his 2005-2006 tour of duty, but Sergeant First Class Fenlason did.
Following several weeks of battalion-wide leave, the usual changes in leadership and the routine discharges and transfers of men into and out of the unit commenced, but with this added difference: Bravo Company’s 1st Platoon was being disbanded and would be reconstituted with almost entirely new personnel. Despite all they had been through, it was, for many of the men, one of the saddest, toughest days of the entire experience. Bravo’s new company commander, Justin Habash, choked up as he delivered the news. “Nothing I could say to them would erase their feelings of betrayal or feeling like the black sheep for all that they had been through,” Habash said, “but they were not to blame for the murder or other things that they felt they were carrying black marks for.” He declared the breakup an unnecessary step, opining that 1st Platoon could and should be allowed to continue the rebuilding it had already begun.
That would not come to pass. Most of the men of 1st Platoon soon got scattered throughout Fort Campbell and across the rest of the Army, and the 1-502nd Infantry Regiment began the business of training up for their inevitable return to Iraq. First Strike would deploy again, this time to Baghdad, in the fall of 2007.
“This was life and death stuff,” concluded Sergeant John Diem with respect to the 2005-2006 deployment, of which he and all the men of Bravo are still trying to make sense. “You line up three people in a row, and one of them dies. That’s the kinds of numbers we are talking about. In ways that are important to young men, like what you do, what you stand for, and what you are willing to put on the line, this was the defining moment in a lot of people’s lives. And I don’t think their actions will withstand their own scrutiny. I know mine don’t. But I know what kills soldiers now. I know what kills them. Not in the physical sense, but in the psychological sense; what causes soldiers to fail themselves, and what command can do to set them up for failure or not. It was the feeling of isolation at all levels of command that caused what happened. There’s only one reality.There’s only one thing that is happening, and there’s only so many variables that surround it. It can be figured out and responsibility can be meted out and then problems can be fixed. If people continue to treat this like a mysterious event that came out of nowhere, and we don’t change how we lead soldiers, and we don’t honestly look at what caused this to happen, it’s going to happen again. I mean, this isn’t the only time. It’s just the most notorious time.”
next 426s
EPILOGUE
The Triangle of Death Today and Trials at Home
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