BLACK HEARTS: ONE PLATOON'S DESCENT INTO MADNESS IN
IRAQ'S TRIANGLE OF DEATH
BY JIM FREDERICK
BY JIM FREDERICK
22
“We Had Turned a Corner”
THE HUNT FOR Zarqawi had begun shortly after the invasion of Iraq, in
the summer of 2003, when the U.S. military joined two special
operations forces units into what was then called Task Force 6-
26. Over the years, the Task Force had gone through several name
changes, becoming Task Force 145, then Task Force 121, and then
Task Force 77. As the war ground on, and with Zarqawi still on the
loose, the unit grew in size and mandate. By early 2006, Task Force
77 had expanded into four subordinate groups with rough
geographic areas of responsibility. The Task Force’s members,
known as “operators,” averaged at least a mission a day, usually
conducted in the small hours of the morning. Task Force Central, which covered the Triangle of Death, was organized around a Delta
Force squadron with Army Rangers in support.
Because of Zarqawi’s feuds with the Anbar sheikhs and other
Sunnis revolted by his hyper violence, his areas of safe operation were narrowing, and the Triangle of Death was one of the last
locales where he could find refuge. With information that he was
spending more time there, the Task Force picked up its rate of
operations in the area accordingly. The Task Force’s methodology
of pursuit was simple yet relentless: capture an enemy safe house,
detain suspects, and exploit the resulting intelligence to set up a
new hit as soon as possible, preferably in just a few hours. The
Task Force described this combination of intelligence and action as
“the unblinking eye.”
Task Force 77’s cooperation with the regular Army units holding
a particular area was cordial but fairly one-way. The operators did
not ask the local commanders’ permission to come in; they usually
just notified them that they were doing so. If a mission went poorly and men or machines were damaged, the local commander would
be expected to have a QRF on standby, but beyond that, the
commanders were expected to stay out of the way.
For the men of Bravo, “the cool guys,” as they called the
operators, were an ever-present but mysterious backdrop to their war. In the spring of 2006, the cool guys started zipping in and out
of 1st Battalion’s AO with increasing regularity. Unless they were
assigned to a rescue mission, most of the men had only a dim
awareness of when or even if TF-77 was in the area, but the
operators always seemed to be popping up.
Zarqawi, Al Qaeda, and other terrorist organizations did not go
dormant in the face of increased pursuit, however. In fact, they
stepped up their activities in the Yusufiyah area and started taking
out some very big American targets. Just before 5:00 p.m. on April
1, a rocket or RPG fired from a white Bongo truck shot down an
Apache attack helicopter about one mile northwest of Rushdi
Mullah. A video posted on Al Qaeda–related Web sites on April 5,
complete with jihadi music and the Mujahideen Shura Council
logo, depicted a gruesome scene. The helicopter was a mound of
twisted rubble, Daming like a lava Dow. Several black-clad fighters, with bandoliers, AKs, and covered faces, swarmed upon the wreckage. Some yelled “Allahu Akbar!” as they pulled out the body
of one of the pilots and dragged him across the ground. It was the first time a U.S. helicopter had been shot down since January, but
for the next few months, Al Qaeda’s Aeisha Brigade, which was
headquartered in the Yusufiyah area and specialized in antiaircraft
operations, would become particularly successful at bringing down
helicopters in the area.
“There were helicopters falling out of the sky a lot, which isn’t
supposed to happen,” said Goodwin. The Aeisha Brigade was well
organized, had outstanding concealment tactics, and possessed more
sophisticated weaponry than average for an insurgent cell. Their
presence was an indication of just how badly Al Qaeda wanted to
hold this piece of land. “They started putting anti aircraft guns out
there,” remarked First Strike’s intelligence officer, Leo Barron. “Rarely did you see many aircraft getting shot down anywhere else.
This was pivotal terrain, and they were willing to expend those
kinds of assets.”
Numerous units from across the division were dispatched to the
Apache crash scene, including Bravo Company’s 2nd Platoon. The
recovery effort would stretch for two days, hampered by muddy
conditions, numerous IEDs, and frequent fire from insurgents. Both
pilots would be pronounced dead, the body of one recovered on
the scene and the other never found. With roads impassable, and
helicopter delays interminable, the salvage effort had all but ground
to a halt until 2nd Platoon, desperate not to spend a second night in
the bush, carried helicopter wreckage on stretchers across muddy
fields to the removal trucks for four hours.
On April 13, against great odds, contrary to the advice of many
doctors, and despite all the unit commanders’ assurances that no
one expected him to return or would think less of him if he didn’t,
Rick Skidis returned to Iraq and resumed his role as Bravo’s first
sergeant. After getting blown up in November, he had battled
through numerous surgeries to his leg and went through months of
therapy to get back and finish the deployment with his beloved
Bravo. Upon returning, Skidis noticed a definite change in his men.
They were battle hardened and battle weary. “I saw a lot of stress,”
he recalled. “I saw a lot of tired guys, a lot of guys that had done a
lot of fighting. They had been honed, they had matured, they had
been working their asses off.” And, he noticed, their work had made noticeable gains. “You could drive down FatBoy. It was okay.
You could drive down Sportster and it was pretty much okay.”
As one First sergeant was returning, however, another was
departing.Throughout the winter and into the spring,Kunk’s battles with Charlie Company commander Captain Bill Dougherty and First
Sergeant Dennis Largent were frequent and heated. They argued
about tactics, priorities, IED sweeps, manning rosters, anything. While both men refused to be intimidated by the Kunk Gun,Largent was particularly emphatic about going back on the attack
against Kunk, accusing him of a bull-headedness that was
tantamount to incompetence because he insisted on policies that
Charlie’s leaders believed were misguided, if not needlessly
dangerous. Through it all, however, Dougherty and Largent were
concerned that their conflicts with the boss were having an adverse
effect on the company, bringing more scrutiny and ultimately more
pain down on their guys.
Others saw this happening as well. “Kunk was starting to have an
impact on that company’s performance and morale, because of the way he would treat the CO and the First sergeant,” commented HHC
commander Shawn Umbrell. Word had gotten out among Charlie
that Kunk had it in for them, that he thought they were jacked up.
Like Bravo, they were detaching themselves from the battalion, but
unlike Bravo, they had more esprit de corps to carry them through,
even if it was borderline mutiny sometimes. Occasionally Charlie
soldiers flew a Cobra flag from their crow’s nests and guard towers
instead of the American flag. “He just hates us because we’re the
People’s Army” became a battle cry among the Cobras. Those
gestures of defiance drove a further wedge between the company
and the battalion. Both Edwards and Kunk could frequently be
heard screaming, “I am sick of this People’s Army bullshit!”
Largent was in a dilemma. He believed that Kunk was a bad
commander and a danger to the soldiers. He had tried reasoning with him, he had tried arguing with him, he had tried ignoring him,
and he had tried defying him. As his disillusionment grew, so did
his bitterness and hatred of Kunk. And that, he realized, was
clouding his judgment and his ability to work in Charlie’s best
interests.
By spring, Charlie’s relationship with the battalion had crumbled
to the point that issues such as Internet access, which on the modern
battle:eld has real morale implications for soldiers, still got blown
out of all proportion. Earlier in the year, during a visit from some
general down in Lutufiyah, Largent mentioned that FOB Lutufiyah
did not have good communications connections. And, as generals do, the general said to his aide, get this unit’s info and get them one
of those Internet trailers down here as soon as possible. E-mail
addresses were exchanged, promises were made. Largent and the men of Charlie were pumped. Largent, dying to bring anything the men could be excited about into their lives, followed up with the
general’s aide like a demon. He inquired frequently: When’s it
coming? When’s it coming? During this period of intense
anticipation, a Charlie convoy that had been up to Mahmudiyah
came back to report: Hey, the battalion has a shiny new Internet
trailer that they are using up at their FOB. The outpouring of
negative emotions from Charlie was intense, and the backlash back
from the battalion was worse.
“Now, is that my Internet?” said Dougherty. “I don’t know. There
are theories that say it was ours because we were tracking the
shipment of it, with air bill numbers or whatever. And guys got
pissed. There was a tidal wave of ‘They’ve got our Internet.’ Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know. But I had a hard time convincing them of
that, and I can’t legislate how my men think. So they got it in their
heads that Battalion stole their Internet. Then Colonel Kunk picked
up on it and he got mad at me because he thought I was spouting
all these terrible, terrible things about Battalion because of it. It just
spun out of control.”
Kunk vehemently denied the accusation that Battalion took first
pick of anything. “We always pushed all resources down to Bravo
Company or Charlie Company first—be it Internet, big-screen TVs,
no matter what it was,” Kunk said. “The Internet and all that had
been provided down there and they were not taking advantage of
it, and still saying that they didn’t have what everyone had at
Mahmudiyah.” HHC commander Umbrell watched the fiasco
escalate, powerless to stop it because the relationship between
Kunk and Edwards and Dougherty and Largent had degraded so
badly. “The relationship had deteriorated to the point where it wouldn’t be improved unless both parties agreed it was going to be
improved,” he noted. “And neither one of them was backing
down.”
Largent was desperate for ideas to remedy the situation. He
appealed, he thought in confidence, to an officer from the brigade whom he had always trusted. He approached him and asked, “Sir, we’ve got these problems. What can I do about it? Can you give me
some insight here?” Largent believed he was betrayed: not long
after, Kunk confronted him about going behind his back. They had
a relationship-ending argument, during which Largent told Kunk he
couldn’t work for him anymore. He contacted Brigade Sergeant
Major Brian Stall, who came down to see Largent in Lutufiyah the
next day.
“I can’t work for this fucking guy anymore,” Largent told Stall. “We are headed down a road to where something bad is going to happen, because he is not listening to anybody. He’s not understanding the tactical situation out here. I’ve done everything I can.This is going to end badly, and there’s nothing more I can do to fix it.” Largent was gone from Lutufiyah and moved to new duties within a week. About Largent’s departure, Kunk said, “He wasn’t getting the job done. The environment was tough. And there’s a thing about enforcing standards and discipline and doing the right things. And it wasn’t getting done. It was time for a change.”
“I can’t work for this fucking guy anymore,” Largent told Stall. “We are headed down a road to where something bad is going to happen, because he is not listening to anybody. He’s not understanding the tactical situation out here. I’ve done everything I can.This is going to end badly, and there’s nothing more I can do to fix it.” Largent was gone from Lutufiyah and moved to new duties within a week. About Largent’s departure, Kunk said, “He wasn’t getting the job done. The environment was tough. And there’s a thing about enforcing standards and discipline and doing the right things. And it wasn’t getting done. It was time for a change.”
The Rushdi Mullah missions had become so frequent that First
Strike decided in mid-April to seize a house permanently and make
it a patrol base. Instead of having different units running through
there at irregular intervals, they now had a fixed location that
Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie would occupy on an alternating basis.
The battalion never really had enough men to hold on to that
patrol base and control of the town completely, but almost
everybody viewed the initiative favorably because the battalion’s
activities were obviously disruptive to a very large insurgent
population. Soldiers even liked the Rushdi Mullah missions. They were dangerous and scary, but they were more like the kind of war
they had trained for. It was real enemy territory where soldiers
could maneuver and fight against enemies who were recognizable
yet defeatable. Give me a gun battle over an IED any day, was every soldier’s preference.
First Platoon became a regular and reliable part of those rotations. For Goodwin, April seemed to be a crucial turning point. He felt that 1st Platoon was, after much pain and resistance, adapting to Fenlason’s way of doing business and coming back on line as a well-performing unit. “We had three platoons at that point,” he said. “It felt good. We were not just sitting there getting punched in the face. We’re actually going out, looking for him, punching him back.”
Around the same time, Task Force 77 was making more dramatic strikes into the area looking for Zarqawi. In February, they had identified certain houses in the Yusufiyah area that insurgent leaders were using. At 2:15 a.m. on April 16, TF-77 operators raided one such safe house. They got into a firefight, during which several suspected insurgents were killed and several more were taken into custody, though Zarqawi was not among them. He was, the Americans later learned, less than half a mile away at the time. Nine days after that, TF-77 mounted another raid on a house several miles from where the Apache had crashed on April 1. They were fired upon as they arrived and killed five men outside the house. With persistent fire coming from within the house, they called in an air strike, which reduced the house to rubble and killed seven more men and one woman. A press release issued by the military said every male found in the rubble was carrying an AK-47 and wearing a weapons vest.
With uncanny timing, a video starring Zarqawi appeared on Islamist Web sites the same day. It was his most public communiqué ever and the first to show his uncovered face. During the thirty-four-minute video, Zarqawi speaks directly into the camera for long stretches, meets with some masked lieutenants, pores over maps, and squeezes oI machine gun bursts in the empty desert. He has a mustache and a beard and wears black fatigues, an ammunition harness, and a black skullcap. He is serious but robust looking. Healthy, even plump. The message is a condemnation of the United States and George W. Bush and an exhortation to the the Iraqi insurgency. There are elements of bitterness—he is very harsh with Sunnis who have begun participating in the political process. They have, he says, “put a rope around the necks of the Sunnis,” and he vows to target anyone who cooperates with the Shi’ite dominated, U.S.-backed government. A debate raged within military and intelligence circles about whether Zarqawi’s dramatic step into the spotlight connoted desperation or bravado.
In mid-April, some Charlie Company soldiers were busted for possession of Valium. The AR 15-6 investigation revealed that they had gotten it when they spent a short time at the TCPs filling in for Bravo. According to the soldiers’ statements, the IAs offered them drugs within their first few hours of arrival. HHC commander Shawn Umbrell, who conducted the investigation, said he mentioned to Goodwin that if it happened to Charlie Company so quickly out there, then it was likely that Bravo’s guys were being exposed to that temptation on a regular basis. Many IAs were known users and abusers of both drugs and alcohol. Fenlason, for his part, said he never entertained the notion that 1st Platoon might be abusing substances at the TCPs. “Do I know I have an alcohol problem or a drug problem?” he asked. “No, I don’t. Did I conceive of it? No, I didn’t. Did the IA have drugs? Yeah. They had all kinds of stupid shit down there.But, no, it never occurred to me.”
That changed in mid-May when a 1st Platoon Bravo soldier, high on Valium, left his guard station at TCP3 in the middle of the night without his weapon and wandered two hundred yards down the road until he got caught in a strand of concertina wire. Sergeant Carrick found him snared out in the street, babbling gibberish, thinking he was still on a patrol that had happened days ago. Carrick sent him up to the medic at TCP1 because he thought he had had a mental breakdown. Doc Sharpness checked him out and concluded, no, he was not having a breakdown. He was high. Fenlason and Goodwin ordered urinalysis tests for the whole platoon and three soldiers failed. platoon and three soldiers failed.
In mid-May, Task Force 77 initiated another round of offensives against Al Qaeda throughout First Strikes AO. Beginning on the evening of the 13th, the United States claimed it killed a high-value target known as Abu Mustafa (who it believed was involved in the April Apache crash) and fifteen other insurgents in four coordinated raids in Lutufiyah. In keeping with TF-77’s “unblinking eye” approach, the operators used information gleaned in those raids to immediately mount another raid beginning the afternoon of the 14th, this time on a safe house not far from the power plant.
As coalition forces approached, they started taking fire. Al Qaeda’s Aeisha Brigade had commandeered several rooftops and from there shot at the helicopters with missiles and machine guns. At 5:30 p.m., they hit one of TF-77’s Little Bird helicopters just east of the power plant. That copter was able to self-recover and take off again. At 5:40 p.m., however, the insurgents hit another Little Bird. This one crashed badly only a few hundred yards northwest of Rushdi Mullah. TF-77 called in a fighter-bomber air strike, which included at least one 500-pound bomb that ripped apart several homes and resulted in dozens of dead and wounded. An MNF-I (Multi-National Force–Iraq) press release said that “approximately 20 terrorists” were killed, but locals insisted that the dead were mostly noncombatants.
Several units from throughout the division were dispatched to assist in the recovery of the Little Bird and its two dead pilots, including, once again, Bravo’s 2nd Platoon. In a repeat of the recovery mission in April, the salvage crews took far longer to get to the site than expected due to the dozens of IEDs and numerous firefights they met along the way. At about 3:00 p.m. on the second day, 2nd Platoon got word that the trucks were only an hour or two away. But by 7:00 p.m., after hitting two more IEDs, they still had not arrived and were not likely to make it there until morning. At that point, 2nd Platoon told the convoy to stay there, they would bring the helicopter to them.They found the house of a farmer with whom they had developed a good relationship. “We told him we’d pay him if he would let us borrow his tractor and trailer,” said 2nd Platoon Sergeant Jeremy Gebhardt. “And he said, ‘No, no, I’ll drive. Let’s go.’ So he drove out there and we loaded up his tractor with helicopter parts.” They finished the job of getting the debris to the wrecker just before 11:00 p.m.
A military spokesperson reiterated to the Washington Post what MNF-I’s press release had said, that there were no civilian casualties related to this battle. This is not true according to 3rd Platoon soldiers who were down at the JS Bridge during this time. Platoon Sergeant Phil Blaisdell recalled, “The fucking bomb hit this one family’s house, killed like five kids. The wife survived, but her arm was broken. They brought all those kids down to the JSB in the back of a Bongo truck, just all fucked up. How do you face a guy that just lost his entire family except one son and his wife?” The man asked Blaisdell if they could cross the bridge, which was ordinarily closed, to bury their children in a cemetery that was on the other side.Blaisdell let them pass.
Fenlason and Norton were happy that 1st Platoon was participating more fully in the company’s battle rhythms, including the multi day rotations out to Rushdi Mullah. To them, it was a sign that they were rehabilitating the platoon. They had a couple of very successful runs up there, doing patrols, gathering intelligence, rolling up bad guys. “It was important, proving that we’re not a jacked-up unit,” said Norton, “proving we could accomplish multiple-day operations miles away from any sort of higher leadership.”
Virtually every aspect of the platoon was on the upswing. Two months after he kicked Yribe out, Fenlason felt like the men were finally getting on board. Soldiers were shaving, wearing their uniforms correctly, cutting their hair. Their attitude was improving, they were letting go of some of their anger and bitterness. “We still couldn’t take much of a setback, but we had turned a corner,” he said. “We were well on the road to recovery.” Others noticed it too. Sergeant Major Edwards told Fenlason several times that he was now running one of the top five platoons in the whole battalion. Even some of the men say that May did seem like the beginning of a new chapter. They had been in country seven months, they were on the back end now, and things were looking up.
In mid-May, 1st Platoon returned to Rushdi Mullah. During what would turn out to be their last trip up there, several elements of 1st Platoon got into a serious firefight. On May 22, most of the platoon was back at the patrol base after a round of morning patrolling. They were relaxing, trying to cool off. They had been taking some sporadic fire coming from behind the house for some time, but it was steadily getting more persistent, moving from harassment probes to more directed fire.
After checking with Norton and Fenlason, Lauzier grabbed Specialist Barker, Sergeant Diaz, and another soldier and they headed out to maneuver on the gunmen. Norton began prepping another fire team to flank from the other direction. Barker was in the lead, with Lauzier behind and Diaz and the other soldier making up a machine gun team in the back. They flanked out right from the house and into a farm field. To their surprise, this field was much lower than the surrounding ones, and their sight was further impaired by stands of elephant grass. But they spotted six or seven insurgents on a berm about 130 yards to the northeast. Diaz and the other soldier had started firing the machine gun and lobbing rifle-fired grenades when another group of insurgents began firing from a field only 50 yards to the west. They were caught in a brutal crossfire. They hit the ground. Pinned down, they were trying to return fire but their weapons started to jam. Both Lauzier’s and Barker’s M4s locked up. Diaz, meanwhile, realized that they hadn’t brought a full load of machine gun ammo. At the same time, the insurgents were refining their fire, walking it closer to them. “The rounds were just cracking all over us,” Lauzier said.
“Hey, I need fucking mortars now!” Lauzier yelled into the radio. The platoon’s radioman requested mortars up to battalion headquarters.
“Denied. We have fast movers in the air,” meaning there were jets in the vicinity, which is a collision risk with large caliber, high flying mortars. But the mortars that travel with each company are small enough that they fly below jets’ minimum altitude. Norton’s fire team had the mortar team, led by Staff Sergeant Matthew Walter, with them.
Mortarmen are frequently maligned for being lazy. They have heavy equipment, and it is standard practice to spread the mortar round loads out to all the men of the platoon, which they complain about. But Walters humped all, or almost all, of his own gear. He would frequently carry the mortar tube and a dozen rounds at a time, which is about 100 pounds. So the guys esteemed him greatly. As Norton was talking to Fenlason about what sort of help they could get Lauzier, Walter asked Norton if he could borrow three men. Walter grabbed the men and ran across the road. Since he could see the enemy’s tracer rounds, and generally the source of fire, he set up his 60mm mortar tube. Norton followed about two minutes later.
“How far do you think that is? Four hundred meters?” Walter asked.
“Six hundred?” Norton said. They decided to average it. The big problem, however, was figuring out where Lauzier’s team was. Since their weapons were jamming, and they were conserving the machine gun ammo, Norton and Walter couldn’t tell, exactly, where their friendlies were. They tried to determine their location over the radio, but descriptions like “in a canal” or “to the right of the enemy fire” were not hugely helpful. At Norton’s command, Lauzier ordered Diaz to fire one rifle-launched grenade at the insurgents, and Norton eyeballed their probable location back from that explosion. With all of those variables, Norton and Walter were fairly confident, but still, this was some risky business and Norton was uneasy. Lauzier, however, was insistent.
“We are getting cut up,” he yelled into the radio. “Our weapons are jammed. We need support now.Repeat, now.”
“All right, we are working on it,” Norton responded. “I want you to lay everything you have on the exact spot where the insurgents are. And then we’re going to drop mortars off of that. As soon as the mortars drop, I want you to break contact and clear the area, because we’re going to sweep left to right toward the direction we think you are. Got me?”
“Roger,” Lauzier responded. A few seconds later, Diaz’s machine gun ripped toward the berm, and Norton and Walter finalized their adjustments. Walter dropped his first round. Away it flew and detonated on impact.
“Aaaaaaaaaarrrrrhhhhh!” Lauzier screamed through the mic. It was a loud and ear-splitting wail. Through the crackle of the radio, it sounded like the scream of a man badly injured. Walter and Norton looked at each other. “Oh my God,” Norton thought. He felt like he was going to puke. “We hit them. I just killed my own men.”
“Lauzier! Lauzier! Are you there? Are you there?” Norton yelled into the mic.
“Aaaaaaaaaarrrrrhhhhh, yyyeeeaaahhh! Fucking bull’s-eye, dude!” Lauzier yelled. “You hit him dead on! Fucking bull’s-eye! Fire for effect!” Norton had never been more relieved in his life. Walter lobbed about four or five shells on and around the spot. Lauzier wanted to follow and make sure the insurgents were dead, but he didn’t have any more working weapons. He told his men to break contact, and they headed back to the house. It is something he regretted years later, that he was not able to personally finish the insurgents off.
After three years of hunting, the U.S. military finally found and killed Zarqawi on June 7, in a farmhouse in a village thirty-five miles north of Baghdad. U.S. and Jordanian intelligence had gotten a number of key breaks in the weeks before. One source helped focus the Zarqawi-hunters on Sheikh Abdul-Rahman, often described as Zarqawi’s spiritual adviser. A small Task Force 77 team had followed Abdul-Rahman to a farmhouse where they were certain he was meeting with Zarqawi. Worried that their prey might get away if they waited to muster enough troops to attempt an assault, they requested air support. Two Air Force F-16s were diverted from another mission, and at 6:21 p.m., one dropped first one, then another 500-pound bomb on the house. Amazingly, Zarqawi survived the initial blasts as Iraqi police and U.S. soldiers swarmed the scene, but he died from injuries within the hour. Everyone else in the house, including Abdul-Rahman and a small but never conclusively speci:ed number of women, children, and other men, died in the blast as well.
Hopes that this alone would deal a decisive blow to the insurgency, or even AQI’s activities, were fleeting. On June 12, the Mujahideen Shura Council released a statement on behalf of Al Qaeda in Iraq saying that a new emir of Al Qaeda in Iraq had been appointed. Attacks resumed unabated, and a month later U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad would tell the BBC that Zarqawi’s death, “in terms of the level of violence …has not had any impact.”
By June, First Strike had decided to shut down the Rushdi Mullah patrol base. It simply did not have enough men to hold the position and turn it into a fully functioning outpost. Constant operations here were sapping combat strength for missions elsewhere, so on June 11, Bravo Company 2nd Platoon was in the process of tearing it down. They were breaking down some of the defensive positions, dismantling the concertina wire serpentines in the front, and preparing for a night mission later on. They would depart the next day.
At 3:00 p.m. on what had been an unusually quiet day until then, the house started taking fire from both the front and the rear. As the IAs on guard started returning fire, the only American on guard, Private First Class Tim Hanley, who was manning a bunker on the front gate, saw an orange thirty-ton dump truck approach from the northeast. When it got to the front drive, it turned right and began barreling toward the gate, plowing through what few strands of concertina wire were left. Hanley started banging away at the truck with his M240B machine gun. He damaged it and may have thrown it off course, but he could not stop it from slamming into the courtyard wall and exploding into a massive fireball. Platoon Sergeant Jeremy Gebhardt, who had walked to the front door to investigate the gunfire, was thrown across the room. Several other soldiers were picked up off of their feet, hurled against walls, and showered with debris, shrapnel, and glass. The blast shook the FOB at Yusu:yah five miles away. Amazingly, although fifteen U.S. soldiers, eight Iraqi soldiers, and one interpreter were injured, no coalition forces were critically hurt.The driver’s body was ripped to pieces.
A medic ran to the front of the building, where Hanley had crawled out of the rubble of his bunker, with a ruptured eardrum and shrapnel in his neck. The truck’s front axle and engine had landed directly on top of his post, which was fortified only with sandbags and plywood overhead covering. Looking at the crushed bunker, it was impossible to figure out how Hanley had survived. Hanley lost most of his hearing, however, and could have returned home, but he elected to stay with the men and finish the deployment.*
* On September 25, 2007, Tim Hanley shot himself to death one year after returning from deployment. His was one of an epidemic of suicides to plague the Army and the 101st Airborne—including eighteen suicides at Fort Campbell through the middle of November 2009. One of those was Juan Hernandez, the soldier who had performed so valorously during Charlie Company’s friendly fire incident on November 4, 2005. He shot himself to death in Coffee County, Tennessee, on October 5, 2009.
Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki was inaugurated on May 28, 2006, and the Shi’ite militias’ carte blanche increased substantially. Sectarian killings continued to escalate throughout the country, with more than a hundred civilians dying every day in June. By early August, the U.S. military would acknowledge that more people in Baghdad were being killed by Shi’ite death squads than by Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgents. Yet throughout the summer, the Iraqi government and top U.S. commanders thwarted attempts by lower level units attempting to rein in the Shi’ite paramilitaries: American forces were not allowed to target the Mahdi Army without direct approval from either Maliki or General George Casey.
On June 14, 2006, nearly 50,000 Iraqi and American troops launched Operation Forward Together, an initiative designed to bolster security in the capital by increasing street patrols, beefing up checkpoints, and enforcing curfews. It was a failure. Two of the promised Iraqi brigades never showed up. After a day or two of calm, violence erupted in the capital again on June 17, when seven separate attacks—a suicide bombing, a mortar attack, three car bombings, a bus bombing, and a pushcart bombing—occurred in Baghdad, resulting in at least 36 dead and 75 wounded. And the attacks kept coming. Fifty gunmen wearing police uniforms kidnapped scores of factory workers on June 21. By July, Baghdad was averaging 34 attacks a day, compared with 24 a day in June. Despite the spike in violence, the war’s planners insisted that the answer was fewer rather than more troops. On June 21, General George Casey briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff and recommended reducing the 15 combat brigades currently stationed in Iraq to 10 brigades within six months. Six months after that, he proposed whittling that number down to 7 or 8. By December 2007, according to his timeline, only 5 or 6 brigades would remain. He similarly proposed cutting the number of bases from 69 to 11. With the violence still escalating, U.S. and Iraqi forces initiated Operation Forward Together II in August, using more troops shipped in from Anbar. One government report described this as “giving up ground to one enemy to fight another.” That operation also failed.
Fenlason was concerned about how shorthanded the company was, and he told Major Salome about it. “When you took out the people that were on leave, the people that were going on leave, and then you factored the passes into it, the company was going to be short the equivalent of a platoon for three weeks,” Fenlason said. With attrition, scheduled leaves, and soldiers up at Striker for medical or other reasons, 1st Platoon had twenty-two of its assigned thirty-four men on the ground. In addition to security at the base itself, the AVLB, and TCP4, their missions included morning IED sweeps, at least two patrols a day to sensitive nearby facilities, resupply runs back to Yusufiyah, daytime neighborhood patrols in Quarguli Village, night time overwatch's in that same village, and cordon and knock searches for bad guys as the case came up.
Heading into the evening of the 16th, Private First Class Thomas Tucker, Specialist David Babineau, and Private First Class Kristian Menchaca were guarding the AVLB. Menchaca hadn’t even been on the regular duty roster for that shift, but he had volunteered so another soldier who was celebrating his birthday could enjoy it in the relative comfort of the JSB. The threesome had been on duty, in a single Humvee, for almost twenty-four hours. Their team leader, Sergeant Daniel Carrick, was on one of those four-day Freedom Rest passes and Staff Sergeant Chaz Allen, their squad leader, had told them to be extra alert, because when Cortez and two others were out there the night before, they had taken some small-arms fire and RPG fire.
Allen had nine men to cover the two positions and they had been doing it for days. It was a ridiculous staffing situation, but it was standard practice for this deployment. So at any given time, Allen had three men on the AVLB, three men on TCP4, and three in reserve.
Just before 8:00 p.m., he and two soldiers at TCP4 were about to relieve the soldiers on guard at TCP4. He asked somebody to do a radio check with the Alamo. A minute or so went by.
“Any luck?” he inquired. Negative, the soldier said. “Gimme the mic,” he said. Just then, a torrent of gunfire opened up. Allen tried to raise them on the radio. Cortez climbed on the roof of the TCP with an M14. With that guns scope, it was possible to see the position. He yelled down that he didn’t see anyone.
Soldiers stationed at the JSB heard the barrage too. Lauzier figured it must be the IAs shooting at something from their location on the JSB itself. The birthday soldier had been planning on bringing steaks to the men at the AVLB for dinner as a thank-you, and he had taken their order over the radio a couple of minutes ago. He tried hailing them now, but there was no response. Norton ordered Lauzier, Barker, Hernandez, Sharpness, and couple of others to rush a convoy out there.
At TCP4, the same thing was happening. Cortez and a couple others jumped into a Humvee. It wouldn’t start. The battery was dead. They piled back out and into the M113 armored personnel carrier and took off.
Just over halfway through the three-quarter-mile journey to the AVLB, the QRF from the JSB patrol base hit the brakes. There were two objects—they sort of looked like oil drums, which could be IEDs—blocking their path. Some of the men got out to investigate them. Though the drums turned out to be decoys, they would hold up the vehicles for an hour and a half. Lauzier, Barker, Hernandez, and Sharpness got out right away and decided to make it there on foot. They started out walking, but, increasingly worried, they began to run and finally sprinted the rest of the way.
Cortez and his men arrived first, around 8:15 p.m. There was no one there. Hundreds of brass shell casings were strewn about the ground. There were several large pools of blood. The men cordoned off the area and searched the vicinity. Cortez found Babineau about thirty yards away, facedown in the weeds and water on the banks of the canal. He had been shot multiple times up and down his back. Bullets had split his head open. There were two M4s on top of the hood and both right-hand Humvee doors were open. All three of the men’s helmets were inside the Humvee. One had a packet of Skittles inside it. The soldiers had not been able to get a Mayday signal off over the radio, nor did they fire a shot. The Humvee’s turret was locked and its M240B machine gun was on safe.
“They had their Kevlars off and no weapons,” said Allen. “So nobody had situational awareness. Nobody was pulling guard. Sometimes people will say to me, ‘It’s a direct reflection of your leadership.’ The first time somebody told me that, I almost fucking killed somebody. I wanted to just slit the motherfucker’s throat. Mainly because you’re basically stating that I allow things of this nature to take place, that I don’t care.”
The insurgents on the scene apparently had had enough time to sift through the truck and the men’s personal effects looking for valuables, taking what they wanted. In addition to everything on the ground, and the guns on the hood, there was a PlayStation Portable on the floor of the Humvee, but two pairs of night-vision goggles and a bulletproof vest were gone.
Lauzier’s fire team arrived a few minutes after Cortez’s. They could hear yelling. “Menchaca! Menchaca! Tucker! Tucker!” Cortez was at the banks of the canal. He was trying to pull Babineau out of the water.
“Where are Tucker and Chaca?” Lauzier asked.
“I don’t know,” Cortez said, crying. “They’re not here. They are not here.”
Lauzier’s team began to search the area. They headed out to the nearest houses to question, and kick the shit out of, anyone they saw. The Iraqi soldiers stationed on the JS Bridge itself said that they hadn’t heard or seen anything, which, to the Americans, was a stone-cold lie. Either they were in on it, or they had decided to stay out of it, but there is no way they could have failed to hear the bullets. Sharpness put Babineau in a body bag, and the rage he felt was nearly uncontrollable.
“I pulled my fucking weapon up, I put it on fucking semi, and I was ready to just start spraying,” he said. Much of 1st Platoon wound up staying out all night looking for their comrades. “We spent the whole night questioning people,” recalled one soldier. “You’re not supposed to tactically question people in combat unless you’re an interrogator. We were straight-up interrogating people. Beating people’s asses with weapons, threatening to kill them if they didn’t talk. It was thug style, like a gang war, because we wanted our guys back alive and the chances of that were dwindling every second that went by.”
While the rest of 1st Platoon was responding to the crisis, Private First Class Justin Watt and Sergeant Tony Yribe were up at FOB Mahmudiyah at the same time. Both were heading up to Striker: Watt, to get some dental work done, while Yribe was having his back looked at; the blast that had killed Britt and Lopez had caused a nagging injury. They had scored a semi-private hooch in a tent occupied by some Psychological Operations soldiers they had befriended. It was early evening and Yribe was talking to some friends out in front of the tent when a bunch of Alpha guys started running past, heading for the helicopter landing zones and motorpool staging areas, strapping on helmets and Velcroing vests as they went. went.
“What the hell is going on?”Yribe called out after some of them. “Dead and wounded down by the JSB,” they yelled as they ran past. The JSB? That’s 1st Platoon,Yribe realized. He ran to the TOC to get the fuller story. Watt was sleeping when Yribe came back to wake him up.
“Watt, Watt! Hey, Watt!” he said. “Hadj just attacked Tucker, Babs, and Chaca down at the Alamo and they don’t know where Tucker and Chaca are. Babineau’s dead.” Getting captured was every soldier’s worst fear, worse than dying in a firefight or even getting blown to pieces by an IED. Insurgents were known to be lusty, committed torturers without mercy. Soldiers frequently commented that they would kill themselves before they’d allow themselves to be captured. So the news that Tucker and Menchaca were missing was, perversely, worse than hearing that they were already dead.
The two whipped outside and tried to )nd a ride or a flight down to the JSB to help with the search. Alpha was spinning up a massive Quick Reaction Force. Yribe and Watt asked everybody they saw if they could get a ride. No one had any seats. Finally, an officer told them that they weren’t going anywhere anyway. Hundreds of soldiers were already flooding the area and no one thought bringing two more who were close friends with the kidnapped was going to help anything. So throughout that night, they had little to do but scrounge for updates and talk in their bunks.
“It just drives me crazy that all the good men die and the shitbag murderers like Green are home eating hamburgers,” said Yribe.
“Murderers?” Watt asked.
Yribe told Watt about the day at the checkpoint, how he had found the shotgun shell, how Green had confessed to him, how Yribe had followed up the next day, and how, once he was convinced that Green really did it, he told Green that he needed to get out of the Army or he would get him out himself.
Watt couldn’t believe what he was hearing. On the one hand, it sounded like something Green was capable of. On the other hand, it was unbelievable because it didn’t add up.
“How in the fuck is Green going to single-handedly escape the wire without an NCO knowing, murder four fucking people by himself, without other people knowing, and then infiltrate that same wire?” he asked.
Green swore that he acted alone, Yribe said, and that Cortez and Barker had nothing to do with it. But they must have, Watt asserted —it doesn’t make any sense otherwise. No, Yribe insisted, they wouldn’t do that. And anyway, Yribe said, the less I know about it and the less you know about it—the better. Just forget I said anything.
But Watt couldn’t forget it. That night, he lay on his cot thinking about Tucker and Menchaca, who he, and everybody else, suspected were being tortured at that moment. And he thought about Green doing much the same thing to a whole family of Iraqis. Tucker and Menchaca were some of the best guys Watt had ever known. Tucker always talked about fishing and the pickup trucks he liked to work on. And Menchaca was quiet but respected, a friend to everyone. He was from Texas, but he still had a heavy Mexican accent that he turned up even heavier when he was goofing around. He had gotten married just a month before deployment. Babineau, though, had been married for years and was a father of three and shouldn’t have even been there. He had been “stop-lossed,” the policy that allowed the Army to forcibly retain soldiers scheduled to be discharged if their unit was deploying within a certain window of time. Watt couldn’t stop thinking about that: Babineau was here on stolen time.Babs had done his eight years already, and now he was dead.
Goodwin showed up at the JSB with 3rd Platoon around 9:00 p.m. He had been in constant radio contact since the )rst call, but almost immediately, commanders several levels above him had taken control. When a “MisCap-DuStWUn” (“Missing, Captured-Duty Status, Whereabouts Unknown”) happens, the Army moves fast. An Apache Longbow arrived within minutes. A Predator unmanned drone started hovering overhead within half an hour, tracking any suspicious activities. Relief units from the 2-502nd started arriving at each TCP location and halted all motor traffic throughout the area. An Iron Claw team and other, larger relief units were heading to Yusufiyah as their staging base. An Iraqi special operations forces unit went into action, and dive teams and division-level Q.R.F's at Striker began gearing up.
“At that point,” Goodwin said. “I didn’t know what to do. Honest. I was talking to so many people on the radio, I was having a hard time keeping straight who I was talking to. It was insane.” Within another hour, Colonel Kunk and Sergeant Major Edwards showed up too. “They took over the show and began to abuse 1st Platoon,” Goodwin recalled. “Anytime they had a free moment, they were yelling at Norton, about how much 1st Platoon sucked and how worthless they all were. Anything that they were told by 1st Platoon, they considered lies or they just chose not to listen to them.”
In less than five hours, approximately 400 soldiers had searched three objective areas in the vicinity of the attack site. Throughout the night, elements of the 101st Airborne and the 4th Infantry conducted searches, set up blocking positions, or prepared for mobilization at dawn.
As had become the norm during critical times for the 1-502nd, Alpha Company got the call to take the lead.They moved up fast as part of a multi-unit clearing effort of Malibu. Bravo’s 3rd Platoon walked up Malibu as well, following the guidance of helicopters and drones. Blaisdell remembered searching the house of a Quarguli sheikh on Malibu with whom they were on relatively friendly terms. Because he forgot to strap up his helmet, it popped off just as he was flinging himself over the courtyard wall. He and his helmet landed at the feet of the sheikh, who was waiting for them. Blaisdell had never seen a sheikh in his underwear before. “I knew he knew a lot of what was going on, but he wasn’t going to tell us anything,” he said. “That would have been a death sentence for him and his family.”
After a brief operational pause in the earliest hours of the morning, Alpha and several other units moved northwest (more than 8,000 coalition troops would ultimately aid in the search), discovering bloody drag marks on the road leading to the power plant. As they searched throughout the morning, they found pieces of a U.S. body armor vest, a white Bongo truck with a thick pool of blood in the flatbed near an office building on the plant’s grounds, and blood on the handrail of a bridge over a canal at the plant’s front entrance.
With temperatures soaring past 110 degrees, Alpha took small arms fire and mortar fire throughout the day. While Alpha inspected a village on the north side of the power plant and other nearby environs, massive air assaults cleared wide swaths of countryside almost continuously.Colonel Ebel, Lieutenant Colonel Kunk, and Major General James Thurman, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, flew up to the Russian power plant looking for a status update from Alpha commander Jared Bordwell. “I had an Army Dive Team and a PJ [Air Force Para Jumper] Dive Team with me, diving in that canal up by Caveman,” said Bordwell. “And we had just been in a firefight with some guys earlier in that morning. And they wanted to know what was going on and what we thought. And I started to brief General Thurman, and he just cut me off and started briefing me. He started briefing me on what had been reported—from me, up to him—and based on what had gotten changed along the way, he was telling me that I was wrong. And Colonel Kunk and Colonel Ebel just sat there. It was frustrating to see my two senior leaders not say anything. They just let the general tell me what I thought, which wasn’t accurate by any means.”
After searching well into the next day, most of the men of 1st Platoon returned to the JSB to try to get some food and rest for an hour or two before heading back out. But Kunk and Edwards were unhappy with the state of the base. “The first thing that sergeant major does is yell at us about the JSB being dirty. The very first thing,” said 2nd Squad’s Chris Payne. “He doesn’t pull the guys together and say, ‘Hold your heads up, we’ll do what we can do to find these guys.’ Neither did the battalion commander. Something to unify the platoon. It didn’t happen. All that happened was that the men got yelled at.” Under orders from Sergeant Major Edwards, Payne went down to the Bat Cave and hauled all the rest of the men out of their racks and they started picking up cigarette butts.
Since he was acting First sergeant, Fenlason did not get out to the JSB until the next day. “Kunk had moved his TOC down there,” he said. “So now you got Edwards, Kunk, Salome, and all their little wizards down there. All I did was go in and take my ass beatings. They didn’t want us around them. All they wanted us to do was cook their fucking food. I remember Kunk screaming at me one night because we didn’t make enough food for his people, giving me the ‘Here we are looking for your goddamn soldiers’ routine while I am trying to explain that he’s never told me how many people he’s actually got down here. And Edwards is screaming at me every which way.”
“That was it for me,” said one 1st Platoon Bravo soldier. “I was done after that. I didn’t give a fuck about anybody but my platoon. Other platoons, I didn’t give a fuck. I didn’t talk to anybody else after that. Other platoons were looking at us: no sympathy. They were looking at us like it was all our fault, giving us the ‘Do you know how much pain you caused?’ routine. It was just bad.”
to be continued..
First Platoon became a regular and reliable part of those rotations. For Goodwin, April seemed to be a crucial turning point. He felt that 1st Platoon was, after much pain and resistance, adapting to Fenlason’s way of doing business and coming back on line as a well-performing unit. “We had three platoons at that point,” he said. “It felt good. We were not just sitting there getting punched in the face. We’re actually going out, looking for him, punching him back.”
Around the same time, Task Force 77 was making more dramatic strikes into the area looking for Zarqawi. In February, they had identified certain houses in the Yusufiyah area that insurgent leaders were using. At 2:15 a.m. on April 16, TF-77 operators raided one such safe house. They got into a firefight, during which several suspected insurgents were killed and several more were taken into custody, though Zarqawi was not among them. He was, the Americans later learned, less than half a mile away at the time. Nine days after that, TF-77 mounted another raid on a house several miles from where the Apache had crashed on April 1. They were fired upon as they arrived and killed five men outside the house. With persistent fire coming from within the house, they called in an air strike, which reduced the house to rubble and killed seven more men and one woman. A press release issued by the military said every male found in the rubble was carrying an AK-47 and wearing a weapons vest.
With uncanny timing, a video starring Zarqawi appeared on Islamist Web sites the same day. It was his most public communiqué ever and the first to show his uncovered face. During the thirty-four-minute video, Zarqawi speaks directly into the camera for long stretches, meets with some masked lieutenants, pores over maps, and squeezes oI machine gun bursts in the empty desert. He has a mustache and a beard and wears black fatigues, an ammunition harness, and a black skullcap. He is serious but robust looking. Healthy, even plump. The message is a condemnation of the United States and George W. Bush and an exhortation to the the Iraqi insurgency. There are elements of bitterness—he is very harsh with Sunnis who have begun participating in the political process. They have, he says, “put a rope around the necks of the Sunnis,” and he vows to target anyone who cooperates with the Shi’ite dominated, U.S.-backed government. A debate raged within military and intelligence circles about whether Zarqawi’s dramatic step into the spotlight connoted desperation or bravado.
In mid-April, some Charlie Company soldiers were busted for possession of Valium. The AR 15-6 investigation revealed that they had gotten it when they spent a short time at the TCPs filling in for Bravo. According to the soldiers’ statements, the IAs offered them drugs within their first few hours of arrival. HHC commander Shawn Umbrell, who conducted the investigation, said he mentioned to Goodwin that if it happened to Charlie Company so quickly out there, then it was likely that Bravo’s guys were being exposed to that temptation on a regular basis. Many IAs were known users and abusers of both drugs and alcohol. Fenlason, for his part, said he never entertained the notion that 1st Platoon might be abusing substances at the TCPs. “Do I know I have an alcohol problem or a drug problem?” he asked. “No, I don’t. Did I conceive of it? No, I didn’t. Did the IA have drugs? Yeah. They had all kinds of stupid shit down there.But, no, it never occurred to me.”
That changed in mid-May when a 1st Platoon Bravo soldier, high on Valium, left his guard station at TCP3 in the middle of the night without his weapon and wandered two hundred yards down the road until he got caught in a strand of concertina wire. Sergeant Carrick found him snared out in the street, babbling gibberish, thinking he was still on a patrol that had happened days ago. Carrick sent him up to the medic at TCP1 because he thought he had had a mental breakdown. Doc Sharpness checked him out and concluded, no, he was not having a breakdown. He was high. Fenlason and Goodwin ordered urinalysis tests for the whole platoon and three soldiers failed. platoon and three soldiers failed.
In mid-May, Task Force 77 initiated another round of offensives against Al Qaeda throughout First Strikes AO. Beginning on the evening of the 13th, the United States claimed it killed a high-value target known as Abu Mustafa (who it believed was involved in the April Apache crash) and fifteen other insurgents in four coordinated raids in Lutufiyah. In keeping with TF-77’s “unblinking eye” approach, the operators used information gleaned in those raids to immediately mount another raid beginning the afternoon of the 14th, this time on a safe house not far from the power plant.
As coalition forces approached, they started taking fire. Al Qaeda’s Aeisha Brigade had commandeered several rooftops and from there shot at the helicopters with missiles and machine guns. At 5:30 p.m., they hit one of TF-77’s Little Bird helicopters just east of the power plant. That copter was able to self-recover and take off again. At 5:40 p.m., however, the insurgents hit another Little Bird. This one crashed badly only a few hundred yards northwest of Rushdi Mullah. TF-77 called in a fighter-bomber air strike, which included at least one 500-pound bomb that ripped apart several homes and resulted in dozens of dead and wounded. An MNF-I (Multi-National Force–Iraq) press release said that “approximately 20 terrorists” were killed, but locals insisted that the dead were mostly noncombatants.
Several units from throughout the division were dispatched to assist in the recovery of the Little Bird and its two dead pilots, including, once again, Bravo’s 2nd Platoon. In a repeat of the recovery mission in April, the salvage crews took far longer to get to the site than expected due to the dozens of IEDs and numerous firefights they met along the way. At about 3:00 p.m. on the second day, 2nd Platoon got word that the trucks were only an hour or two away. But by 7:00 p.m., after hitting two more IEDs, they still had not arrived and were not likely to make it there until morning. At that point, 2nd Platoon told the convoy to stay there, they would bring the helicopter to them.They found the house of a farmer with whom they had developed a good relationship. “We told him we’d pay him if he would let us borrow his tractor and trailer,” said 2nd Platoon Sergeant Jeremy Gebhardt. “And he said, ‘No, no, I’ll drive. Let’s go.’ So he drove out there and we loaded up his tractor with helicopter parts.” They finished the job of getting the debris to the wrecker just before 11:00 p.m.
A military spokesperson reiterated to the Washington Post what MNF-I’s press release had said, that there were no civilian casualties related to this battle. This is not true according to 3rd Platoon soldiers who were down at the JS Bridge during this time. Platoon Sergeant Phil Blaisdell recalled, “The fucking bomb hit this one family’s house, killed like five kids. The wife survived, but her arm was broken. They brought all those kids down to the JSB in the back of a Bongo truck, just all fucked up. How do you face a guy that just lost his entire family except one son and his wife?” The man asked Blaisdell if they could cross the bridge, which was ordinarily closed, to bury their children in a cemetery that was on the other side.Blaisdell let them pass.
Fenlason and Norton were happy that 1st Platoon was participating more fully in the company’s battle rhythms, including the multi day rotations out to Rushdi Mullah. To them, it was a sign that they were rehabilitating the platoon. They had a couple of very successful runs up there, doing patrols, gathering intelligence, rolling up bad guys. “It was important, proving that we’re not a jacked-up unit,” said Norton, “proving we could accomplish multiple-day operations miles away from any sort of higher leadership.”
Virtually every aspect of the platoon was on the upswing. Two months after he kicked Yribe out, Fenlason felt like the men were finally getting on board. Soldiers were shaving, wearing their uniforms correctly, cutting their hair. Their attitude was improving, they were letting go of some of their anger and bitterness. “We still couldn’t take much of a setback, but we had turned a corner,” he said. “We were well on the road to recovery.” Others noticed it too. Sergeant Major Edwards told Fenlason several times that he was now running one of the top five platoons in the whole battalion. Even some of the men say that May did seem like the beginning of a new chapter. They had been in country seven months, they were on the back end now, and things were looking up.
In mid-May, 1st Platoon returned to Rushdi Mullah. During what would turn out to be their last trip up there, several elements of 1st Platoon got into a serious firefight. On May 22, most of the platoon was back at the patrol base after a round of morning patrolling. They were relaxing, trying to cool off. They had been taking some sporadic fire coming from behind the house for some time, but it was steadily getting more persistent, moving from harassment probes to more directed fire.
After checking with Norton and Fenlason, Lauzier grabbed Specialist Barker, Sergeant Diaz, and another soldier and they headed out to maneuver on the gunmen. Norton began prepping another fire team to flank from the other direction. Barker was in the lead, with Lauzier behind and Diaz and the other soldier making up a machine gun team in the back. They flanked out right from the house and into a farm field. To their surprise, this field was much lower than the surrounding ones, and their sight was further impaired by stands of elephant grass. But they spotted six or seven insurgents on a berm about 130 yards to the northeast. Diaz and the other soldier had started firing the machine gun and lobbing rifle-fired grenades when another group of insurgents began firing from a field only 50 yards to the west. They were caught in a brutal crossfire. They hit the ground. Pinned down, they were trying to return fire but their weapons started to jam. Both Lauzier’s and Barker’s M4s locked up. Diaz, meanwhile, realized that they hadn’t brought a full load of machine gun ammo. At the same time, the insurgents were refining their fire, walking it closer to them. “The rounds were just cracking all over us,” Lauzier said.
“Hey, I need fucking mortars now!” Lauzier yelled into the radio. The platoon’s radioman requested mortars up to battalion headquarters.
“Denied. We have fast movers in the air,” meaning there were jets in the vicinity, which is a collision risk with large caliber, high flying mortars. But the mortars that travel with each company are small enough that they fly below jets’ minimum altitude. Norton’s fire team had the mortar team, led by Staff Sergeant Matthew Walter, with them.
Mortarmen are frequently maligned for being lazy. They have heavy equipment, and it is standard practice to spread the mortar round loads out to all the men of the platoon, which they complain about. But Walters humped all, or almost all, of his own gear. He would frequently carry the mortar tube and a dozen rounds at a time, which is about 100 pounds. So the guys esteemed him greatly. As Norton was talking to Fenlason about what sort of help they could get Lauzier, Walter asked Norton if he could borrow three men. Walter grabbed the men and ran across the road. Since he could see the enemy’s tracer rounds, and generally the source of fire, he set up his 60mm mortar tube. Norton followed about two minutes later.
“How far do you think that is? Four hundred meters?” Walter asked.
“Six hundred?” Norton said. They decided to average it. The big problem, however, was figuring out where Lauzier’s team was. Since their weapons were jamming, and they were conserving the machine gun ammo, Norton and Walter couldn’t tell, exactly, where their friendlies were. They tried to determine their location over the radio, but descriptions like “in a canal” or “to the right of the enemy fire” were not hugely helpful. At Norton’s command, Lauzier ordered Diaz to fire one rifle-launched grenade at the insurgents, and Norton eyeballed their probable location back from that explosion. With all of those variables, Norton and Walter were fairly confident, but still, this was some risky business and Norton was uneasy. Lauzier, however, was insistent.
“We are getting cut up,” he yelled into the radio. “Our weapons are jammed. We need support now.Repeat, now.”
“All right, we are working on it,” Norton responded. “I want you to lay everything you have on the exact spot where the insurgents are. And then we’re going to drop mortars off of that. As soon as the mortars drop, I want you to break contact and clear the area, because we’re going to sweep left to right toward the direction we think you are. Got me?”
“Roger,” Lauzier responded. A few seconds later, Diaz’s machine gun ripped toward the berm, and Norton and Walter finalized their adjustments. Walter dropped his first round. Away it flew and detonated on impact.
“Aaaaaaaaaarrrrrhhhhh!” Lauzier screamed through the mic. It was a loud and ear-splitting wail. Through the crackle of the radio, it sounded like the scream of a man badly injured. Walter and Norton looked at each other. “Oh my God,” Norton thought. He felt like he was going to puke. “We hit them. I just killed my own men.”
“Lauzier! Lauzier! Are you there? Are you there?” Norton yelled into the mic.
“Aaaaaaaaaarrrrrhhhhh, yyyeeeaaahhh! Fucking bull’s-eye, dude!” Lauzier yelled. “You hit him dead on! Fucking bull’s-eye! Fire for effect!” Norton had never been more relieved in his life. Walter lobbed about four or five shells on and around the spot. Lauzier wanted to follow and make sure the insurgents were dead, but he didn’t have any more working weapons. He told his men to break contact, and they headed back to the house. It is something he regretted years later, that he was not able to personally finish the insurgents off.
After three years of hunting, the U.S. military finally found and killed Zarqawi on June 7, in a farmhouse in a village thirty-five miles north of Baghdad. U.S. and Jordanian intelligence had gotten a number of key breaks in the weeks before. One source helped focus the Zarqawi-hunters on Sheikh Abdul-Rahman, often described as Zarqawi’s spiritual adviser. A small Task Force 77 team had followed Abdul-Rahman to a farmhouse where they were certain he was meeting with Zarqawi. Worried that their prey might get away if they waited to muster enough troops to attempt an assault, they requested air support. Two Air Force F-16s were diverted from another mission, and at 6:21 p.m., one dropped first one, then another 500-pound bomb on the house. Amazingly, Zarqawi survived the initial blasts as Iraqi police and U.S. soldiers swarmed the scene, but he died from injuries within the hour. Everyone else in the house, including Abdul-Rahman and a small but never conclusively speci:ed number of women, children, and other men, died in the blast as well.
Hopes that this alone would deal a decisive blow to the insurgency, or even AQI’s activities, were fleeting. On June 12, the Mujahideen Shura Council released a statement on behalf of Al Qaeda in Iraq saying that a new emir of Al Qaeda in Iraq had been appointed. Attacks resumed unabated, and a month later U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad would tell the BBC that Zarqawi’s death, “in terms of the level of violence …has not had any impact.”
By June, First Strike had decided to shut down the Rushdi Mullah patrol base. It simply did not have enough men to hold the position and turn it into a fully functioning outpost. Constant operations here were sapping combat strength for missions elsewhere, so on June 11, Bravo Company 2nd Platoon was in the process of tearing it down. They were breaking down some of the defensive positions, dismantling the concertina wire serpentines in the front, and preparing for a night mission later on. They would depart the next day.
At 3:00 p.m. on what had been an unusually quiet day until then, the house started taking fire from both the front and the rear. As the IAs on guard started returning fire, the only American on guard, Private First Class Tim Hanley, who was manning a bunker on the front gate, saw an orange thirty-ton dump truck approach from the northeast. When it got to the front drive, it turned right and began barreling toward the gate, plowing through what few strands of concertina wire were left. Hanley started banging away at the truck with his M240B machine gun. He damaged it and may have thrown it off course, but he could not stop it from slamming into the courtyard wall and exploding into a massive fireball. Platoon Sergeant Jeremy Gebhardt, who had walked to the front door to investigate the gunfire, was thrown across the room. Several other soldiers were picked up off of their feet, hurled against walls, and showered with debris, shrapnel, and glass. The blast shook the FOB at Yusu:yah five miles away. Amazingly, although fifteen U.S. soldiers, eight Iraqi soldiers, and one interpreter were injured, no coalition forces were critically hurt.The driver’s body was ripped to pieces.
A medic ran to the front of the building, where Hanley had crawled out of the rubble of his bunker, with a ruptured eardrum and shrapnel in his neck. The truck’s front axle and engine had landed directly on top of his post, which was fortified only with sandbags and plywood overhead covering. Looking at the crushed bunker, it was impossible to figure out how Hanley had survived. Hanley lost most of his hearing, however, and could have returned home, but he elected to stay with the men and finish the deployment.*
* On September 25, 2007, Tim Hanley shot himself to death one year after returning from deployment. His was one of an epidemic of suicides to plague the Army and the 101st Airborne—including eighteen suicides at Fort Campbell through the middle of November 2009. One of those was Juan Hernandez, the soldier who had performed so valorously during Charlie Company’s friendly fire incident on November 4, 2005. He shot himself to death in Coffee County, Tennessee, on October 5, 2009.
Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki was inaugurated on May 28, 2006, and the Shi’ite militias’ carte blanche increased substantially. Sectarian killings continued to escalate throughout the country, with more than a hundred civilians dying every day in June. By early August, the U.S. military would acknowledge that more people in Baghdad were being killed by Shi’ite death squads than by Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgents. Yet throughout the summer, the Iraqi government and top U.S. commanders thwarted attempts by lower level units attempting to rein in the Shi’ite paramilitaries: American forces were not allowed to target the Mahdi Army without direct approval from either Maliki or General George Casey.
On June 14, 2006, nearly 50,000 Iraqi and American troops launched Operation Forward Together, an initiative designed to bolster security in the capital by increasing street patrols, beefing up checkpoints, and enforcing curfews. It was a failure. Two of the promised Iraqi brigades never showed up. After a day or two of calm, violence erupted in the capital again on June 17, when seven separate attacks—a suicide bombing, a mortar attack, three car bombings, a bus bombing, and a pushcart bombing—occurred in Baghdad, resulting in at least 36 dead and 75 wounded. And the attacks kept coming. Fifty gunmen wearing police uniforms kidnapped scores of factory workers on June 21. By July, Baghdad was averaging 34 attacks a day, compared with 24 a day in June. Despite the spike in violence, the war’s planners insisted that the answer was fewer rather than more troops. On June 21, General George Casey briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff and recommended reducing the 15 combat brigades currently stationed in Iraq to 10 brigades within six months. Six months after that, he proposed whittling that number down to 7 or 8. By December 2007, according to his timeline, only 5 or 6 brigades would remain. He similarly proposed cutting the number of bases from 69 to 11. With the violence still escalating, U.S. and Iraqi forces initiated Operation Forward Together II in August, using more troops shipped in from Anbar. One government report described this as “giving up ground to one enemy to fight another.” That operation also failed.
23
The Alamo
IN JUNE I6, Bravo’s 1st Platoon was back at the JSB, 2nd Platoon
was manning the TCPs, and 3rd Platoon was patrolling
Yusufiyah. Rick Skidis was on emergency family leave, so
Fenlason was Bravo Company’s acting First sergeant. A bunch of
Freedom Rest passes had been approved simultaneously, so several more soldiers than anybody had anticipated were going to be gone
from duty. Fenlason was concerned about how shorthanded the company was, and he told Major Salome about it. “When you took out the people that were on leave, the people that were going on leave, and then you factored the passes into it, the company was going to be short the equivalent of a platoon for three weeks,” Fenlason said. With attrition, scheduled leaves, and soldiers up at Striker for medical or other reasons, 1st Platoon had twenty-two of its assigned thirty-four men on the ground. In addition to security at the base itself, the AVLB, and TCP4, their missions included morning IED sweeps, at least two patrols a day to sensitive nearby facilities, resupply runs back to Yusufiyah, daytime neighborhood patrols in Quarguli Village, night time overwatch's in that same village, and cordon and knock searches for bad guys as the case came up.
Heading into the evening of the 16th, Private First Class Thomas Tucker, Specialist David Babineau, and Private First Class Kristian Menchaca were guarding the AVLB. Menchaca hadn’t even been on the regular duty roster for that shift, but he had volunteered so another soldier who was celebrating his birthday could enjoy it in the relative comfort of the JSB. The threesome had been on duty, in a single Humvee, for almost twenty-four hours. Their team leader, Sergeant Daniel Carrick, was on one of those four-day Freedom Rest passes and Staff Sergeant Chaz Allen, their squad leader, had told them to be extra alert, because when Cortez and two others were out there the night before, they had taken some small-arms fire and RPG fire.
Allen had nine men to cover the two positions and they had been doing it for days. It was a ridiculous staffing situation, but it was standard practice for this deployment. So at any given time, Allen had three men on the AVLB, three men on TCP4, and three in reserve.
Just before 8:00 p.m., he and two soldiers at TCP4 were about to relieve the soldiers on guard at TCP4. He asked somebody to do a radio check with the Alamo. A minute or so went by.
“Any luck?” he inquired. Negative, the soldier said. “Gimme the mic,” he said. Just then, a torrent of gunfire opened up. Allen tried to raise them on the radio. Cortez climbed on the roof of the TCP with an M14. With that guns scope, it was possible to see the position. He yelled down that he didn’t see anyone.
Soldiers stationed at the JSB heard the barrage too. Lauzier figured it must be the IAs shooting at something from their location on the JSB itself. The birthday soldier had been planning on bringing steaks to the men at the AVLB for dinner as a thank-you, and he had taken their order over the radio a couple of minutes ago. He tried hailing them now, but there was no response. Norton ordered Lauzier, Barker, Hernandez, Sharpness, and couple of others to rush a convoy out there.
At TCP4, the same thing was happening. Cortez and a couple others jumped into a Humvee. It wouldn’t start. The battery was dead. They piled back out and into the M113 armored personnel carrier and took off.
Just over halfway through the three-quarter-mile journey to the AVLB, the QRF from the JSB patrol base hit the brakes. There were two objects—they sort of looked like oil drums, which could be IEDs—blocking their path. Some of the men got out to investigate them. Though the drums turned out to be decoys, they would hold up the vehicles for an hour and a half. Lauzier, Barker, Hernandez, and Sharpness got out right away and decided to make it there on foot. They started out walking, but, increasingly worried, they began to run and finally sprinted the rest of the way.
Cortez and his men arrived first, around 8:15 p.m. There was no one there. Hundreds of brass shell casings were strewn about the ground. There were several large pools of blood. The men cordoned off the area and searched the vicinity. Cortez found Babineau about thirty yards away, facedown in the weeds and water on the banks of the canal. He had been shot multiple times up and down his back. Bullets had split his head open. There were two M4s on top of the hood and both right-hand Humvee doors were open. All three of the men’s helmets were inside the Humvee. One had a packet of Skittles inside it. The soldiers had not been able to get a Mayday signal off over the radio, nor did they fire a shot. The Humvee’s turret was locked and its M240B machine gun was on safe.
“They had their Kevlars off and no weapons,” said Allen. “So nobody had situational awareness. Nobody was pulling guard. Sometimes people will say to me, ‘It’s a direct reflection of your leadership.’ The first time somebody told me that, I almost fucking killed somebody. I wanted to just slit the motherfucker’s throat. Mainly because you’re basically stating that I allow things of this nature to take place, that I don’t care.”
The insurgents on the scene apparently had had enough time to sift through the truck and the men’s personal effects looking for valuables, taking what they wanted. In addition to everything on the ground, and the guns on the hood, there was a PlayStation Portable on the floor of the Humvee, but two pairs of night-vision goggles and a bulletproof vest were gone.
Lauzier’s fire team arrived a few minutes after Cortez’s. They could hear yelling. “Menchaca! Menchaca! Tucker! Tucker!” Cortez was at the banks of the canal. He was trying to pull Babineau out of the water.
“Where are Tucker and Chaca?” Lauzier asked.
“I don’t know,” Cortez said, crying. “They’re not here. They are not here.”
Lauzier’s team began to search the area. They headed out to the nearest houses to question, and kick the shit out of, anyone they saw. The Iraqi soldiers stationed on the JS Bridge itself said that they hadn’t heard or seen anything, which, to the Americans, was a stone-cold lie. Either they were in on it, or they had decided to stay out of it, but there is no way they could have failed to hear the bullets. Sharpness put Babineau in a body bag, and the rage he felt was nearly uncontrollable.
“I pulled my fucking weapon up, I put it on fucking semi, and I was ready to just start spraying,” he said. Much of 1st Platoon wound up staying out all night looking for their comrades. “We spent the whole night questioning people,” recalled one soldier. “You’re not supposed to tactically question people in combat unless you’re an interrogator. We were straight-up interrogating people. Beating people’s asses with weapons, threatening to kill them if they didn’t talk. It was thug style, like a gang war, because we wanted our guys back alive and the chances of that were dwindling every second that went by.”
While the rest of 1st Platoon was responding to the crisis, Private First Class Justin Watt and Sergeant Tony Yribe were up at FOB Mahmudiyah at the same time. Both were heading up to Striker: Watt, to get some dental work done, while Yribe was having his back looked at; the blast that had killed Britt and Lopez had caused a nagging injury. They had scored a semi-private hooch in a tent occupied by some Psychological Operations soldiers they had befriended. It was early evening and Yribe was talking to some friends out in front of the tent when a bunch of Alpha guys started running past, heading for the helicopter landing zones and motorpool staging areas, strapping on helmets and Velcroing vests as they went. went.
“What the hell is going on?”Yribe called out after some of them. “Dead and wounded down by the JSB,” they yelled as they ran past. The JSB? That’s 1st Platoon,Yribe realized. He ran to the TOC to get the fuller story. Watt was sleeping when Yribe came back to wake him up.
“Watt, Watt! Hey, Watt!” he said. “Hadj just attacked Tucker, Babs, and Chaca down at the Alamo and they don’t know where Tucker and Chaca are. Babineau’s dead.” Getting captured was every soldier’s worst fear, worse than dying in a firefight or even getting blown to pieces by an IED. Insurgents were known to be lusty, committed torturers without mercy. Soldiers frequently commented that they would kill themselves before they’d allow themselves to be captured. So the news that Tucker and Menchaca were missing was, perversely, worse than hearing that they were already dead.
The two whipped outside and tried to )nd a ride or a flight down to the JSB to help with the search. Alpha was spinning up a massive Quick Reaction Force. Yribe and Watt asked everybody they saw if they could get a ride. No one had any seats. Finally, an officer told them that they weren’t going anywhere anyway. Hundreds of soldiers were already flooding the area and no one thought bringing two more who were close friends with the kidnapped was going to help anything. So throughout that night, they had little to do but scrounge for updates and talk in their bunks.
“It just drives me crazy that all the good men die and the shitbag murderers like Green are home eating hamburgers,” said Yribe.
“Murderers?” Watt asked.
Yribe told Watt about the day at the checkpoint, how he had found the shotgun shell, how Green had confessed to him, how Yribe had followed up the next day, and how, once he was convinced that Green really did it, he told Green that he needed to get out of the Army or he would get him out himself.
Watt couldn’t believe what he was hearing. On the one hand, it sounded like something Green was capable of. On the other hand, it was unbelievable because it didn’t add up.
“How in the fuck is Green going to single-handedly escape the wire without an NCO knowing, murder four fucking people by himself, without other people knowing, and then infiltrate that same wire?” he asked.
Green swore that he acted alone, Yribe said, and that Cortez and Barker had nothing to do with it. But they must have, Watt asserted —it doesn’t make any sense otherwise. No, Yribe insisted, they wouldn’t do that. And anyway, Yribe said, the less I know about it and the less you know about it—the better. Just forget I said anything.
But Watt couldn’t forget it. That night, he lay on his cot thinking about Tucker and Menchaca, who he, and everybody else, suspected were being tortured at that moment. And he thought about Green doing much the same thing to a whole family of Iraqis. Tucker and Menchaca were some of the best guys Watt had ever known. Tucker always talked about fishing and the pickup trucks he liked to work on. And Menchaca was quiet but respected, a friend to everyone. He was from Texas, but he still had a heavy Mexican accent that he turned up even heavier when he was goofing around. He had gotten married just a month before deployment. Babineau, though, had been married for years and was a father of three and shouldn’t have even been there. He had been “stop-lossed,” the policy that allowed the Army to forcibly retain soldiers scheduled to be discharged if their unit was deploying within a certain window of time. Watt couldn’t stop thinking about that: Babineau was here on stolen time.Babs had done his eight years already, and now he was dead.
Goodwin showed up at the JSB with 3rd Platoon around 9:00 p.m. He had been in constant radio contact since the )rst call, but almost immediately, commanders several levels above him had taken control. When a “MisCap-DuStWUn” (“Missing, Captured-Duty Status, Whereabouts Unknown”) happens, the Army moves fast. An Apache Longbow arrived within minutes. A Predator unmanned drone started hovering overhead within half an hour, tracking any suspicious activities. Relief units from the 2-502nd started arriving at each TCP location and halted all motor traffic throughout the area. An Iron Claw team and other, larger relief units were heading to Yusufiyah as their staging base. An Iraqi special operations forces unit went into action, and dive teams and division-level Q.R.F's at Striker began gearing up.
“At that point,” Goodwin said. “I didn’t know what to do. Honest. I was talking to so many people on the radio, I was having a hard time keeping straight who I was talking to. It was insane.” Within another hour, Colonel Kunk and Sergeant Major Edwards showed up too. “They took over the show and began to abuse 1st Platoon,” Goodwin recalled. “Anytime they had a free moment, they were yelling at Norton, about how much 1st Platoon sucked and how worthless they all were. Anything that they were told by 1st Platoon, they considered lies or they just chose not to listen to them.”
In less than five hours, approximately 400 soldiers had searched three objective areas in the vicinity of the attack site. Throughout the night, elements of the 101st Airborne and the 4th Infantry conducted searches, set up blocking positions, or prepared for mobilization at dawn.
As had become the norm during critical times for the 1-502nd, Alpha Company got the call to take the lead.They moved up fast as part of a multi-unit clearing effort of Malibu. Bravo’s 3rd Platoon walked up Malibu as well, following the guidance of helicopters and drones. Blaisdell remembered searching the house of a Quarguli sheikh on Malibu with whom they were on relatively friendly terms. Because he forgot to strap up his helmet, it popped off just as he was flinging himself over the courtyard wall. He and his helmet landed at the feet of the sheikh, who was waiting for them. Blaisdell had never seen a sheikh in his underwear before. “I knew he knew a lot of what was going on, but he wasn’t going to tell us anything,” he said. “That would have been a death sentence for him and his family.”
After a brief operational pause in the earliest hours of the morning, Alpha and several other units moved northwest (more than 8,000 coalition troops would ultimately aid in the search), discovering bloody drag marks on the road leading to the power plant. As they searched throughout the morning, they found pieces of a U.S. body armor vest, a white Bongo truck with a thick pool of blood in the flatbed near an office building on the plant’s grounds, and blood on the handrail of a bridge over a canal at the plant’s front entrance.
With temperatures soaring past 110 degrees, Alpha took small arms fire and mortar fire throughout the day. While Alpha inspected a village on the north side of the power plant and other nearby environs, massive air assaults cleared wide swaths of countryside almost continuously.Colonel Ebel, Lieutenant Colonel Kunk, and Major General James Thurman, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, flew up to the Russian power plant looking for a status update from Alpha commander Jared Bordwell. “I had an Army Dive Team and a PJ [Air Force Para Jumper] Dive Team with me, diving in that canal up by Caveman,” said Bordwell. “And we had just been in a firefight with some guys earlier in that morning. And they wanted to know what was going on and what we thought. And I started to brief General Thurman, and he just cut me off and started briefing me. He started briefing me on what had been reported—from me, up to him—and based on what had gotten changed along the way, he was telling me that I was wrong. And Colonel Kunk and Colonel Ebel just sat there. It was frustrating to see my two senior leaders not say anything. They just let the general tell me what I thought, which wasn’t accurate by any means.”
After searching well into the next day, most of the men of 1st Platoon returned to the JSB to try to get some food and rest for an hour or two before heading back out. But Kunk and Edwards were unhappy with the state of the base. “The first thing that sergeant major does is yell at us about the JSB being dirty. The very first thing,” said 2nd Squad’s Chris Payne. “He doesn’t pull the guys together and say, ‘Hold your heads up, we’ll do what we can do to find these guys.’ Neither did the battalion commander. Something to unify the platoon. It didn’t happen. All that happened was that the men got yelled at.” Under orders from Sergeant Major Edwards, Payne went down to the Bat Cave and hauled all the rest of the men out of their racks and they started picking up cigarette butts.
Since he was acting First sergeant, Fenlason did not get out to the JSB until the next day. “Kunk had moved his TOC down there,” he said. “So now you got Edwards, Kunk, Salome, and all their little wizards down there. All I did was go in and take my ass beatings. They didn’t want us around them. All they wanted us to do was cook their fucking food. I remember Kunk screaming at me one night because we didn’t make enough food for his people, giving me the ‘Here we are looking for your goddamn soldiers’ routine while I am trying to explain that he’s never told me how many people he’s actually got down here. And Edwards is screaming at me every which way.”
“That was it for me,” said one 1st Platoon Bravo soldier. “I was done after that. I didn’t give a fuck about anybody but my platoon. Other platoons, I didn’t give a fuck. I didn’t talk to anybody else after that. Other platoons were looking at us: no sympathy. They were looking at us like it was all our fault, giving us the ‘Do you know how much pain you caused?’ routine. It was just bad.”
24
Dilemma and Discovery
MULTIPLE SWEEP AND SEARCH operations were conducted simultaneously
throughout the next forty-eight hours on both sides of the
Euphrates, but physical clues and human intelligence kept
leading back to the vicinity of the power plant. As that was
happening, Watt was obsessively mulling over everything Yribe had
told him, even after they made it up to Striker the next day. It
continued to nag at him. He weighed all the scenarios, he tried to
evaluate all possibilities, and it just didn’t compute, that one guy
could get into a house and control an entire family in that situation.
There was no way Green could have done it alone. No way. There
just had to have been more people. He brought it up with Yribe
several times, and each time Yribe refused to entertain the notion.
Yes,Yribe said, he took Green’s word on how it went down. No, he
never asked Barker and Cortez about it. Why not? Tons of reasons,
Yribe said: Because he didn’t really want to know, because God would sort it out in the end, because the last thing 1st Platoon
needed was more trouble, because it was already ancient history.
And because it was none of his business—and it was none of Watt’s
business either..... to be continued..
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