Black Hearts: One Platoon's Descent into Madness in Iraq's Triangle of Death

by Jim Frederick

  Part of Kunk’s job was also to train the Iraqi security forces into competent organizations, another tall order. There was no functioning police force in the whole region. The 4th Brigade of the 6th Iraqi Army Division’s area of responsibility roughly mirrored First Strike’s, with a battalion in Lutufiyah, a battalion in Yusufiyah, and a battalion and headquarters in Mahmudiyah. When the 101st arrived, the Iraqi soldiers were understaffed, half of them did not have weapons, fewer had any training, and most were of dubious loyalty. Many, the Americans’ interpreters noted, had slogans supporting Muqtada al-Sadr written on their rifles. Sorting through who could be trusted, let alone who was fit to fight, would prove a never-ending challenge. Kunk suspected the Iraqi brigade commander to be, if not a Mahdi Army sympathizer, then certainly prejudiced against Sunnis. Two of the battalion commanders, both Sunnis, would die under mysterious circumstances. And even though Yusufiyah was the most dangerous place, Kunk noted, the Iraqi battalion there always had the fewest resources and the weakest leaders.

  The catchphrase order from Kunk to his subordinates was “Go out and get after it,” and that’s what they did. Delta’s company commander Captain Lou Kangas divided his territory into four pieces, dealing one to each of his platoon leaders.

  He told them, “You own this space now. Become the expert in absolutely everything having to do with it. Patrol every inch of it, meet every person, take a census of every house.”

  Within a few days of arrival, Captain Bordwell organized a full Alpha Company patrol of Mahmudiyah. “We just threw it out there,” he said. “The mentality was, if this is going to get ugly, let’s do it early.”

  Down in Lutufiyah, Captain Dougherty also started running patrols and began a census. Patrol leaders were to get names and photos of the inhabitants of every house and to develop a database. On the battalion level, operations officer Major Salome started scheduling missions into seemingly random map grid squares, to keep insurgents and townspeople off-balance and to create the impression that the U.S. forces in the area were far larger than they actually were, “that we were everywhere at the same time,” he said.

  As Goodwin and the rest of Bravo took over the Yusufiyah area in October, he was supremely confident in his team. Goodwin’s first sergeant, Rick Skidis, would be his closest adviser, institutional memory, and overseer of the men. Rounding out Goodwin’s leadership crew was his executive officer, First Lieutenant Justin Habash, and his fire support officer, another lieutenant who coordinated artillery fire into and out of Bravo territory.

  The magnitude of Goodwin’s task weighed on him. He had been entrusted with the safety, well-being, and fight-readiness of 135 young men. He was realistic about the dangers of war, and knew some of his men would probably not be coming home, but he was nonetheless enthusiastic about the job at hand. “I have a great bunch of guys,” he thought to himself. “The ship’s on course. All I have to do is keep it straight.”

  Goodwin’s company, like most light infantry companies, consisted of his headquarters element plus three platoons of approximately thirty-five soldiers each, with each platoon led by a lieutenant who is the platoon leader and a sergeant first class who is the platoon sergeant. It also had a weapons squad, with three machine gun teams of two men each; but before deployment, Bravo’s weapons squad was broken up and the machine gun teams distributed throughout the rest of the company.

  Twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Ben Britt led 1st Platoon. The son of a Texas rancher, he had propelled his high-school football team to the state finals as an all-state tackle. He was an Eagle Scout, an all-region saxophonist, and class valedictorian. He entered San Antonio’s Trinity University in 1999 to play Division III football, but he transferred to West Point the next year because he wanted service and sacrifice to be a part of his life. He thrived at West Point, where he played rugby, majored in economics, and graduated in the academic top 5 percent of his class.

  There is an old joke in the Army: “What is the difference between a private first class and a second lieutenant? A PFC has been promoted.” That sums up the difficult task every platoon leader has establishing authority. While a second lieutenant may have a college degree and some high-class training, these officers are younger than many of the men they are leading, and they often struggle to earn their respect.

  Soldiers can be ruthless in their assessment of lieutenants, but Britt’s men universally said they loved him. A born leader, he was always one of the smartest guys in the room, but he never copped the superiority attitude that West Pointers are often mocked for having. He could talk about the finer points of Keynesian economics, if that was what you were into, or he could just as easily tell you why Tupac was better than Wu-Tang. He was well-read in all of his tactical handbooks, but he always weighed the input of his NCOs before making a decision. A big kid with a large round face, he was fearsome when he scowled, yet disarming when he smiled, which was often. Most of all, Britt’s men respected him because he led from the front. There is no quicker way to earn a trooper’s respect than to put yourself at the same risks he is forced to take. “He wanted a piece of the action,” said one of his men. “Command and control? Not a problem. He did it. But he wasn’t satisfied with that. He wanted to be the first guy going in.”

  Britt’s NCO counterpart was Phil Miller, a twenty-five-year-old staff sergeant from North Huntington, Pennsylvania. Platoon sergeants are usually sergeants first class, but 1st Platoon’s original platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Rob Gallagher, was one of the few non–Alpha Company men moved to the MiTT team, so Miller—the platoon’s senior squad leader, a go-getter, and one of the only NCOs in the platoon with a Ranger Tab—took over. Despite Miller’s considerable youth and inexperience, Lieutenant Colonel Kunk and Sergeant Major Edwards were impressed by what they saw of Miller at NTC and they were sure he was up to the job. He was one of the most popular NCOs in the platoon, and the guys were delighted when they heard he was taking over from Gallagher, who was widely considered a hard-ass. Small and sinewy, Miller was a strutting peacock with a loud voice. He was a tough guy when he wanted to be, but also a total cutup when he was in the mood for goofing off. Miller jumped at the added responsibility. “Right before we deployed,” he said, “I pulled everyone in, and I told them, ‘I’m going to do everything that I can to bring everyone home.’ That’s a big statement, to say, ‘Hey, everyone that’s standing here right now is coming home.’ But I was confident. I was confident in that platoon.”

  While bravado can be a powerful force, 2nd and 3rd Platoons simply had more-seasoned and more-mature platoon sergeants in charge. When Second Lieutenant Mark Evans showed up at Fort Campbell in May 2005 to take over as 3rd Platoon’s leader, for example, the first words of advice 1st Battalion Executive Officer Fred Wintrich gave him were: “Blaisdell’s got a good platoon. Don’t screw it up.”

  “Blaisdell” was thirty-two-year-old Sergeant First Class Phil Blaisdell, one of First Strike’s fastest-rising stars and most-respected NCOs. A hard-charger and a demanding boss, Blaisdell had formidably high standards yet a surprisingly warm disposition with his men. There was something about the way he operated that made even privates feel important. People did what he said, not just because it was an order but because they wanted to please him. So effective was his charisma that when people did carp about him, they complained he was coated in Teflon. Blaisdell’s position as the battalion’s crown prince was so secure, they grumbled, that he was forgiven for mistakes others got crucified for. He took risks, often dramatic ones, but he was doubly charmed: most of the time his risks paid off, and even when they didn’t, he suffered very few repercussions.

  Unlike 1st and 3rd Platoons, 2nd Platoon was not overflowing with powerful personalities. By contrast, its platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Jeremy Gebhardt, had neither Blaisdell’s magnetism nor Miller’s brashness. If anything, the twenty-eight-year-old was a bit taciturn in a culture where leaders tend to be boisterous. But his unassuming style clearly worked for him,
earning him a reputation for calm, understated excellence.

  If First Strike’s mission was to win South Baghdad, then Charlie and Bravo, situated on the western and southern borders of the battalion’s territory, were on the frontier of the fight. Bravo’s domain was a fifty-square-mile swath on the battalion’s west side. On the eastern edge of the company’s territory were Bravo’s two anchors. To the north was the town of Yusufiyah and FOB Yusufiyah, the company headquarters that Bravo shared with soldiers from the Iraqi Army’s 4th Battalion, 4th Brigade, 6th Division. The base was not large, only about 500 yards by 250 yards. American operations were almost entirely housed in one building, a gigantic corrugated-tin barn that used to be a potato-processing plant. The vast open center space had six loading bays, three on each side. Each platoon got a bay, MiTT Team 4 (a group of soldiers from the 2-502nd) took a bay, one bay was reserved for visitors such as Civilian Affairs or Combat Stress teams, and the sixth bay contained Goodwin’s and his staff’s living quarters. In recognition that Bravo was in the hottest area, Kunk centered the battalion’s medical corps in Yusufiyah as well. Goodwin put his headquarters, which the Army calls a TOC (tactical operations center), up in front of the potato barn, along with the interpreters and MiTT team offices. Members of the Iraqi Army’s 4th Battalion occupied an identical potato barn two hundred feet away.

  The southern anchor of Bravo’s area was the Jurf al-Sukr Bridge (which was usually shortened to “the JS Bridge” or just “the JSB”) and a smaller patrol base nearby right on the banks of the Euphrates located in a former water-treatment plant. The bridge, a large concrete span across the river, had been closed to traffic since the Marines took it over in late 2004. A six-mile-long, two-lane paved road called Route Sportster linked Bravo’s two nodes. One mile south of Yusufiyah on Sportster was the smaller town that the Iraqis called Al-Shuhada (“The Martyrs”) but the Americans, for reasons no one seemed to recall, had always known as Mullah Fayyad. Bravo was also in charge of a vast expanse of land to the west, which was largely terra incognita. In this area was a sprinkling of smaller hamlets that the soldiers would get to know much better over time—Rushdi Mullah, Al-Toraq, Quarguli Village. But for now, few even knew what these places were called, let alone what was lurking there.

  Like much of the battalion’s area, the terrain was perfect for guerrilla warfare. In the towns, the houses were densely packed, making it difficult and confusing for the Americans to find their way, especially when they were in a hurry. Outside the towns, there were acres of empty farmlands, affording ample privacy and plenty of places to hide weapons, bomb materials, equipment, and people. There were few paved roads, making it difficult for heavy vehicles to maneuver. And hundreds of interlacing irrigation canals diced up the land like a maze. It was easy to get pinned between two canals with only one avenue of escape, or to see an enemy just fifty yards away but have no way to get to him. Elephant grass and reeds ten or more feet high lined many of the roads, allowing insurgents to skulk about with unnerving ease. Thanks to the canal system, the land here was greener overall than might be expected, but there were still stark contrasts in a tightly concentrated space. Down by Quarguli Village on the banks of the Euphrates, the land is extravagantly lush, an idealized oasis. But just a half-mile in any direction are flats of crumbly brown, cracked earth.

  To the north of Quarguli Village, which is strung along a route called Malibu, lay the massive, abandoned Russian Thermal Power Plant construction site. Until the last months of First Strike’s deployment, however, the power plant was a no-go area for U.S. troops. “We couldn’t get in the power plant under policy constraints until June of 2006,” said Colonel Ebel. “We were restricted because of some diplomatic arrangement with Russia, at least that was the interpretation through the staff channels, all the way down to us.” Not surprisingly, it had become a stronghold for insurgents, practically a FOB of their own.

  On his early rides out around the area, Kunk saw the first glimpses of what he needed to do. Riding along with the 48th, he would hear them say, “We don’t go down that road. That road? We don’t go down that one either.” Whenever they hit a catastrophic IED, the 48th would declare the road “black” (off-limits to military traffic) and never drive down it again. As a result, they had to take tortuous, detour-filled routes to get anywhere.

  “I asked, ‘Why don’t you go down Sportster?’” Kunk remembered. “They said, ‘That is where the bad guys are, and you’ll get killed if you go out there.’ They hadn’t gone down there in many, many months. The enemy was dictating the fight. We had to change that. It was going to be tough, but we had to take Sportster back, and then we had to hold it.”

  Upon Bravo’s arrival at Yusufiyah in October, Captain Goodwin split his three platoons into three duty rotations, each twenty-one days long. One platoon would go down to the JSB, secure that territory, and run patrols and missions from there. Another platoon would be responsible for holding down FOB Yusufiyah. They would pull guard and act as the company’s Quick Reaction Force (QRF) if another Bravo element ran into trouble. If Goodwin spotted something on the J-Lens, the company’s eye-in-the-sky camera observation system, he might send them out to investigate, and they would also run support and supply convoys up to Striker or Mahmudiyah when necessary. The third platoon would be the company’s “maneuver platoon.” Also operating out of FOB Yusufiyah, they would conduct ambushes, overwatches, snatch and grabs, searches, and presence patrols, as well as outreach and contact with the local populace. Every twenty-one days, the platoons would rotate.

  Of course, no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.

  * Many of the men of the 1-502nd said they would have been far more polite about the 48th if, when the 101st started making headlines in the summer of 2006, they had not read an Atlanta Journal-Constitution story with quotes from 48th commanders implying that they had done a better job and that the 101st was handing back the gains they had made. Feeling such comments to be a knife in the back, in addition to an outrageous aggrandizement of the 48th’s accomplishments, many from First Strike acknowledged that they felt no impulse to cover for what they considered an incompetent Guard unit that they believed had surrendered its territory to the insurgency.

  5

  1st Platoon at the JS Bridge

  GOODWIN DECIDED TO send 1st Platoon down to the JSB for the first rotation. Why? “First comes before second,” he said. “No other reason than that.” Following the advance teams, much of Britt and Miller’s 1st Platoon helicoptered in to the JSB in early October. Living conditions were grim. The JSB patrol base was dominated by three main buildings surrounded by a ten-foot-high cement-covered cinder-block wall. A mortar team stayed in the plant itself, which is where the platoon set up its TOC. Most of the soldiers slept in a dingy basement of one of the other main buildings, a place they called the Bat Cave. And leaders stayed in a third, smaller building.

  There was no chow hall or any kitchen to cook meals. All the food was either the Army’s cook-in-pouch combat rations called MREs (meals, ready to eat) or hamburger patties or steaks they would grill themselves. Their first barbecue was made from a storm drain—they had cleaned it by burning it with diesel fuel—placed on top of an oil drum. There were no dishes or cutlery, so if they grilled, they either saved the MRE plasticware or gnawed on hamburger patties with their bare hands. There was no electricity, no lighting that wasn’t battery-operated, no air-conditioning during the day and no heaters at night. There were no showers, no toilets, and no Porta-Johns. There was no running water of any kind—ironic, they noted, considering the place was a water-treatment plant. Soldiers defecated in “WAG Bags,” small green garbage bags with solvents inside that were tied off and then thrown in a pit and burned once a day. Often the smoke would blow back into the guard areas, bathing the men in odors of smoldering plastic, feces, urine, and trash.

  Besides holding down the JSB patrol base itself, their other major duty was to secure something called an Armored Vehicle–Laun
ched Bridge (AVLB), a metal span that Army engineers had placed over a bend in a canal that joined the JSB frontage road to Route Sportster and provided access to both north and west. The bridge was narrow and the banks of the canal it crossed were steep. It was a lonely outpost, three-quarters of a mile from the JSB. There would be frequent controversy over the best way to secure it—and what the word “secure” meant—but generally, 1st Platoon adopted the staffing rotation that the 48th employed: three to four soldiers parked in a Humvee off to the side of the road, near the canal, twenty-four hours a day. During the daytime, it was not uncommon for the bridge to be guarded by just two soldiers in a truck. Everyone who looked at it knew it was a dangerous position. There were angles of attack from virtually every direction but bad defense sight lines, and virtually no barriers, man-made or natural, to slow any approaching vehicle. It could not be directly defended by the JSB base because it was barely within that outpost’s visible range and well beyond effective rifle range. Most of the men started calling the AVLB what the 48th had called it: the Alamo.

  Besides guard duties at the JSB and the Alamo, 1st Platoon kept patrols to a minimum early on because building up the site’s defenses was unquestionably the priority. The 48th had stationed only about a squad of men out there and they hadn’t fortified the place. There was no high gun position and there were big holes—literally blasted-out gaps—in the perimeter wall that anyone could have walked through.