BLACK HEARTS: ONE PLATOON'S DESCENT INTO MADNESS IN
IRAQ'S TRIANGLE OF DEATH
BY JIM FREDERICK
BY JIM FREDERICK
20
The Janabis
ON MARCH 12, Green was pulling predawn guard in the gun truck at
TCP2. He’d been up for eighteen hours. “I’ve had it,” he thought
to himself. This was it. After the morning IED sweep down
Sportster and back, he was hanging out with Barker and Cortez in
the courtyard area of the TCP, where Barker would always hit golf
balls with a club he had scrounged somewhere. Whenever soldiers
found Barker’s balls on patrols and IED sweeps, they’d bring them
back to the TCP.
“When I’m on guard next time,” Green told them, “I’m going to waste a bunch of dudes in a car. And we’ll just say they were
running the TCP.”
“Don’t do that!” Cortez exclaimed. “Don’t do it while I’m here.
I’m supposed to be running this shit. I don’t want to get in trouble.”
Barker agreed. “I’ve got a better idea,” he said. “We’ve all killed
Hadjis, but I’ve been here twice and I still never fucked one of these
bitches.” Cortez’s interest was piqued. They talked about it, the
three of them, semi-seriously but somewhat distractedly as they did
other things throughout the rest of the morning. Sometimes Barker
and Cortez would confer privately, sometimes Green and Barker would, and sometimes all three of them would talk.
Barker had already picked the target. There was a house, not far
from here, that would be perfect, he said. They had been on a
patrol there just a little while ago. There was only one male and
three females in the house during the daytime—a husband, a wife,
and two daughters. One was young, but the other was a teenager or
in her twenties, it was hard to tell with all the clothes the women wore, as they frequently lamented. But Barker thought she was
pretty hot, at least for a Hadji chick. Barker told them that they should go over there right now.
Witnesses were a problem, however. They knew that they
couldn’t leave anyone alive.Barker asked Green if he was willing to
take care of that, even if there were some women and kids
involved. Barker knew Green was always begging to kill Iraqis, if
only someone would say the word.
“You’ll kill them, right?” Barker asked.
“Absolutely,” Green replied. “It don’t make any difference to me,”
Green said. “A Hadji is a Hadji.”
They refined their plan. Barker and Cortez told Green where the
father hid the family’s AK-47. They described the layout of the
house and instructed Green on how to kill the family: Lay everyone
down on their faces, put pillows over their heads, and shoot them
once right in the back of the head real close, they said.
Over several hours and several conferences, they went back and
forth on whether to do it or not.
Invoking the privileges of rank, Cortez asserted, “If we are going
to do this, I am going to go first.” Barker was pushing hard, and
Green was game, but Cortez was waffling. Finally Cortez said, “No,
fuck it, this is crazy. Fuck this. There is no way we are doing this
shit.”
At around noon, with a new wave of boredom taking hold, the
three of them, along with Private First Class Jesse Spielman, sat
down outside with a cardboard box as a table to play Uno. They
drank Iraqi whiskey. Barker had bought five or six 12-ounce cans of
the stuC from an IA at the very reasonable price of $5 per can.
There was some bottled whiskey on hand too. Most of them mixed
the whiskey in an empty one-liter water bottle with some Rip It, a
carbonated energy drink. Green liked his whiskey straight. Over
several hands of cards, they got drunk as they talked about all the
things they usually talked about. Girls, cars, music, sports, how much they hated this place, how much they hated Fenlason, how much they hated Hadj.
During most of the game, Private First Class Bryan Howard had been on his cot, listening to his CD player in another room. Howard was just eighteen, a brand-new private who had arrived in
November. Though he had missed only a little more than a month
of the deployment, he was still considered a new guy. He was
hazed often and not included in a lot of things.
The men, as they played, got drunker and drunker. Cortez later
rated their level of intoxication at a 6 or 7 on a scale of 10. Barker
said he felt about the equivalent of having six to eight beers.
During one of the rounds, Cortez popped up and declared, “Fuck
it, we are going to do this.” He outlined the mission and he divvied
up the duty assignments just like a legit patrol. He and Barker would take the girl, Green would kill the rest of the family,
Spielman would pull guard, and Howard would stay back and man
the radio. He told everyone to grab their rifles and get ready to
head out.
Spielman, who had not heard of the plan until now, did not bat
an eye. “I’d be down with that,” he said. As he packed up the cards
and put them away, Cortez went out to the truck to check on
Private Seth Scheller, who was the only one on guard. Scheller was
also a brand-new private and he had been in the truck all morning.
Cortez returned and said, “If we are going to do this, let’s go
before I change my mind.” He and Barker started changing their
clothes, putting on their black, silk-weight Polartec tops and
bottoms and balaclavas to obscure their faces. They wanted to look
like insurgents, they said, and ordered Spielman and Green to do
the same. Green objected, saying he wasn’t changing. At least take
your patches off, Cortez said, which Green did. Spielman wore only
his ACU bottoms and a T-shirt, while Green kept his whole uniform
on. Cortez insisted they cover their faces, so Green tied a T-shirt
around his head and Spielman put on a pair of sunglasses,
remarking that that was good enough.
Green grabbed a shotgun, and Cortez and Barker snagged M4s.
Barker took Howard’s because it had fewer accessories attached to
it and was therefore lighter. Spielman picked up an M14, a larger, heavier rifle than the M4 frequently used as a longer-range weapon.
Cortez briefed Howard.Cortez told him they knew about an Iraqi
girl who lived nearby and they were going to go out and fuck her.
To Howard, it was the most insane thing he’d ever heard. He did
not believe them, but he also could not believe that they were
actually leaving for somewhere, leaving him and Scheller alone.
Cortez gave him the radio and told him to call if there were any
patrols or Humvees coming through.
The men, armed and disguised, headed out the back of the TCP.
Forty-five-year-old Qassim Hamzah Rashid al-Janabi was not
originally from the Yusufiyah area. The ancestral seat of his branch
of the Janabi tribe was Iskandariyah, fifteen miles to the southeast.
Qassim grew up in a large, poor family comprised mostly of
farmers. He was a gentle and thoughtful child according to his
sister, and in his early adulthood, he was a guard at the Hateen Weapons facility near Iskandariyah. During Saddam’s time,
Iskandariyah was one of the capitals of the Iraqi military-industrial
complex, and Hateen was one of the region’s major employers. When he was in his late twenties, his parents matched him with a
cousin eleven years his junior, Fakhriah Taha Mahsin Moussa alJanabi.
They had a large wedding in 1987, even though the Iran-Iraq
War was still raging and times were tough.
Qassim and Fakhriah had dreams. They wanted to own a house,
have a large family, and earn enough money to provide anything
their children desired, including college educations. After the 1991
Gulf War, the UN sanctions made life even tougher. Qassim, like
everyone, just struggled to make ends meet. In the mid-1990s, the
couple moved to Yusufiyah, to be closer to Fakhriah’s family and to
look for different work. During this period, the couple lived in
several different homes and he held a number of jobs, sometimes as
a farmhand, sometimes as a construction laborer. If their financial
life was difficult, one part of their dream was coming true: they were building a big and handsome family.
A daughter, Abeer, was born in August 1991. She was tall for her
age, somewhat gangly, and plagued with asthma, but Abeer was
nonetheless beautiful, with big doe eyes, a small mouth, and gentle
features. She was a spirited child who was, in the words of her
aunt, “proud of being young.” Soon after Abeer came a son, Muhammad, another son, Ahmed, and another daughter, Hadeel.
In 2000, Qassim came into a job that provided a measure of
stability. A landlord in Baghdad hired him to look after his five-acre
plot of orchards and farmlands where he grew pomegranates, dates,
and grapes, among other crops, in a hamlet near Yusufiyah called
Al-Dhubat. The landlord paid Qassim about $50 a month to look
after the grounds, but he also allowed the Janabis to live in the
small, one-story, one-bedroom furnished farmhouse on the land for
free. Qassim split the harvest with the landlord. Depending on the
season, his half could yield Qassim an extra $30 a month.
Qassim’s family stayed in touch with his relatives in Iskandariyah
and Fakhriah’s relatives in Yusufiyah, visiting on holidays and weekends.They were always poor—so poor that Qassim never paid
off motorcycle he had bought from a relative for $20. The relative was so fond of the couple that he simply forgave the debt. Despite
their poverty, the family was happy, the sons said. Qassim would
take the boys to the market, play soccer with them, and help them
with their homework, while Fakhriah stayed at home, teaching her
daughters to cook the big meals that were her specialty. The
children loved the small orchards, where they would play hide and seek
among the rows of scraggly trees.
When the Americans invaded, people in the neighborhood and
throughout the region were optimistic. The U.S. bombing
campaigns had ruined what little infrastructure there had been
under Saddam, but the people were sure that the Americans would
bring not just peace and democracy but all of the electricity and water they would ever need, as well as new roads and sewer pipes.
But soon, as they waited and waited, they realized, in fact, that was
not going to happen—and that’s when the trouble started. The area
began to fall apart from neglect and violence.
“When the Americans entered the country, they dissolved the military, the police, everything,” said Abu Muhammad, Fakhriah’s
cousin who lived in Mullah Fayyad then. “The borders were open
and chaotic. And terrorists and Al Qaeda were ready to enter the
country.” Strangers started coming to town, beating people up,
killing them. “And the people accepted it, because there was no
other option. Fanaticism and radicalism, things we never had
before, started happening. Even the government was built on
radicalism.”
In the fall of 2005, the people of Yusufiyah started seeing a lot more Americans, but even this brought no relief. It was no exaggeration to say, in many locals’ eyes, that the Americans were as bad as the insurgents. Not only did the locals not feel protected, they felt persecuted. The patrols the Americans ran were brutish. “When they came to search a house, they would come without warning,” remarked Abu Muhammad. “They would throw a Gashbang grenade by the door, storm in, scare the whole family.” The Americans would break things or even steal money and jewelry as they upended the house looking for evidence. They’d leer at the women, point guns at the men, shout at them in English. If the homeowners were lucky, after the soldiers had found nothing, they would get an insincere apology. Qassim’s son Muhammad said whenever the soldiers came to the house, he was terrified. They would point guns straight at his father’s chest and shout at him, even though his father had done nothing, yelling, “You are Ali Baba, you are Ali Baba,” the pidgin Arabic-English phrase for “criminal.”
Whenever the extended family got together, the relatives would talk about how bad things had gotten and what could be done. But what could be done? Nothing. Qassim’s brother-in-law was gunned down in cold blood by the Americans in Iskandariyah in early 2005, said his sister. The U.S. Army, she continued, admitted it made a mistake but never did a thing to make restitution, never did anything to the soldiers involved. Other family members got hauled off to jail for no reason, with no indication when they would ever be coming home. One member of the extended family got picked up just because there was a dead body outside his house, as if murderers dump their victims right outside their own homes. It made no sense.
Fakhriah was particularly worried about Abeer. Now fourteen years old, she was on the verge of womanhood and had started looking beyond the boundaries of her family. She dreamed of getting an education, marrying a well-to-do man, and moving to the city, where she could escape the tedium of country life. But her fragile beauty was attracting a lot of unwanted attention. Soldiers, whenever they saw her, would give her the thumbs-up and say, “Very good, very nice.” Muhammad and Ahmed once watched a soldier run a finger down the terrified Abeer’s cheek.
By early March, the harassment of Abeer was getting so bad that Abu Muhammad told the family to leave Abeer with him. There were more people at his house and it was less secluded. Abeer stayed there only one night, on March 9 or 10. Qassim came the next day to pick her up. Abeer’s parents had decided to bring her back home. It was no problem, Qassim said, Abeer would be fine. Since they had taken the girls out of school awhile ago, Qassim was able to watch them all day. With his protection, Qassim assured Abu Muhammad, they would be fine.
The house was only a few hundred yards to the northwest, across a couple of farm fields and dirt trails. Like the natural pathfinder he was, Barker knew the way over and under every ditch, ravine, and bridge. They hurried there, doing the half-walk, half-jog pace known as the Airborne Shuffle. Barker knew the route to that little cluster of houses so well that he had taken his Gerber hand tool. He knew they would encounter a chain-link fence en route. Halfway through cutting it, his hand got tired, so he passed the tool off to one of the others to finish the job. They passed another fence that had been cut on a previous patrol. They passed three houses, knowing from trips through the area before that one of those was abandoned and one was still being constructed.
Sneaking up on the dingy home, Cortez and Barker broke to the right around a small shack in the front. Spielman and Green broke left. Spielman and Green found the little Hadeel and father Qassim in the driveway. Green grabbed the man and Spielman grabbed the girl and they marched them inside. Barker and Cortez cleared the house, checking the foyer, the hallway, and moving past the kitchen, where Cortez stopped to grab the woman, Fakhriah, and Abeer. Green and Spielman entered the house while Barker continued with the sweep, checking the bathroom and the toilet room, the bedroom and the living room. Then he headed up the stairs to the roof, checked the roof, and went back down the stairs.
The others had corralled the whole family into the bedroom. After they had recovered the family’s AK-47 and Green had confirmed that it was locked and loaded, Barker and Cortez left, yanking Abeer behind them. Spielman pulled the bedroom door shut and then set up guard in the doorway between the foyer and the living room while Cortez shoved Abeer into the living room. Cortez pushed Abeer down on the ground and Barker walked over to her and pinned her outstretched arms down with his knees.
In the bedroom, Green was trying to get the man, woman, and child to lie down on the Goor. They were scared, screaming in Arabic. Green was shouting back, “Get down, get down now!”
Back at the TCP, Howard was trying to get Cortez on the radio, each time saying there was a convoy coming and they needed to come back. They never responded. No Humvees actually came during the ten to fifteen minutes that they were gone, but Howard was panicked. Scheller and he were out there all alone.
In the living room, Cortez pulled Abeer’s tights off. She was crying, screaming in Arabic, trying to struggle free as Barker continued to hold her in place. Cortez was masturbating, trying to get an erection. He started to make thrusting motions. “What the fuck am I doing?” he later recalled thinking at the time. “At the same time, I didn’t care, either. I wanted her to feel the pain of the dead soldiers.”
In the bedroom, Green was losing control of his prisoners. They weren’t getting down on the ground. Terrified, they were yelling, and they weren’t responding to Green’s orders. The woman made a run for the bedroom door. Green shot her once in the back and she fell to the Goor. The man, agitated before, now became unhinged. Green turned the AK on him and pulled the trigger. It jammed. He tried to clear it several times, but it kept sticking. Panicking, as the man started advancing on him, Green switched to his shotgun.
Green couldn’t remember if there was anything in the chamber, so he pumped once and a full shell ejected. Then, Green said, “I shot him the way I had been taught: one in the head and two in the chest.” The first shot blasted the top of the man’s head off. He dropped backward to the floor as buckshot from the following shots continued to riddle his body.
Then Green turned toward the little girl, who was spinning away from him, running for a corner. Green returned to the AK and tried to clear it again, and this time it worked. He raised the rifle and shot Hadeel in the back of the head. She fell to the ground.
“I was hyped up, the adrenaline was really high,” Green remembered later. “But as far as the actions of doing it, it’s something that I had been through a million times, in training for raiding houses. It was just eliminating targets, and those were the targets that they had told me to eliminate. It wasn’t complicated.”
Spielman ran over to the locked bedroom door and pounded on it. Green opened the door. Spielman asked if he was okay and Green said he was. Spielman looked at the carnage in the room and was furious. He spotted the unexpended shotgun round, picked it up, and said, “What the fuck is this?” Green explained that the AK had jammed. Spielman asked Green how many shotgun blasts he had fired and began searching the room for the casings.
As Green was executing the family, Cortez finished raping Abeer and switched positions with Barker. Barker’s penis was only half hard. Despite all her squirming and kicking, Barker forced himself on Abeer and raped her.
Green came out of the bedroom and announced to Barker and Cortez, “They’re all dead. I killed them all.” Barker got up and headed toward the kitchen. He wanted to look outside the window, see if anything was happening outside. As he did that, Green propped the AK-47 he was carrying against the wall, got down between Abeer’s legs, and, as Cortez held her down, Green raped her.
The men were starting to get antsy. Spielman returned from the bedroom with several shells. The group had been there several minutes now.
“Come on, come on, hurry up,” Cortez said, “hurry up and finish.” Green stood up and zipped his fly as Cortez pushed a pillow over her face, still pinning her arms with his knees. Green grabbed the AK, moved Cortez’s knee out of the way, pointed the gun at the pillow, and fired one shot, killing Abeer.
The men were becoming extremely frenzied and agitated now. Spielman lifted Abeer’s dress up around her neck and touched her exposed right breast. Barker brought a kerosene lamp he had found in the kitchen and dumped the contents on Abeer’s splayed legs and torso. Spielman handed a lighter to either Barker or Cortez, who lit the flame. Spielman went into the bedroom and found some blankets to throw on the body to stoke the fire. As the flames engulfing Abeer’s body grew, Green, hoping to blow up the house, opened the valve on the propane tank in the kitchen and told everybody to get out of there.
The four men ran back the way they had come. When they arrived at the TCP, they were winded, nervous, and scared. Howard was relieved to see them. They were out of breath, manic, animated. But as the elation accompanying their safety took hold, they started celebrating. They began talking rapid-fire about how great that was, how well done. Green was jumping up and down on a cot and they all agreed that that was awesome, that was cool.
Barker and Cortez took off their long-underwear outfits and scrubbed down their genitals and bodies with bottled water. They collected their clothes to burn in the pit behind the TCP.Cortez told Spielman and Green to burn their clothes, too, but Green resisted, saying what he was wearing was the only uniform he had. Cortez then handed the AK to Spielman and told him to get rid of it. Spielman walked over to the canal and heaved it in.
Once their adrenaline started to wear off and they began to calm down, as they were standing around the burn pit, Cortez told everyone that they could never speak about what had happened. They agreed that if it ever came up, they would say that they didn’t know anything about it. Green said that if it ever went beyond that, just to blame everything on him. He would say he and he alone did it.
It was getting close to dinnertime. Barker started to grill some chicken wings. Spielman tried to go to sleep and Green relieved Scheller on guard. Green asked Scheller if he had heard any shots or anything suspicious. Scheller said he hadn’t.
Several hours later, as Yribe was walking back to TCP2 after investigating the crime scene, he mulled over what he had seen. The house was ghastly for sure, but it wasn’t the worst thing ever. And yet, there were a couple of things about it that were odd. You don’t see a lot of girls that little murdered in Iraq, he thought to himself. It happens, but it’s not common. Maybe the killers didn’t expect the house to be filled with females? Maybe they were disturbed mid-crime and panicked? And the burning of the other girl’s body, that was strange too.Burning was a huge desecration, so big, Yribe knew, that Hadjis usually saved that insult for the rare American corpse they could get their hands on. And then there was the shotgun shell. Shotguns are not common in Iraq. The shotgun is almost exclusively an American weapon, mostly to shoot open doors and gates. The shell was locally made, green with a brass tip, called a “Baghdad round” because it had “Baghdad” stamped on it. Soldiers sometimes traded them with contractors on the larger FOBs for their novelty value. God knows, contractors can get pretty lawless themselves, but there were no contractors in the area; they were too scared to go down here.
As Yribe approached TCP2 along the canal road to drop off Spielman and Cortez, Green was waiting in the street. He didn’t have any armor on, and he was looking up and down the street expectantly, nervously. He pulled Yribe aside and asked him what was going on, what he saw. Yribe gave him a twenty-second rundown, saying it was pretty ugly, especially with kids and all getting whacked, but other than that, it was just another murder like all the other murders. They had a phrase for it: “Yusufiyah happens.”
“I did that shit,” Green said.
“What?”Yribe said.
“I killed them,” Green repeated. Barker was standing next to Green, but didn’t say a word.
“What?”Yribe asked again. “What are you talking about?”
“That was me. I did it,” Green said. “I killed that family.”
Caught off guard, Yribe dismissed the idea immediately as more of Green’s crazy talk. This is exactly the kind of stupid shit Green would say. And it was insane. How could a scrawny guy just slip away from a TCP by himself in the middle of the day and rape and murder a family? It just didn’t figure. But Green kept insisting, and he knew details. He knew there were two parents and two girls, he knew there was a burned body, and he knew where the bodies were located in the house. Yribe was taken aback, but then he figured it was possible to have listened over the radio net as he was relaying the scene back to company headquarters. Yribe told Green to shut the fuck up, he didn’t have time for his bullshit right now.
The next day, Cortez found his way up to TCP1 on a resupply or some other mission. He went to Yribe. He was in tears. He said he was so shaken up by what he had seen in the house—the littlest girl reminded him of his niece, he said—he needed to go to Combat Stress, but Fenlason wouldn’t let him. Gimme a second, Yribe said. Yribe went to Fenlason and pleaded Cortez’s case. The dude is really messed up, Yribe said, I think he really needs it. Fenlason relented and he sent Yribe to cover TCP2 while Cortez went to Mahmudiyah to see the psychiatrist there.
Yribe was anxious to get to TCP2. He had been thinking all night about what Green had told him, and it was bothering him. Yribe did not share any of it with Captain Goodwin when he briefed him on the crime scene. What was there to tell? That Green was talking shit again? He figured that Cortez must have gotten rid of the green shotgun shell, because it wasn’t in the small packet of evidence they had turned in. Once Yribe got to TCP2, however, he yanked Green’s elbow.
“Now,”Yribe demanded, “tell me everything, every single detail.”
“No,” Green said, “never mind. Forget I said anything. I’m either leaving Iraq in a body bag or as a free man. Just forget it.”
“You tell me what happened,” Yribe insisted, “or I will put you in that body bag myself.”
Green started to talk. Again, Barker was there for the whole conversation, and again, Barker did not say a word. Green started telling Yribe everything he had told him the previous night, about the house, the four victims, details about the arrangement of the bodies, and what they were wearing, but in far greater detail than had ever been passed over the radio, such detail that only someone who had been there could possibly know. As he talked and retraced his steps, Green adamantly insisted that he had slipped away unnoticed while the other men were sleeping and acted alone. Barker volunteered nothing, and Yribe asked him no questions. The thing that really convinced Yribe, though, was not just what Green was saying but how he was saying it. Ordinarily, Green was manic and boastful, either jokey or angry or hysterical. Right now, however, Green was just serious, sober, matter-of-fact.
When Green was finished, Yribe stood up and told him, “I am done with you. You are dead to me. You get yourself out of this Army, or I will get you out myself.”
The events of the second meeting roughly mirrored the first, but that was fine. Everybody understood that no breakthroughs were going to happen overnight. This was the beginning of a long process. The Americans discussed how they wanted help locating insurgents. The Iraqis wanted safety and basic utilities restored. There was a circularity to the proceedings, but in all, Goodwin was enthused. “They voiced their concerns, and we addressed them,” he said. “I said I would try to fix what I could. And I made promises where I could. We were moving forward.”
Before the meeting broke up, however, the group talked about a couple of remaining issues. The men asked Captain Goodwin if he could get his soldiers to stop beating them up. He thought they were talking about arrests, where things maybe got a little rough. But then they clarified. No, they said. Sometimes, American soldiers would hit them and kick them with no provocation whatsoever at traffic checkpoints. Worse, sometimes they would appear at their homes in the middle of the night and pummel them for no reason at all, not even as part of an arrest. Goodwin knew that insurgent groups frequently used Iraqi uniforms, or were, in fact, actual Iraqi policemen whose true loyalties lay with the Mahdi Army, the Badr Corps, or some other militia. But U.S. Army uniforms were harder to come by than Iraqi ones, and anyway, he would have thought Iraqis could tell the difference. He chalked it up to the out-of control rumor mills and conspiracy theories rampant in Iraq.
“You can trust me when I say that they’re not my guys,” he told them.
“But they look like you,” they said.
“Trust me,” he said. “They are not my guys.”
Finally, there was the matter of the murder of a family in the small nearby town of Al-Dhubat a few days ago. Did anyone, the Americans asked, know anything about that? Violence was rife, it was true, but this crime seemed, well, odd, for several reasons. The Iraqi elders said they had no leads, nothing to offer, except to say it was horrible, what inhuman things the insurgents could do. Is it any wonder no one feels safe?
Those opinions conformed to all the data that had been collected so far.The Iraqi Army had begun interviewing neighbors and family members the morning after the murders. Theories about who committed the crime were so conflicting as to be inconclusive. Some said the family was killed by the Iraqi Army. Others said it was the Americans. Some said it was the Badr Corps or the Mahdi Army. Others said it was a tribal feud or a family grudge gone bad. There were no eyewitnesses, or at least none who could offer a consistent story about what they saw. Since the bodies had been removed so quickly (the family was buried in a nearby cemetery the day after, with only stones as grave markers), and since so many soldiers had tramped through the house, there was literally no usable physical evidence beyond a few AK-47 shell casings. A U.S. intelligence officer in the area a few weeks later asked about the incident and got much the same answers from the locals. Although the investigator found the atmosphere tense and unnervingly anti-American, nobody claimed Americans were the perpetrators in any greater numbers than for any of the other theories. Without conclusive evidence, and with no one presenting a compelling rationale that would favor one hypothesis over another, it was instantly a cold case, like literally tens of thousands of murders in Iraq that year. The resources devoted to any further investigative work on the crime plummeted to zero.
On March 19, 1st Squad was doing a cordon-and-knock mission in one of the small villages around Mullah Fayyad and Yribe was surprised to see Fenlason come along for this one. They had searched about fifteen or twenty houses when, at one home, no one was answering the door. After they pounded and pounded, finally someone opened up.
“The Americans want to search the house,” said the interpreter. “Do not be afraid.” As soldiers fanned out, Yribe walked down a hallway. He knocked on the last door. It was locked. While he was jiggling the handle and laying his shoulder into it, getting ready to knock it in, an old man behind the door holding a pistol pulled it open. As Yribe’s momentum carried him, surprised and with his weapon down, into the room, the two men practically bumped into one another, and the old man fired.
Yribe’s rifle was not pointed forward, it was across his chest, barrel down, so his reflexive motion was not to pull the trigger but to stroke the man across the face with the butt of his rifle, knocking him back hard and opening a gash above his eye. Yribe got on top of him and got ready to keep pounding him. Fenlason and 1st Squad leader Chaz Allen were there, though, and threw Yribe off the man, yelling, “Stop!”
Yribe patted himself down to see if he was shot. The old man had missed.Yribe looked down and saw Fenlason giving first aid to the man, helping him up, giving him water.Yribe was enraged.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Yribe asked. “We should kill him.” He had to walk out of the room or he was going to go berserk on both of them. Fenlason called some other soldiers to take the man outside and have him patched up by Doc Sharpness until they decided what to do with him.
“Fuck this! Fuck this! Fuck this!”Yribe yelled.
“Hey, pal, slow down,” said Fenlason. “You need to cool off. What is the problem?”
“The problem is we should kill that motherfucker, not take him in. He fucking tried to shoot me.”
Allen pulled Yribe aside and said, “When you entered that room, where was your weapon? You had it slung down like Mr.Cool Guy. If your weapon had been up at eye level where it should have been, you could have shot him and it would have been a clean shot. But we all know you can’t go back in there and kill him now.” Some of the other guys started teasing Yribe about it.
“Dude, you had a chance,” they said, “and didn’t fucking kill a guy? A guy who actually had a gun! What a fucking loser.”
“No,” quipped Watt, “that’s not his M.O. Yribe only shoots women and children.”
“That’s fucking cold, Watt,”Yribe said.
At the end of the mission, Fenlason called Goodwin and asked him what he wanted to do with the old man. He was seventy-two, he was hard of hearing, and he was scared out of his mind. He shouldn’t have had a pistol, granted, but Fenlason seriously doubted he was an insurgent. He suggested they confiscate his pistol and just let him go. Goodwin agreed.
Yribe did not like that one bit, and he stewed in the Humvee all the way back to TCP1. By the time they arrived, he was fuming. It was cut-and-dried in his mind: This dude tried to kill a U.S. soldier. He is an enemy and should be treated that way. In the central area of TCP1, he began spouting a nonstop tirade about how this whole mission was fucked if they just kept letting go people who tried to do U.S. soldiers harm. Fenlason was a pussy. The whole chain of command was filled with gutless wonders.
This was all well within Fenlason’s earshot, so Fenlason came to the central area of the TCP and said, “You need to cool it, Tony.” Yribe, however, would not let it rest, and since he commanded a lot of sway among the younger men, Fenlason noticed he had a lot of disgruntled soldiers on his hands.
“Shut the fuck up!”Yribe yelled. “Don’t even talk to me!”
“Who do you think you’re talking to here, pal?” Fenlason responded.
“Fuck you. You are a piece of shit. If you come one more inch closer, it’s going to be the worst fucking day you’ve ever had. I want out of your platoon. There is no way I can work for a piece of shit like you.” One of the other sergeants started pushing Yribe out the door, telling him to go get his head together somewhere else.
Their scuffle almost reignited several times, because every time Yribe started to leave, Fenlason would say something like, “You better walk away,” which would only cause Yribe to come scrambling back with: “No. Now I am staying. You have to make me leave, but you’re too much of a pussy.” This went on for several rounds before some other sergeants finally dragged Yribe away for good.
“You are done, Tony,” Fenlason said as they finally hauled him out of there. Staff Sergeant Allen tried to calm Yribe down.
“Hey man, you can’t be blowing up like this,” he cautioned.
“Sergeant Allen, I don’t know you,” Yribe answered. “I haven’t worked with you very long.But I respect you right now.But I’m not going to respect this guy.This guy will get everyone killed.”
“Well, that’s not for you to decide, is it? You’re an E-5, he’s an E7. We work for him.”
“I’m not going to work for him. I can’t work for you either. If you’re going to work for him, I can’t work for you.”
“Roger that, then,” Allen fired back. “Then I don’t need you.”
Fenlason was already moving against Yribe. He could not tolerate that kind of insubordination. He had Allen and Staff Sergeant Payne write up statements that night, and he forwarded them to Goodwin. He thought for certain Yribe would be in for some sort of disciplinary action, or even a psychological evaluation, but after a brief double check of what had happened, Goodwin decided not to take any punitive action against Yribe. Yet after a rupture like that, there was no way Goodwin could leave Yribe in 1st Platoon.
Third Platoon’s Phil Blaisdell said that he’d be willing to take Yribe. He sat Yribe down and told him he had no idea what had just happened between Fenlason and him. Frankly, he didn’t want to know and he didn’t care. “With me,” Blaisdell said, “you start with a fresh slate. Follow orders, do a good job, get along with the rest of the platoon, and I am sure everything will be fine.”
Goodwin’s decision not to punish Yribe rankled Fenlason, but he saw the overall outcome—Yribe left, Fenlason stayed—as a turning point in the dynamic of the platoon. Fenlason had proved that he was not going anywhere, and that his authority could survive a full scale coup attempt by the most powerful representative of the old 1st Platoon mentality. “That was when people began to realize that the immovable object was in fact immovable,” he said. “That was the day there was no doubt that it was my platoon. We were done negotiating.”
Fenlason’s platoon was still very much in trouble, however, and he remained willfully ignorant of the extent of its problems. In order to take Yribe, for example, Blaisdell had to give someone up: Sergeant Daniel Carrick, who was considered one of the best young NCOs in the company, if not the battalion. He was Ranger qualified and had been to all the right schools and had gotten all the right skill badges very quickly. His culture shock upon arriving at 1st Platoon was extreme. Showing up more than six months into their deployment, Carrick never had much chance of being taken seriously by his fire team. Dealing with the aura left by Yribe was his first big challenge. Again and again, he would hear, “Sergeant Yribe wouldn’t do it that way,” or “Sergeant Yribe didn’t care about stuff like that.” He had to tell them that he didn’t give a fuck about how Sergeant Yribe would do it because he was not Yribe, Yribe was not here any longer, and this was how they were going to do it now.But more than that, he was alarmed at how angry they were— at Hadj, at the chain of command, at life. “There were a lot of guys at 1st Platoon who would love to go on patrol, but only because they wanted to fuck something up,” he said. “They wanted to punch somebody in the head or they wanted to shoot up somebody’s car.” In his eyes, a lot of the lower-enlisted were clearly thugs and degenerates back home and they had never been properly instilled with Army discipline in the first place. Here, they were out of control. “After being with them for a month, I was just like, ‘These guys are the biggest group of bitches and psychopaths that I ever could have fallen into,’” as he put it. “They would get booze, and how do you stop this when Joes just do whatever they want? As a leader, what do you do? I didn’t know. I knew about it, and I would tell them to knock that shit off, but I could never find the stuff. So what am I going to do?”
Other team leaders likewise acknowledged that they knew drinking or drug use was going on but that it was difficult to prevent. During the three-week TCP rotation in March, Sergeant John Diem had two soldiers melt down on him on two consecutive days. One day, the first suddenly became uncontrollable and inconsolable. “It was like a hysteria, left and right emotions, for hours,” Diem said. “I told him to lie on his bunk and we’d take care of guard. I didn’t understand it. I had known him for six months, I’d always been able to depend on him.Then, one day, he just went off the bend. I thought it was an extreme combat stress injury. So we got him out of there, somewhere where he could be closely watched. The very next day, we were doing a route clearance, and somebody tells me that one of my guys is asleep in a Humvee. So I go down there, and I fucking get on top of the Humvee, and I’m yelling, ‘Hey dickhead!’ And I’m yelling at him and he’s not moving. He’s breathing, but that’s it. He’s not aware of what’s going on at all. So I give him a couple shots upside the K-pot [helmet] to check for responsiveness. And he’s like, ‘Stop hitting me. Stop hitting me.’ Like almost completely unresponsive, like a catatonia, like a …like a …drug overdose. So I put him to bed. I get another guy out there on guard. I toss these two guys’ shit and we find pill packs of some shit that I’ve never seen before. And those two guys lived with me. I had thought they couldn’t make a move without me knowing. But I came to learn that it was pretty free game. It was something that you could get if you even half-ass wanted it.”
Many soldiers assert that substance abuse was pervasive. “It was fairly common,” said one. “That’s how they began to deal and cope with certain things: All the soldiers who had been killed, the long hours they were pulling. Some of the soldiers used painkillers or drank because it was their only escape. That is what they had to do in their own mind to keep themselves from freaking out. Still, I was extremely upset and mortified by the idea that people would do that—all the times you thought your life was safe while you slept and they were on guard, it wasn’t.”
In Iraq, stray dogs are rampant and a constant nuisance. Most are mangy, disease-ridden, and nasty, and they run in large, wild packs. But some, every once in a while, manage to have good looks, clean coats, and friendly natures. These strays were frequently snatched up by soldiers and turned into pets. Although keeping dogs was always against the rules, many of the on-the-ground commanders recognized the undeniable positive impact they had on morale— several platoon-level leaders had stories of stumbling upon a soldier who had just lost a comrade in battle tucked away in some lonely corner of a base, cradling a dog in his arms, just petting it and sobbing into its fur—so they frequently just looked the other way. There were two dogs that hung around TCP1—an adult and a puppy. But the puppy got sick and started to lose its fur. Fenlason sent the word out: The puppy needs to be put down, and the faster you put it out of its misery, the easier it will be on canine and human alike.
It was the third week of March, 1st Squad was still at TCP1, and Fenlason could hear some guys tromp up the stairs. A few minutes later they came back down. He could hear them talking in excited but hushed tones, catching snippets of some guys giggling and saying, “That was cool,” and others saying, “That shit was fucked up.” Fenlason recognized it as the murmur of soldiers who were up to no good. He came out of his once and demanded, “What the hell is going on here?”
“Nothing, Sergeant,” somebody replied.
“Don’t bullshit me,” Fenlason pushed. “What the hell is going on?”
“Green threw the puppy off the roof,” somebody answered.
“He did what?” Fenlason asked, incredulous, to a wide round of more murmurs and shuffling.
“C’mere, you jackass,” he said to Green.
“What, Sergeant?” Green responded, giggling. “You said to get rid of it.”
“And do you think seeing if it could fly is what I had in mind?” Green found this line funny, but Fenlason wasn’t laughing. Fenlason was so dismayed by Green’s cavalier attitude to his own cruelty, he told Combat Stress about the incident. Green, meanwhile, was trying to comply with Yribe’s order to get out of the Army.Between the puppy incident and Sergeant Yribe pushing him to find a way to get discharged, Green headed back to the Combat Stress tent the next time he was at FOB Mahmudiyah. “I got my duffel bags, all my stuff, and took it with me to Mahmudiyah. I was telling everybody I’m not coming back,” Green said. “And they were like, ‘You’ll be back.’ And I was like, ‘Just watch.’”
Green had not seen Combat Stress since December 21, and a new team had taken over in January, headed by Lieutenant Colonel Elizabeth Bowler, a forensic psychiatrist and reservist who ordinarily worked in the California prison system, and Staff Sergeant Bob Davis, also a reservist. On March 20, Green showed up at the Mahmudiyah Combat Stress once. In the block marked Reason for Visit on his intake form, he wrote: “Anger, dreams, emotions over dead friends.” And in the block marked Who Referred You and Why, he wrote: “Both team leaders Sgt. Diaz and Sgt.Yribe. Don’t know exactly but they just said I needed to go.”
In his initial interview, however, he told Davis, “I was told to see you because I killed a puppy.” Through the course of the session, Green said he didn’t understand what the big deal was. Everybody was killing dogs down there, he just happened to kill his in ten minutes rather than a couple of seconds. It all ends the same way, so what difference did it make? Seeing a red flag, Davis tried to explain why it made a world of difference. In his intake questionnaire, Green described his mood as “good a lot and then it flips to where I don’t care and I want to kill all the Hadj.” Bowler gave Green some Ambien to help him sleep and a course of antidepressant medication—Lexapro—and she kept him on the FOB for more evaluation.
Over the next few days, the Combat Stress team met with Green several more times and concluded that he wasn’t registering the moral implications of the incident. “If he had ever said, ‘Look, I was just trying to impress my buddies by showing my capacity for cruelty,’ we would have let him go back to work,” recounted Davis, “because it would have shown understanding of what the fuss was about.” But the conversations progressed into more-troubling territory. Green said that the puppy could have just as easily been an Iraqi and it still wouldn’t have made a bit of difference.
Bowler told Kunk of her diagnosis of Green: a preexisting antisocial personality disorder, a condition marked by indifference to the suffering of others, habitual lying, and disregard for the safety of self or others. People with this diagnosis are colloquially referred to as sociopaths or psychopaths. The diagnosis of personality disorder carries an immediate expulsion from the Army, and they began the process of removing Green from the service. In fiscal 2005, 1,038 soldiers—or 0.21 percent of those on active duty— were discharged with this classification. Even though Green had committed rape and quadruple homicide just eleven days earlier, Bowler’s mental-health-status evaluation sheet that initiated the personality disorder discharge stated that his current potential for harm to others was “low.” Green’s separation from the Army had begun. He would never return to Bravo Company.
Green disputed the diagnosis. “I don’t have antisocial personality disorder,” he said. “That’s like a sociopath. In regular day-to-day life, I’m not remotely like that. I don’t even want to hurt people’s feelings. If I say my opinion and someone gets offended, that’s one thing, but intentionally to hurt someone? No, that’s ridiculous. I didn’t agree with the diagnosis, but I didn’t care. It was getting me out of the Army.” He remained at Mahmudiyah for a few more weeks for observation and processing. By April 14, he was headed out of Iraq and back to the States, and at Fort Campbell on May 16 he was honorably discharged from the Army and sent back into society.
As Green was undergoing his psychological evaluations at Mahmudiyah, the rest of 1st Platoon had rotated back from the TCPs to Yusufiyah on March 21. Goodwin couldn’t have been more pleased, but he thought three weeks was the maximum that men could stay out there without a break.
“I thought it was a great success,” Goodwin said. “After they came back, I talked to the platoon that evening and told them that they did an outstanding job.” Justin Cross had just returned from a week of Freedom Rest and psychological evaluation in Baghdad, but he was there for the pep talk, which he said was the first time most of the platoon had heard why they had all been out there so long. “Finally, after it was over, we finally found out what Sergeant Fen’s master plan was out there. It just pissed everybody off that he didn’t tell us when we were out there what we were doing.”
Fenlason was pissed too. He wanted 1st Platoon to stay out at the TCPs longer. He was, he felt, just weeks away from making a real breakthrough in Mullah Fayyad. “A third meeting and we could have damn near formed a city government,” he believed.
When Goodwin told him to move off of the TCPs, his response was “That’s bullshit, we’re close.” When Goodwin said his mind was made up, Fenlason replied, “Well, then, you’ll give back Mullah Fayyad.”
For the remaining five months of the deployment, TCP rotations never lasted longer than a week, and Bravo Company never organized another community leaders’ meeting in Mullah Fayyad.
next
APRIL–JUNE 2006
“We Had Turned a Corner”
In the fall of 2005, the people of Yusufiyah started seeing a lot more Americans, but even this brought no relief. It was no exaggeration to say, in many locals’ eyes, that the Americans were as bad as the insurgents. Not only did the locals not feel protected, they felt persecuted. The patrols the Americans ran were brutish. “When they came to search a house, they would come without warning,” remarked Abu Muhammad. “They would throw a Gashbang grenade by the door, storm in, scare the whole family.” The Americans would break things or even steal money and jewelry as they upended the house looking for evidence. They’d leer at the women, point guns at the men, shout at them in English. If the homeowners were lucky, after the soldiers had found nothing, they would get an insincere apology. Qassim’s son Muhammad said whenever the soldiers came to the house, he was terrified. They would point guns straight at his father’s chest and shout at him, even though his father had done nothing, yelling, “You are Ali Baba, you are Ali Baba,” the pidgin Arabic-English phrase for “criminal.”
Whenever the extended family got together, the relatives would talk about how bad things had gotten and what could be done. But what could be done? Nothing. Qassim’s brother-in-law was gunned down in cold blood by the Americans in Iskandariyah in early 2005, said his sister. The U.S. Army, she continued, admitted it made a mistake but never did a thing to make restitution, never did anything to the soldiers involved. Other family members got hauled off to jail for no reason, with no indication when they would ever be coming home. One member of the extended family got picked up just because there was a dead body outside his house, as if murderers dump their victims right outside their own homes. It made no sense.
Fakhriah was particularly worried about Abeer. Now fourteen years old, she was on the verge of womanhood and had started looking beyond the boundaries of her family. She dreamed of getting an education, marrying a well-to-do man, and moving to the city, where she could escape the tedium of country life. But her fragile beauty was attracting a lot of unwanted attention. Soldiers, whenever they saw her, would give her the thumbs-up and say, “Very good, very nice.” Muhammad and Ahmed once watched a soldier run a finger down the terrified Abeer’s cheek.
By early March, the harassment of Abeer was getting so bad that Abu Muhammad told the family to leave Abeer with him. There were more people at his house and it was less secluded. Abeer stayed there only one night, on March 9 or 10. Qassim came the next day to pick her up. Abeer’s parents had decided to bring her back home. It was no problem, Qassim said, Abeer would be fine. Since they had taken the girls out of school awhile ago, Qassim was able to watch them all day. With his protection, Qassim assured Abu Muhammad, they would be fine.
The house was only a few hundred yards to the northwest, across a couple of farm fields and dirt trails. Like the natural pathfinder he was, Barker knew the way over and under every ditch, ravine, and bridge. They hurried there, doing the half-walk, half-jog pace known as the Airborne Shuffle. Barker knew the route to that little cluster of houses so well that he had taken his Gerber hand tool. He knew they would encounter a chain-link fence en route. Halfway through cutting it, his hand got tired, so he passed the tool off to one of the others to finish the job. They passed another fence that had been cut on a previous patrol. They passed three houses, knowing from trips through the area before that one of those was abandoned and one was still being constructed.
Sneaking up on the dingy home, Cortez and Barker broke to the right around a small shack in the front. Spielman and Green broke left. Spielman and Green found the little Hadeel and father Qassim in the driveway. Green grabbed the man and Spielman grabbed the girl and they marched them inside. Barker and Cortez cleared the house, checking the foyer, the hallway, and moving past the kitchen, where Cortez stopped to grab the woman, Fakhriah, and Abeer. Green and Spielman entered the house while Barker continued with the sweep, checking the bathroom and the toilet room, the bedroom and the living room. Then he headed up the stairs to the roof, checked the roof, and went back down the stairs.
The others had corralled the whole family into the bedroom. After they had recovered the family’s AK-47 and Green had confirmed that it was locked and loaded, Barker and Cortez left, yanking Abeer behind them. Spielman pulled the bedroom door shut and then set up guard in the doorway between the foyer and the living room while Cortez shoved Abeer into the living room. Cortez pushed Abeer down on the ground and Barker walked over to her and pinned her outstretched arms down with his knees.
In the bedroom, Green was trying to get the man, woman, and child to lie down on the Goor. They were scared, screaming in Arabic. Green was shouting back, “Get down, get down now!”
Back at the TCP, Howard was trying to get Cortez on the radio, each time saying there was a convoy coming and they needed to come back. They never responded. No Humvees actually came during the ten to fifteen minutes that they were gone, but Howard was panicked. Scheller and he were out there all alone.
In the living room, Cortez pulled Abeer’s tights off. She was crying, screaming in Arabic, trying to struggle free as Barker continued to hold her in place. Cortez was masturbating, trying to get an erection. He started to make thrusting motions. “What the fuck am I doing?” he later recalled thinking at the time. “At the same time, I didn’t care, either. I wanted her to feel the pain of the dead soldiers.”
In the bedroom, Green was losing control of his prisoners. They weren’t getting down on the ground. Terrified, they were yelling, and they weren’t responding to Green’s orders. The woman made a run for the bedroom door. Green shot her once in the back and she fell to the Goor. The man, agitated before, now became unhinged. Green turned the AK on him and pulled the trigger. It jammed. He tried to clear it several times, but it kept sticking. Panicking, as the man started advancing on him, Green switched to his shotgun.
Green couldn’t remember if there was anything in the chamber, so he pumped once and a full shell ejected. Then, Green said, “I shot him the way I had been taught: one in the head and two in the chest.” The first shot blasted the top of the man’s head off. He dropped backward to the floor as buckshot from the following shots continued to riddle his body.
Then Green turned toward the little girl, who was spinning away from him, running for a corner. Green returned to the AK and tried to clear it again, and this time it worked. He raised the rifle and shot Hadeel in the back of the head. She fell to the ground.
“I was hyped up, the adrenaline was really high,” Green remembered later. “But as far as the actions of doing it, it’s something that I had been through a million times, in training for raiding houses. It was just eliminating targets, and those were the targets that they had told me to eliminate. It wasn’t complicated.”
Spielman ran over to the locked bedroom door and pounded on it. Green opened the door. Spielman asked if he was okay and Green said he was. Spielman looked at the carnage in the room and was furious. He spotted the unexpended shotgun round, picked it up, and said, “What the fuck is this?” Green explained that the AK had jammed. Spielman asked Green how many shotgun blasts he had fired and began searching the room for the casings.
As Green was executing the family, Cortez finished raping Abeer and switched positions with Barker. Barker’s penis was only half hard. Despite all her squirming and kicking, Barker forced himself on Abeer and raped her.
Green came out of the bedroom and announced to Barker and Cortez, “They’re all dead. I killed them all.” Barker got up and headed toward the kitchen. He wanted to look outside the window, see if anything was happening outside. As he did that, Green propped the AK-47 he was carrying against the wall, got down between Abeer’s legs, and, as Cortez held her down, Green raped her.
The men were starting to get antsy. Spielman returned from the bedroom with several shells. The group had been there several minutes now.
“Come on, come on, hurry up,” Cortez said, “hurry up and finish.” Green stood up and zipped his fly as Cortez pushed a pillow over her face, still pinning her arms with his knees. Green grabbed the AK, moved Cortez’s knee out of the way, pointed the gun at the pillow, and fired one shot, killing Abeer.
The men were becoming extremely frenzied and agitated now. Spielman lifted Abeer’s dress up around her neck and touched her exposed right breast. Barker brought a kerosene lamp he had found in the kitchen and dumped the contents on Abeer’s splayed legs and torso. Spielman handed a lighter to either Barker or Cortez, who lit the flame. Spielman went into the bedroom and found some blankets to throw on the body to stoke the fire. As the flames engulfing Abeer’s body grew, Green, hoping to blow up the house, opened the valve on the propane tank in the kitchen and told everybody to get out of there.
The four men ran back the way they had come. When they arrived at the TCP, they were winded, nervous, and scared. Howard was relieved to see them. They were out of breath, manic, animated. But as the elation accompanying their safety took hold, they started celebrating. They began talking rapid-fire about how great that was, how well done. Green was jumping up and down on a cot and they all agreed that that was awesome, that was cool.
Barker and Cortez took off their long-underwear outfits and scrubbed down their genitals and bodies with bottled water. They collected their clothes to burn in the pit behind the TCP.Cortez told Spielman and Green to burn their clothes, too, but Green resisted, saying what he was wearing was the only uniform he had. Cortez then handed the AK to Spielman and told him to get rid of it. Spielman walked over to the canal and heaved it in.
Once their adrenaline started to wear off and they began to calm down, as they were standing around the burn pit, Cortez told everyone that they could never speak about what had happened. They agreed that if it ever came up, they would say that they didn’t know anything about it. Green said that if it ever went beyond that, just to blame everything on him. He would say he and he alone did it.
It was getting close to dinnertime. Barker started to grill some chicken wings. Spielman tried to go to sleep and Green relieved Scheller on guard. Green asked Scheller if he had heard any shots or anything suspicious. Scheller said he hadn’t.
Several hours later, as Yribe was walking back to TCP2 after investigating the crime scene, he mulled over what he had seen. The house was ghastly for sure, but it wasn’t the worst thing ever. And yet, there were a couple of things about it that were odd. You don’t see a lot of girls that little murdered in Iraq, he thought to himself. It happens, but it’s not common. Maybe the killers didn’t expect the house to be filled with females? Maybe they were disturbed mid-crime and panicked? And the burning of the other girl’s body, that was strange too.Burning was a huge desecration, so big, Yribe knew, that Hadjis usually saved that insult for the rare American corpse they could get their hands on. And then there was the shotgun shell. Shotguns are not common in Iraq. The shotgun is almost exclusively an American weapon, mostly to shoot open doors and gates. The shell was locally made, green with a brass tip, called a “Baghdad round” because it had “Baghdad” stamped on it. Soldiers sometimes traded them with contractors on the larger FOBs for their novelty value. God knows, contractors can get pretty lawless themselves, but there were no contractors in the area; they were too scared to go down here.
As Yribe approached TCP2 along the canal road to drop off Spielman and Cortez, Green was waiting in the street. He didn’t have any armor on, and he was looking up and down the street expectantly, nervously. He pulled Yribe aside and asked him what was going on, what he saw. Yribe gave him a twenty-second rundown, saying it was pretty ugly, especially with kids and all getting whacked, but other than that, it was just another murder like all the other murders. They had a phrase for it: “Yusufiyah happens.”
“I did that shit,” Green said.
“What?”Yribe said.
“I killed them,” Green repeated. Barker was standing next to Green, but didn’t say a word.
“What?”Yribe asked again. “What are you talking about?”
“That was me. I did it,” Green said. “I killed that family.”
Caught off guard, Yribe dismissed the idea immediately as more of Green’s crazy talk. This is exactly the kind of stupid shit Green would say. And it was insane. How could a scrawny guy just slip away from a TCP by himself in the middle of the day and rape and murder a family? It just didn’t figure. But Green kept insisting, and he knew details. He knew there were two parents and two girls, he knew there was a burned body, and he knew where the bodies were located in the house. Yribe was taken aback, but then he figured it was possible to have listened over the radio net as he was relaying the scene back to company headquarters. Yribe told Green to shut the fuck up, he didn’t have time for his bullshit right now.
The next day, Cortez found his way up to TCP1 on a resupply or some other mission. He went to Yribe. He was in tears. He said he was so shaken up by what he had seen in the house—the littlest girl reminded him of his niece, he said—he needed to go to Combat Stress, but Fenlason wouldn’t let him. Gimme a second, Yribe said. Yribe went to Fenlason and pleaded Cortez’s case. The dude is really messed up, Yribe said, I think he really needs it. Fenlason relented and he sent Yribe to cover TCP2 while Cortez went to Mahmudiyah to see the psychiatrist there.
Yribe was anxious to get to TCP2. He had been thinking all night about what Green had told him, and it was bothering him. Yribe did not share any of it with Captain Goodwin when he briefed him on the crime scene. What was there to tell? That Green was talking shit again? He figured that Cortez must have gotten rid of the green shotgun shell, because it wasn’t in the small packet of evidence they had turned in. Once Yribe got to TCP2, however, he yanked Green’s elbow.
“Now,”Yribe demanded, “tell me everything, every single detail.”
“No,” Green said, “never mind. Forget I said anything. I’m either leaving Iraq in a body bag or as a free man. Just forget it.”
“You tell me what happened,” Yribe insisted, “or I will put you in that body bag myself.”
Green started to talk. Again, Barker was there for the whole conversation, and again, Barker did not say a word. Green started telling Yribe everything he had told him the previous night, about the house, the four victims, details about the arrangement of the bodies, and what they were wearing, but in far greater detail than had ever been passed over the radio, such detail that only someone who had been there could possibly know. As he talked and retraced his steps, Green adamantly insisted that he had slipped away unnoticed while the other men were sleeping and acted alone. Barker volunteered nothing, and Yribe asked him no questions. The thing that really convinced Yribe, though, was not just what Green was saying but how he was saying it. Ordinarily, Green was manic and boastful, either jokey or angry or hysterical. Right now, however, Green was just serious, sober, matter-of-fact.
When Green was finished, Yribe stood up and told him, “I am done with you. You are dead to me. You get yourself out of this Army, or I will get you out myself.”
21
Twenty-one Days
GOODWIN HAD LOW expectations of Fenlason’s meeting in Mullah
Fayyad, but he was delighted to hear how well it had gone. “It was awesome,” Goodwin said. “Grass-roots politics right there.” When the group of Iraqi attendees made good on their promise to
have a second meeting a few weeks later, Goodwin was there.
Fenlason, working with the Civilian Affairs captain on FOB
Mahmudiyah, secured $15,000 worth of medical supplies for the
local doctor. When the men of 1st Platoon later found out about
that, their rage was nearly uncontrollable. They can get 5fteen
grand for a Hadji doctor, they muttered to each other, but they can’t
fill our fucking HESCO baskets?! The events of the second meeting roughly mirrored the first, but that was fine. Everybody understood that no breakthroughs were going to happen overnight. This was the beginning of a long process. The Americans discussed how they wanted help locating insurgents. The Iraqis wanted safety and basic utilities restored. There was a circularity to the proceedings, but in all, Goodwin was enthused. “They voiced their concerns, and we addressed them,” he said. “I said I would try to fix what I could. And I made promises where I could. We were moving forward.”
Before the meeting broke up, however, the group talked about a couple of remaining issues. The men asked Captain Goodwin if he could get his soldiers to stop beating them up. He thought they were talking about arrests, where things maybe got a little rough. But then they clarified. No, they said. Sometimes, American soldiers would hit them and kick them with no provocation whatsoever at traffic checkpoints. Worse, sometimes they would appear at their homes in the middle of the night and pummel them for no reason at all, not even as part of an arrest. Goodwin knew that insurgent groups frequently used Iraqi uniforms, or were, in fact, actual Iraqi policemen whose true loyalties lay with the Mahdi Army, the Badr Corps, or some other militia. But U.S. Army uniforms were harder to come by than Iraqi ones, and anyway, he would have thought Iraqis could tell the difference. He chalked it up to the out-of control rumor mills and conspiracy theories rampant in Iraq.
“You can trust me when I say that they’re not my guys,” he told them.
“But they look like you,” they said.
“Trust me,” he said. “They are not my guys.”
Finally, there was the matter of the murder of a family in the small nearby town of Al-Dhubat a few days ago. Did anyone, the Americans asked, know anything about that? Violence was rife, it was true, but this crime seemed, well, odd, for several reasons. The Iraqi elders said they had no leads, nothing to offer, except to say it was horrible, what inhuman things the insurgents could do. Is it any wonder no one feels safe?
Those opinions conformed to all the data that had been collected so far.The Iraqi Army had begun interviewing neighbors and family members the morning after the murders. Theories about who committed the crime were so conflicting as to be inconclusive. Some said the family was killed by the Iraqi Army. Others said it was the Americans. Some said it was the Badr Corps or the Mahdi Army. Others said it was a tribal feud or a family grudge gone bad. There were no eyewitnesses, or at least none who could offer a consistent story about what they saw. Since the bodies had been removed so quickly (the family was buried in a nearby cemetery the day after, with only stones as grave markers), and since so many soldiers had tramped through the house, there was literally no usable physical evidence beyond a few AK-47 shell casings. A U.S. intelligence officer in the area a few weeks later asked about the incident and got much the same answers from the locals. Although the investigator found the atmosphere tense and unnervingly anti-American, nobody claimed Americans were the perpetrators in any greater numbers than for any of the other theories. Without conclusive evidence, and with no one presenting a compelling rationale that would favor one hypothesis over another, it was instantly a cold case, like literally tens of thousands of murders in Iraq that year. The resources devoted to any further investigative work on the crime plummeted to zero.
♰♰♰♰♰♰♰
Yribe, like most of 1st Platoon, never liked or respected Fenlason.
He was a know-it-all with not nearly enough battlefield experience
to be telling him or anyone else in the platoon what to do, Yribe
felt. And Yribe thought Fenlason was way too soft on Hadj,
preferring to make time with them to score points with the higher ups
than to do anything that might actually benefit his own men. On March 19, 1st Squad was doing a cordon-and-knock mission in one of the small villages around Mullah Fayyad and Yribe was surprised to see Fenlason come along for this one. They had searched about fifteen or twenty houses when, at one home, no one was answering the door. After they pounded and pounded, finally someone opened up.
“The Americans want to search the house,” said the interpreter. “Do not be afraid.” As soldiers fanned out, Yribe walked down a hallway. He knocked on the last door. It was locked. While he was jiggling the handle and laying his shoulder into it, getting ready to knock it in, an old man behind the door holding a pistol pulled it open. As Yribe’s momentum carried him, surprised and with his weapon down, into the room, the two men practically bumped into one another, and the old man fired.
Yribe’s rifle was not pointed forward, it was across his chest, barrel down, so his reflexive motion was not to pull the trigger but to stroke the man across the face with the butt of his rifle, knocking him back hard and opening a gash above his eye. Yribe got on top of him and got ready to keep pounding him. Fenlason and 1st Squad leader Chaz Allen were there, though, and threw Yribe off the man, yelling, “Stop!”
Yribe patted himself down to see if he was shot. The old man had missed.Yribe looked down and saw Fenlason giving first aid to the man, helping him up, giving him water.Yribe was enraged.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Yribe asked. “We should kill him.” He had to walk out of the room or he was going to go berserk on both of them. Fenlason called some other soldiers to take the man outside and have him patched up by Doc Sharpness until they decided what to do with him.
“Fuck this! Fuck this! Fuck this!”Yribe yelled.
“Hey, pal, slow down,” said Fenlason. “You need to cool off. What is the problem?”
“The problem is we should kill that motherfucker, not take him in. He fucking tried to shoot me.”
Allen pulled Yribe aside and said, “When you entered that room, where was your weapon? You had it slung down like Mr.Cool Guy. If your weapon had been up at eye level where it should have been, you could have shot him and it would have been a clean shot. But we all know you can’t go back in there and kill him now.” Some of the other guys started teasing Yribe about it.
“Dude, you had a chance,” they said, “and didn’t fucking kill a guy? A guy who actually had a gun! What a fucking loser.”
“No,” quipped Watt, “that’s not his M.O. Yribe only shoots women and children.”
“That’s fucking cold, Watt,”Yribe said.
At the end of the mission, Fenlason called Goodwin and asked him what he wanted to do with the old man. He was seventy-two, he was hard of hearing, and he was scared out of his mind. He shouldn’t have had a pistol, granted, but Fenlason seriously doubted he was an insurgent. He suggested they confiscate his pistol and just let him go. Goodwin agreed.
Yribe did not like that one bit, and he stewed in the Humvee all the way back to TCP1. By the time they arrived, he was fuming. It was cut-and-dried in his mind: This dude tried to kill a U.S. soldier. He is an enemy and should be treated that way. In the central area of TCP1, he began spouting a nonstop tirade about how this whole mission was fucked if they just kept letting go people who tried to do U.S. soldiers harm. Fenlason was a pussy. The whole chain of command was filled with gutless wonders.
This was all well within Fenlason’s earshot, so Fenlason came to the central area of the TCP and said, “You need to cool it, Tony.” Yribe, however, would not let it rest, and since he commanded a lot of sway among the younger men, Fenlason noticed he had a lot of disgruntled soldiers on his hands.
“Shut the fuck up!”Yribe yelled. “Don’t even talk to me!”
“Who do you think you’re talking to here, pal?” Fenlason responded.
“Fuck you. You are a piece of shit. If you come one more inch closer, it’s going to be the worst fucking day you’ve ever had. I want out of your platoon. There is no way I can work for a piece of shit like you.” One of the other sergeants started pushing Yribe out the door, telling him to go get his head together somewhere else.
Their scuffle almost reignited several times, because every time Yribe started to leave, Fenlason would say something like, “You better walk away,” which would only cause Yribe to come scrambling back with: “No. Now I am staying. You have to make me leave, but you’re too much of a pussy.” This went on for several rounds before some other sergeants finally dragged Yribe away for good.
“You are done, Tony,” Fenlason said as they finally hauled him out of there. Staff Sergeant Allen tried to calm Yribe down.
“Hey man, you can’t be blowing up like this,” he cautioned.
“Sergeant Allen, I don’t know you,” Yribe answered. “I haven’t worked with you very long.But I respect you right now.But I’m not going to respect this guy.This guy will get everyone killed.”
“Well, that’s not for you to decide, is it? You’re an E-5, he’s an E7. We work for him.”
“I’m not going to work for him. I can’t work for you either. If you’re going to work for him, I can’t work for you.”
“Roger that, then,” Allen fired back. “Then I don’t need you.”
Fenlason was already moving against Yribe. He could not tolerate that kind of insubordination. He had Allen and Staff Sergeant Payne write up statements that night, and he forwarded them to Goodwin. He thought for certain Yribe would be in for some sort of disciplinary action, or even a psychological evaluation, but after a brief double check of what had happened, Goodwin decided not to take any punitive action against Yribe. Yet after a rupture like that, there was no way Goodwin could leave Yribe in 1st Platoon.
Third Platoon’s Phil Blaisdell said that he’d be willing to take Yribe. He sat Yribe down and told him he had no idea what had just happened between Fenlason and him. Frankly, he didn’t want to know and he didn’t care. “With me,” Blaisdell said, “you start with a fresh slate. Follow orders, do a good job, get along with the rest of the platoon, and I am sure everything will be fine.”
Goodwin’s decision not to punish Yribe rankled Fenlason, but he saw the overall outcome—Yribe left, Fenlason stayed—as a turning point in the dynamic of the platoon. Fenlason had proved that he was not going anywhere, and that his authority could survive a full scale coup attempt by the most powerful representative of the old 1st Platoon mentality. “That was when people began to realize that the immovable object was in fact immovable,” he said. “That was the day there was no doubt that it was my platoon. We were done negotiating.”
Fenlason’s platoon was still very much in trouble, however, and he remained willfully ignorant of the extent of its problems. In order to take Yribe, for example, Blaisdell had to give someone up: Sergeant Daniel Carrick, who was considered one of the best young NCOs in the company, if not the battalion. He was Ranger qualified and had been to all the right schools and had gotten all the right skill badges very quickly. His culture shock upon arriving at 1st Platoon was extreme. Showing up more than six months into their deployment, Carrick never had much chance of being taken seriously by his fire team. Dealing with the aura left by Yribe was his first big challenge. Again and again, he would hear, “Sergeant Yribe wouldn’t do it that way,” or “Sergeant Yribe didn’t care about stuff like that.” He had to tell them that he didn’t give a fuck about how Sergeant Yribe would do it because he was not Yribe, Yribe was not here any longer, and this was how they were going to do it now.But more than that, he was alarmed at how angry they were— at Hadj, at the chain of command, at life. “There were a lot of guys at 1st Platoon who would love to go on patrol, but only because they wanted to fuck something up,” he said. “They wanted to punch somebody in the head or they wanted to shoot up somebody’s car.” In his eyes, a lot of the lower-enlisted were clearly thugs and degenerates back home and they had never been properly instilled with Army discipline in the first place. Here, they were out of control. “After being with them for a month, I was just like, ‘These guys are the biggest group of bitches and psychopaths that I ever could have fallen into,’” as he put it. “They would get booze, and how do you stop this when Joes just do whatever they want? As a leader, what do you do? I didn’t know. I knew about it, and I would tell them to knock that shit off, but I could never find the stuff. So what am I going to do?”
Other team leaders likewise acknowledged that they knew drinking or drug use was going on but that it was difficult to prevent. During the three-week TCP rotation in March, Sergeant John Diem had two soldiers melt down on him on two consecutive days. One day, the first suddenly became uncontrollable and inconsolable. “It was like a hysteria, left and right emotions, for hours,” Diem said. “I told him to lie on his bunk and we’d take care of guard. I didn’t understand it. I had known him for six months, I’d always been able to depend on him.Then, one day, he just went off the bend. I thought it was an extreme combat stress injury. So we got him out of there, somewhere where he could be closely watched. The very next day, we were doing a route clearance, and somebody tells me that one of my guys is asleep in a Humvee. So I go down there, and I fucking get on top of the Humvee, and I’m yelling, ‘Hey dickhead!’ And I’m yelling at him and he’s not moving. He’s breathing, but that’s it. He’s not aware of what’s going on at all. So I give him a couple shots upside the K-pot [helmet] to check for responsiveness. And he’s like, ‘Stop hitting me. Stop hitting me.’ Like almost completely unresponsive, like a catatonia, like a …like a …drug overdose. So I put him to bed. I get another guy out there on guard. I toss these two guys’ shit and we find pill packs of some shit that I’ve never seen before. And those two guys lived with me. I had thought they couldn’t make a move without me knowing. But I came to learn that it was pretty free game. It was something that you could get if you even half-ass wanted it.”
Many soldiers assert that substance abuse was pervasive. “It was fairly common,” said one. “That’s how they began to deal and cope with certain things: All the soldiers who had been killed, the long hours they were pulling. Some of the soldiers used painkillers or drank because it was their only escape. That is what they had to do in their own mind to keep themselves from freaking out. Still, I was extremely upset and mortified by the idea that people would do that—all the times you thought your life was safe while you slept and they were on guard, it wasn’t.”
In Iraq, stray dogs are rampant and a constant nuisance. Most are mangy, disease-ridden, and nasty, and they run in large, wild packs. But some, every once in a while, manage to have good looks, clean coats, and friendly natures. These strays were frequently snatched up by soldiers and turned into pets. Although keeping dogs was always against the rules, many of the on-the-ground commanders recognized the undeniable positive impact they had on morale— several platoon-level leaders had stories of stumbling upon a soldier who had just lost a comrade in battle tucked away in some lonely corner of a base, cradling a dog in his arms, just petting it and sobbing into its fur—so they frequently just looked the other way. There were two dogs that hung around TCP1—an adult and a puppy. But the puppy got sick and started to lose its fur. Fenlason sent the word out: The puppy needs to be put down, and the faster you put it out of its misery, the easier it will be on canine and human alike.
It was the third week of March, 1st Squad was still at TCP1, and Fenlason could hear some guys tromp up the stairs. A few minutes later they came back down. He could hear them talking in excited but hushed tones, catching snippets of some guys giggling and saying, “That was cool,” and others saying, “That shit was fucked up.” Fenlason recognized it as the murmur of soldiers who were up to no good. He came out of his once and demanded, “What the hell is going on here?”
“Nothing, Sergeant,” somebody replied.
“Don’t bullshit me,” Fenlason pushed. “What the hell is going on?”
“Green threw the puppy off the roof,” somebody answered.
“He did what?” Fenlason asked, incredulous, to a wide round of more murmurs and shuffling.
“C’mere, you jackass,” he said to Green.
“What, Sergeant?” Green responded, giggling. “You said to get rid of it.”
“And do you think seeing if it could fly is what I had in mind?” Green found this line funny, but Fenlason wasn’t laughing. Fenlason was so dismayed by Green’s cavalier attitude to his own cruelty, he told Combat Stress about the incident. Green, meanwhile, was trying to comply with Yribe’s order to get out of the Army.Between the puppy incident and Sergeant Yribe pushing him to find a way to get discharged, Green headed back to the Combat Stress tent the next time he was at FOB Mahmudiyah. “I got my duffel bags, all my stuff, and took it with me to Mahmudiyah. I was telling everybody I’m not coming back,” Green said. “And they were like, ‘You’ll be back.’ And I was like, ‘Just watch.’”
Green had not seen Combat Stress since December 21, and a new team had taken over in January, headed by Lieutenant Colonel Elizabeth Bowler, a forensic psychiatrist and reservist who ordinarily worked in the California prison system, and Staff Sergeant Bob Davis, also a reservist. On March 20, Green showed up at the Mahmudiyah Combat Stress once. In the block marked Reason for Visit on his intake form, he wrote: “Anger, dreams, emotions over dead friends.” And in the block marked Who Referred You and Why, he wrote: “Both team leaders Sgt. Diaz and Sgt.Yribe. Don’t know exactly but they just said I needed to go.”
In his initial interview, however, he told Davis, “I was told to see you because I killed a puppy.” Through the course of the session, Green said he didn’t understand what the big deal was. Everybody was killing dogs down there, he just happened to kill his in ten minutes rather than a couple of seconds. It all ends the same way, so what difference did it make? Seeing a red flag, Davis tried to explain why it made a world of difference. In his intake questionnaire, Green described his mood as “good a lot and then it flips to where I don’t care and I want to kill all the Hadj.” Bowler gave Green some Ambien to help him sleep and a course of antidepressant medication—Lexapro—and she kept him on the FOB for more evaluation.
Over the next few days, the Combat Stress team met with Green several more times and concluded that he wasn’t registering the moral implications of the incident. “If he had ever said, ‘Look, I was just trying to impress my buddies by showing my capacity for cruelty,’ we would have let him go back to work,” recounted Davis, “because it would have shown understanding of what the fuss was about.” But the conversations progressed into more-troubling territory. Green said that the puppy could have just as easily been an Iraqi and it still wouldn’t have made a bit of difference.
Bowler told Kunk of her diagnosis of Green: a preexisting antisocial personality disorder, a condition marked by indifference to the suffering of others, habitual lying, and disregard for the safety of self or others. People with this diagnosis are colloquially referred to as sociopaths or psychopaths. The diagnosis of personality disorder carries an immediate expulsion from the Army, and they began the process of removing Green from the service. In fiscal 2005, 1,038 soldiers—or 0.21 percent of those on active duty— were discharged with this classification. Even though Green had committed rape and quadruple homicide just eleven days earlier, Bowler’s mental-health-status evaluation sheet that initiated the personality disorder discharge stated that his current potential for harm to others was “low.” Green’s separation from the Army had begun. He would never return to Bravo Company.
Green disputed the diagnosis. “I don’t have antisocial personality disorder,” he said. “That’s like a sociopath. In regular day-to-day life, I’m not remotely like that. I don’t even want to hurt people’s feelings. If I say my opinion and someone gets offended, that’s one thing, but intentionally to hurt someone? No, that’s ridiculous. I didn’t agree with the diagnosis, but I didn’t care. It was getting me out of the Army.” He remained at Mahmudiyah for a few more weeks for observation and processing. By April 14, he was headed out of Iraq and back to the States, and at Fort Campbell on May 16 he was honorably discharged from the Army and sent back into society.
As Green was undergoing his psychological evaluations at Mahmudiyah, the rest of 1st Platoon had rotated back from the TCPs to Yusufiyah on March 21. Goodwin couldn’t have been more pleased, but he thought three weeks was the maximum that men could stay out there without a break.
“I thought it was a great success,” Goodwin said. “After they came back, I talked to the platoon that evening and told them that they did an outstanding job.” Justin Cross had just returned from a week of Freedom Rest and psychological evaluation in Baghdad, but he was there for the pep talk, which he said was the first time most of the platoon had heard why they had all been out there so long. “Finally, after it was over, we finally found out what Sergeant Fen’s master plan was out there. It just pissed everybody off that he didn’t tell us when we were out there what we were doing.”
Fenlason was pissed too. He wanted 1st Platoon to stay out at the TCPs longer. He was, he felt, just weeks away from making a real breakthrough in Mullah Fayyad. “A third meeting and we could have damn near formed a city government,” he believed.
When Goodwin told him to move off of the TCPs, his response was “That’s bullshit, we’re close.” When Goodwin said his mind was made up, Fenlason replied, “Well, then, you’ll give back Mullah Fayyad.”
For the remaining five months of the deployment, TCP rotations never lasted longer than a week, and Bravo Company never organized another community leaders’ meeting in Mullah Fayyad.
next
APRIL–JUNE 2006
“We Had Turned a Corner”
No comments:
Post a Comment