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

by Jim Frederick

  “From the moment those guys hit the ground down there, it was, ‘What the hell is this trash heap? How are you supposed to defend this place?’” said Bravo’s executive officer, First Lieutenant Justin Habash. “The duration of 1st Platoon’s first rotation was work. Manual labor.” First Platoon filled sandbags, from sunup to sundown. It was dirty, demoralizing physical labor that quickly devolved into sheer exhaustion. To build a rooftop gun perch, soldiers would load rucksacks with as many sandbags as they could carry and trudge up several flights of stairs. There was a profound lack of equipment. They had only two hammers. They had only two pairs of gloves to string concertina wire. They had no saws. They had to use their Gerber hand tools, essentially high-end Swiss Army knives, to cut two-by-fours and planks of plywood.

  Staff Sergeant Miller had no doubts about 1st Platoon’s abilities, but there was no denying they were a young and inexperienced group. There had been a lot of turnover after Operation Iraqi Freedom 1 (OIF1). Many of the NCOs were in leadership positions for the first time. Obviously, many of the youngest soldiers were hardly men at all—eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-olds. But in this platoon, even some of the older guys with ample time in the military had had little time in the infantry.

  Forty-one years old, 1st Squad’s leader Staff Sergeant Travis Nelson enlisted in the Army before some of his soldiers were born, but he’d been an infantryman only since he re-entered active duty just over a year before this deployment. Born in Cullman, Alabama, he entered the service in 1982 and served twelve years as a tanker. During the Gulf War, absolutely everyone who talks about Nelson will tell you, he was part of the longest tank-to-tank kill in history. Men in the platoon lovingly called Nelson “Gramps” or “Old Man River.” Old as he was, Nelson never dogged it during a run or PT (physical training). He always hung in there and sometimes bested kids half his age.

  Nelson’s wife, Shelly, was always amazed when a young soldier mentioned to her that Travis was a tough boss. To her, at home, he was as cuddly as a puppy dog. She mailed him a steady stream of care packages, filled with Marlboro Lights and Red Diamond single-serve coffee sachets. Nelson was willing to endure many hardships, but he was not willing to forgo freshly brewed coffee. Back home, Shelly and he had become especially good friends with Miller and his wife. The two couples would spend long nights playing Spades and the men would go fishing all the time. Not long before the division headed out, Shelly was sitting out on the front porch of her home and she told Miller to bring Travis home safe to her.

  “The old man will be home,” Miller said. “I promise.”

  Nelson’s Alpha Team leader, and thus the squad’s second in command, was Sergeant Kenith Casica. A thirty-two-year-old native of the Philippines, Casica grew up in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He met his wife, Renee, in high school when he was seventeen and she was fourteen. She got pregnant and they got married two years later. He worked at McDonald’s, delivered papers, and poured concrete. Sick of dead-end jobs, he joined the Army in 1996 to give his family a better life. Ken and Renee ultimately had three kids. While he enjoyed the Army, he was looking beyond it. He ran an Amway business and wanted to go to college, become a registered nurse, and someday get his U.S. citizenship. Casica was, everybody says, the nicest guy they had ever met. A lean six foot three and handsome, with a big, broad smile, he made his home one of the unofficial clubhouses for the platoon, especially for the younger unmarried guys. They were always welcome to come over, hang out, and have a beer.

  Casica’s unflappable friendliness extended to Iraqis. When he was in OIF1, also with Bravo Company, he was always the most outgoing to the Hadjis (or simply Hadj), as soldiers universally called Iraqis. He learned an impressive amount of Arabic during his first deployment. He had mastered the common Middle Eastern and Asian resting position back on one’s haunches that soldiers called “the Hadji squat,” and he had even bought a dishdasha, the white flowing Middle Eastern garb that soldiers call a “man dress.” Because of his dark complexion, Iraqis often thought he was an Arab and locals warmed to him instantly. He didn’t just talk about helping Iraqis, he actually did it. He’d use his own money to buy extra cases of soft drinks, or sometimes he’d “find” a few extra during a resupply mission, which he would give to a couple of Mosul boys who had a roadside beverage business. He helped them build their stand out of broken-up shipping pallets and other street jetsam. It looked just like Lucy van Pelt’s psychiatry office from Peanuts. The hand-lettered sign he helped paint declared the name of the watering hole: “The Thirsty Goat.” He retained his optimism about the Iraqis even after he was injured by an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) blast in OIF1 that sank shrapnel fragments deep into his shoulder blade. His platoon mates frequently ribbed him about just how buddy-buddy he was with the Iraqis. They called him a Hadji Hugger or Hadji Fucker, but he didn’t care. If the point of being here was to help the people, he said to anyone who gave him a hard time (which was often good-natured, but sometimes not), then let’s help them. Because otherwise, what the hell are we doing here?

  A kid desperate for a father figure, Private First Class Jesse Spielman was exactly the sort of 1st Squad trooper to flock to Casica’s house. The twenty-one-year-old was born in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, to a teenage mom. Spielman’s grandmother was concerned that her own daughter was not fit to raise the child and, after some ugly legal wranglings, she assumed custody of the boy when he was seven. Beyond that rocky beginning, Spielman’s grandmother remembered him as a sweet child who was eager to please. One of Spielman’s uncles gave him an Army camouflage outfit when he was eight or nine years old and from then on all he would do was play Army man outside. Sometimes his grandmother had trouble getting that getup off of him long enough for her to wash it. He joined the Army in March 2005 and became a member of the 101st in August. He married just before deploying, his bride wearing a T-shirt that said, “I love my soldier.” His superiors found Spielman to be a quiet kid, hard to draw out, but a competent trooper who was easy to lead and eager to advance. If there was a cleanup call or some other random task to accomplish and his squad mates were resting, he’d just do it himself. When an NCO would tell him to wake his buddies up and spread the work, he’d say, “Naw, let ’em sleep.”

  Private Steven Green was one of those squad mates Spielman would let sleep. Growing up in Midland, Texas, Green was always the odd kid, the outsider, the strange child on the margins always picked last for kickball. Though highly intelligent, he was bowlegged and uncoordinated. He bumped into things, and he had a drooling problem that lasted well into the 8th grade. According to court records, he was an unwanted child, his mother did not hesitate to tell him. She simply never bonded with him, never grew to love him. She called him “demon spawn” and constantly compared him unfavorably with his brother, Doug, who was three years his senior. Working nights at a bar, she was a neglectful mother who let her children fend for themselves. Doug was, not surprisingly, unable to cope with the responsibility of being a surrogate parent from as young as age seven or eight. He subjected Steven and their little sister to frequent, brutal beatings, sometimes requiring trips to the hospital and once breaking several of the girl’s fingers.

  Green’s parents divorced when he was eight and he lived with his mother until she kicked him out of the house at age fourteen. Diagnosed with ADHD and low-grade depression as an adolescent, he bounced around various family members’ homes for the next few years. Desperate for attention, he did win a few friends in high school by being the class clown. He would entertain at pep rallies by doing a spastic chicken dance and smash dozens of soda cans on his forehead during lunch. After he dropped out of high school in the 10th grade, trouble followed him wherever he went. Smoking cigarettes, drinking booze, and walking around with marijuana are fairly common activities for teenagers, but Green managed to get caught, arrested, and convicted for each of those things by the time he was nineteen, spending a few weeks in juvenile detention for one and a few days in jail for another.
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  Along the way, he had developed some pointed ideas about society, culture, religion, and race. He decided to join the Army in early 2005, not just as a way out of his rut but as a means to participate in what he saw as the latest flare-up of a centuries-long struggle between Western civilization and Eastern barbarism. “This is almost like a race war, like a cultural war,” he said about 9/11, the March 2004 Madrid train bombings, and the now lengthening conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. “And anyone who is my age who is not going to go fight in it is a coward. They can say it’s about this or that, but it’s really about religion. It’s about not even which culture is going to rule the Middle East, but which culture is going to rule the West. I felt like Islam is, was, and always will be like fascism.”

  Green spent several months obtaining a high-school correspondence diploma and the Army granted him a “moral waiver” for his prior convictions. With the Army strapped for personnel, it granted such waivers to almost one in five recruits in 2005, an increase of 44 percent over prewar levels. After graduating from basic training, he headed to Fort Campbell in July 2005. Green was not a terrible soldier—in fact, he would be promoted to private first class relativly quickly, in November—but here, as in school, he developed a reputation for not being quite right in the head. There was no doubt he was smart, and he read far more widely than is typical for a soldier. One lieutenant was surprised to find Rousseau’s Social Contract on his bookshelf. But he was a racist, a white supremacist, and a misanthrope. He remained socially awkward and unable to control his emotions or impulses. He was also an incessant monologuist, with no internal editor, who launched into the most ridiculous and offensive tirades about “niggers,” about Jews, about northerners, about foreigners, about anyone. He did have some friends, but much of the platoon viewed him less as a class clown and more as the village idiot—occasionally entertaining as spectacle, but best kept at arm’s length.

  Second Squad was a much more low-key operation than Bravo’s other squads, and that suited squad leader Staff Sergeant Chris Payne just fine. To the best of his ability, Payne pursued a no-drama policy in his personal and professional life. It was part of the reason, the twenty-four-year-old said, he had advanced fairly quickly in his career: he tried not to get bothered by the things that other people wasted their time getting upset about. The politics, the power games, the backbiting—he just blocked them all out and did his job. Some of his men said that this remote and detached attitude sometimes lapsed into inattention that put outsized responsibility on his subordinates. Payne countered that training his team leaders to step up was part of a squad leader’s job.

  The team leader whom Payne relied upon most was Sergeant John Diem. By most other soldiers’ definition, Diem would appear to be a textbook dork. He was not physically imposing and he did not have a commanding voice. He had thick glasses and reddish curly hair. He played a lot of Xbox, read Japanese comic books, and was a role-playing-game enthusiast. But Diem had fought in OIF1 and he had ascended to a leadership role by virtue of hard work, accomplished technical proficiency, and an obvious, overwhelming intelligence. He always got the job done, and he also had a steely will. Easy to underestimate, he was impossible to intimidate, and he was not afraid to tell subordinates and superiors alike truths they did not want to hear.

  Upon taking leadership of 3rd Squad, thirty-four-year-old Sergeant Eric Lauzier resolved to turn his crew into the toughest, hardest, tightest squad in the company, if not the whole battalion. Lauzier was aggressive, manic, task-driven. He was Sergeant Miller’s go-to guy. Captain Goodwin came to think of him as his Clydesdale, who would just pull and pull and pull until he reached the goal, or broke down trying. Whether it was his maps or his green, cloth-covered notebook that every Army NCO and officer carries around, or even his underwear, Lauzier signed almost everything he owned with his name followed by the initials “BMF”—Bad Motherfucker.

  This was his second stint in the military. He’d been a Marine in the 1990s. Dissatisfied with civilian life, he sought to reenlist in 2001. The Marines wanted him to complete boot camp again as a private, but the Army said he could keep his rank and head straight to Fort Campbell. He was a specialist with Bravo during the invasion (and he would be promoted to staff sergeant in December 2005), making him the only squad leader in 1st Platoon with OIF1 experience.

  That campaign, especially the invasion, felt like everything Lauzier thought war would be: entire companies of men following slow-moving tanks as they advanced on a defined enemy. He remembered his first kill, the pink mist of impact, the way the man’s body dropped—instantly—drained of all vitality, hitting the ground with a thud. Lauzier remembered the electric, elemental frisson of realization that he was still alive, and that other guy, that guy was now dead because of him. He remembered all of them, five confirmed kills, including one rare hand-to-hand kill in Mosul. He still thought a lot about those five men, often when he didn’t want to.

  Lauzier did not head out on his second tour to make friends with Iraqis. He was going to Iraq to put the hurt on the enemy. And don’t let anybody lie to you, he cautioned: All throughout the deployment, nobody was talking about counterinsurgency the way they might be now. That suited him just fine. Hearts and minds didn’t work in Vietnam, he often said, and it wasn’t going to work here.

  Lauzier was emphatic in wanting his men to be the best and he rode them hard. He made his guys do extra PT, extra drills, extra book study. He rarely slept and he consumed almost a case of energy drinks a day. After OIF1, he had washed out of Special Forces selection because he botched a land-navigation test, a failure that irked him. From then on, he made map and compass skills a priority for himself and his squad.

  Despite the French half of his ancestry that contributed his last name, he identified much more with the Italian side of his heritage. Woe to the smart aleck who asked, “How you doing, Sergeant Lo-zjay?” because that kid was going to be doing push-ups for hours. Some of the senior NCOs called him Lolo, but the younger guys were strictly forbidden from calling him that too. He had several tattoos, including the face of the Joker on his left forearm, the phrase “Laugh Now, Cry Later” on his left calf, a memorial to a fallen friend from OIF1 around his right wrist, and “Machine 0311” around his left (“0311” is the Marine designation for infantryman and “Machine” an expression of his indefatigability). Lauzier looked around at his squad and he liked what he saw. He had more OIF1 veterans than anyone in the platoon, and they were some pretty tough customers.

  The toughest customer of them all was Sergeant Tony Yribe, a walking, talking G.I. Joe action figure and Lauzier’s Alpha Team leader. He’d joined the Army just eight days after 9/11 and had already served tours in Germany, Kosovo, and Iraq during OIF1 with the 1st Infantry Division before transferring to the 101st in January 2005. Though only a team leader, he radiated a powerful charisma that made him by far one of the dominant personalities of the platoon. Some say he surpassed the squad leaders and the platoon sergeants as the real seat of power in the platoon. The younger guys flocked to him, wanted to be like him, idolized him. He could be brusque and intolerant of those he did not like or respect, and extraordinarily loyal and kind to those he did, which made being a member of his inner circle particularly sweet.

  No small part of Yribe’s persona was his fearlessness in combat. If the situation was getting dicey, he was not afraid to pull the trigger. He saw a lot of fighting during his first deployment, and that experience had hardened him greatly. He had a tattoo of a Glock 9mm pistol on his right hip and the word “Warrior” in a semicircle around his stomach. Lauzier called Yribe his linebacker because of the way he would just blow through doors and lay dudes flat. Yribe had an uncanny knack for being where the action was. “I would joke with him that if something bad was going to happen, I could count on him being there,” said Goodwin. Yribe saw no need to apologize for this. He just refused to take any shit, especially from Hadj. If you had to use force to get their attention or win their complia
nce, he argued, then that was what you had to do. And if anyone thought it could be any other way, well, then, he was quite certain they hadn’t spent very much time on the line.

  One of the guys most completely under Yribe’s spell was Specialist Paul Cortez, who had recently transferred to the Deuce from the 4th Infantry Division. With wide-wingspan ears and a pronounced widow’s peak, he resembled a postadolescent Eddie Munster. Living in motel rooms around Barstow, California, with his drug-addict mother for most of his childhood, Cortez was taken in by the parents of a school friend around the age of fourteen. Under his foster parents’ care, he flourished, pulling his grades up and finishing high school. When he turned eighteen, they discussed his options. College wasn’t realistic, and technical schools were expensive, so Cortez joined the Army.

  Cortez had driven a Bradley Fighting Vehicle with the 4th Infantry Division during OIF1, and when he arrived at the 101st Airborne, he was originally assigned to Payne’s squad. But Payne couldn’t deal with him. Cortez had potential, Payne thought, but his work was inconsistent. For two, three weeks, even a month, he could be a good soldier with real leadership potential, and then he’d mess things up again, get into a fight, get busted for weed, or drink himself into the hospital. He had a nasty streak, too, and a chip on his shoulder. He was obsessed with proving himself better than others, but he was rarely more than average at anything he did. When given a challenge, sometimes he would rise to meet it, but just as often he would quit in a heap of complaints and sulks.

  “You take him,” Payne told Lauzier. “See if you can do something with him.” Lauzier could and did, finding him to be a classic “field soldier”—someone who doesn’t do well in garrison but excels on the front line. In a lot of ways, he was exactly what Lauzier wanted.