Specialist James Barker was an even better example of a field soldier. Just five foot six, Barker was a natural outside the wire, one of the best combat soldiers Lauzier had ever seen. Childhood friends from Fresno, California, described Barker as a mischievous, lovable dork nicknamed Bunky who hung out mostly with girls. But as he grew older, darker traits emerged. His father died when he was fifteen and Barker fell into a depression. He joined a gang, drank, did drugs, and dropped out of school. He finished high school in 2001 at a continuing education program and had a son with a girl he met there.
He married and joined the Army in March 2003, he said, because he couldn’t hold down a job. Almost immediately, his marriage started to sour. As he was relocating to Fort Campbell, an NCO helping with the move reported Barker for being abusive to his wife and child. Barker said he grabbed his son to prevent him from falling down the stairs, but all the NCO saw was rough treatment. Barker was forced to go to anger management classes, which delayed his first deployment to Iraq by several months. After spending October 2003 to February 2004 in Mosul, he returned home, where his marriage continued to unravel even though his wife was having their second son.
Rounding out 3rd Squad were a handful of younger soldiers whom Lauzier and Yribe worked mercilessly. Being in 3rd Squad, they declared, was a privilege, and they hazed the hell out of new privates before accepting them. Twenty-two-year-old Private Justin Watt, from Tucson, Arizona, was among the newest arrivals. He had dropped out of high school to take a job with a dot-com during the Internet boom, but it went under in eighteen months. He got his GED and tried a few semesters at a technical college in Tempe, but that didn’t work out so well. He was struggling to find his role. He was a computer enthusiast who wasn’t a geek; the smart kid who wasn’t a student; the athlete who wasn’t an all-star.
He just wasn’t inspired, so he took a job as a blackjack dealer at a casino in Tucson. The money was good and, around the same time, he’d fallen in love with a girl. They were going to get married and they had a plan. He’d go back to school, get a degree, and pursue a career in casinos. No doubt it was a growth industry, but he was conflicted. At its root, gambling is a shady, depressing business. As he was questioning whether he really wanted to be a part of all that ugliness, his girlfriend dumped him, causing a total reappraisal of his priorities. He’d always admired his father, who was an Army airborne combat engineer during the late 1970s. The war in Iraq did not look like it would be ending soon. Joining the Army, especially now, he decided, would be a chance to test himself, to take the harder route for once, to be a part of something big.
Yribe and Lauzier had months of fun tormenting the small new private. But Watt never quit. He had made a promise to himself that this was the one time in his life he wasn’t going to wuss out, and, after thousands of push-ups, miles of running in place, and hours of repeating some stupid phrase or self-insult—“I am the fucking new guy, and I am gay”—it wasn’t long before he was a fully accepted member of the squad. They never stopped teasing him, but the tone had changed. It wasn’t a tryout anymore, it was just good-natured ribbing, and Watt was as proud as he had ever been.
6
Contact
AS 1ST PLATOON moved into the JSB sector, the insurgents didn’t waste any time testing their new neighbors. Only two or three days after 1st Platoon’s arrival, Yribe and two other men were guarding the Alamo in a gun truck. It was dark and quiet, almost one-thirty in the morning, when Yribe heard rustling in the reeds. Animals? People? There was no good reason for a man to be out here at night. He looked around nervously, but he couldn’t see anything. Then his vision sharpened, and silhouettes of crouched men skittered against the night sky. Jesus Christ! Two, maybe three shadows, definitely people. They were trying to sneak up on him. He opened fire. His two soldiers followed suit.
Soldiers on guard at the JSB heard a volley of fire and several grenade explosions.
“That’s the Alamo!” Platoon Sergeant Miller yelled. “Get up! Get up! Get the fuck up!” Men started piling their gear on. There was no officially designated Quick Reaction Force (QRF) yet, so everybody scrambled into the armored personnel carrier. When about a squad’s worth of men had loaded, it took off, with Cortez driving. Roughly halfway there, the shooting stopped. They arrived, unloaded, and assessed. All of Yribe’s men were fine. The insurgents had beaten a hasty retreat. Miller took Lauzier and half of 3rd Squad to search the nearby hamlet that the shooters would have had to pass through. The soldiers kicked in doors and questioned the locals, but they all professed ignorance.
First Platoon was usually up and working by 6:00 or 6:30 a.m., filling sandbags or fortifying other positions until sundown. Between those duties, patrols, and guard rotations, soldiers were lucky to get more than four hours of sleep a night. Miller was appalled at the lack of equipment and lack of support 1st Platoon received from the very first day. They were dependent on airdrops for everything. He would get on the radio every few minutes to request new supplies. You name it, they called for it: sandbags, food, ice and coolers. Two minutes later it was cots, wood, water, charcoal, and lighter fluid. Two minutes after that, shovels, pickaxes, hammers, and hoes. Finally, Goodwin said no more calls. Keep a list, for chrissake. For weeks afterward, it became a running joke. Anytime Goodwin saw Miller, he’d say, “Need anything? Need anything? Need anything?” Miller didn’t find it funny. He was annoyed that getting his guys even the bare minimum of equipment seemed to be such a low priority.
Working like coal miners and just as dirty, most of the men stripped down to their T-shirts while they were filling sandbags or doing other manual labor. Being “away from the flagpole” had its benefits. Britt and Miller didn’t sweat the finer points of uniform discipline. They were familiar with the theory why strict adherence to uniform regulations is important at all times: If you get the little things right, it shows an attention to detail, a seriousness, and a vigilance that results in greater self-respect, situational awareness, and, ultimately, safety and combat effectiveness. That’s all well and good, they reasoned, but with all the work they were doing on such little sleep and having so few of the necessities like, say, enough water to drink, if a soldier didn’t feel like shaving for a day or two, that was fine with them.
But it was not fine with battalion command. Senior leaders started circulating First Strike’s territory within the first few days of arrival and Kunk or Edwards began visiting the JSB every few days. They did not like what they saw. “Supposedly they weren’t fortifying their positions fast enough,” said Bravo Executive Officer Habash. “The Colonel came to the FOB and just destroyed Captain Goodwin over the conditions of the JSB. They’re working their asses off to fortify this place, and to have your battalion commander come down and destroy you over not doing enough was frustrating.”
But Kunk wasn’t just annoyed at what he perceived to be lack of progress. Hard work or not, he and Edwards concluded 1st Platoon was awfully quick to decide that the rules didn’t apply to them. The men looked like slobs and were sauntering around not just in their T-shirts but in T-shirts with the sleeves cut off! And flip-flops?! There was trash everywhere. They told Miller and the other NCOs to get their acts together and knock their men into line. Miller and the squad leaders tried to explain that if they had seen what the place looked like before, they’d understand how clean it actually was, how many improvements they had made, and how they were doing it all without any equipment or support. In fact, they thought they were doing a hell of a job. “I wasn’t concerned about the small shit,” said Miller. “Your boot’s unbloused? Who the fuck cares? Last time I checked, that fucker ain’t gonna stop you from getting shot in the face. But me putting up nine hundred fucking strands of wire is. The guys had their sleeves rolled up. Whoopie. It’s a hundred and twenty fucking degrees out here. Maybe they saw that as lack of leadership because I didn’t make them keep their sleeves rolled down.”
That’s precisely the way Kunk and Edwards saw it. Being far away was
no excuse to let standards slip. If anything, they insisted, it made enforcing standards even more important. What really made Kunk mad was the feeling that he wasn’t being taken seriously. “There was always a reason why they couldn’t do something,” he said. “I would put out instructions, I would be gone for a day, get back out there, and they wouldn’t be doing what we had talked about. Sergeant Miller and different people wouldn’t write stuff down. And I’m like, ‘Look man, I’m not saying this for my health. I’m saying this for a reason.’”
But to Miller, there was a very good reason they couldn’t do things as quickly as Kunk wanted: Battalion was not providing the tools they needed to do the job right. “I asked for engineer support,” he said. “Couldn’t get it. Couldn’t get any backhoes or any of that stuff down there. My big question was, ‘I know they’re here, so what’s the issue?’ And I didn’t get any clarification on that.”
A few days after the first attack on the Alamo, it got hit again, from the same direction, but this time in the late afternoon and with a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG). The RPG didn’t hit anything, but 1st Platoon was better prepared to react. They had a QRF ready to go, which found an IED made of three 155mm artillery rounds on the road leading to the Alamo from the other side. (One 155mm shell weighs about a hundred pounds and, when fired conventionally, has enough destructive force to severely damage a tank.) A squad moved into Quarguli Village. They started kicking in doors, searching houses, looking for the men or man who just shot at them and laid that IED. In a chicken shack out back of one of the houses, they found a man with an AK-47, detonation cord, and what looked like an IED trigger. They zip-tied his hands, put a sandbag over his head, roughed him up a little, and brought him back to the JSB to be picked up.
Watt remembered everybody standing around the man nonplussed. He was a skinny little wretch, 150 pounds tops, with muddy feet and no shoes. This was the enemy? How disappointing. But finding a clear suspect like this proved to be a rarity. Most of the time, they wouldn’t find anything. They would receive fire, return fire, and by the time they could get a search party together, the insurgents would be gone, and the locals would claim ignorance, not just about where the bad guys might be, but often that they had even heard shots. The men started calling their enemy “the ghosts.”
Up at FOB Yusufiyah, Goodwin and the rest of the company were also trying to settle in. The battle rhythm, it quickly became clear, was going to be unrelenting. It was a rare day when no member of Bravo got attacked by the enemy in some way. This was true throughout the entire brigade’s sector (four 2-502nd soldiers died in an IED strike on the unit’s first full day in charge of the area), but, over the year, Bravo always had a little bit more, sometimes a lot more, going on than everyone else in First Strike. Days with multiple, even ten or more, significant violent events were commonplace.
From the start, Kunk was unsympathetic to the notion that Bravo should be given any special treatment. Captain Goodwin, First Lieutenant Habash, and First Sergeant Skidis attempted to explain that their environment was more chaotic than Mahmudiyah’s, but that got no play. “Don’t think you have it any worse than anyone else” was one of Kunk’s common refrains. Bravo’s leadership couldn’t figure out if this was a motivation technique or if Kunk really thought it was true. “If Kunk really believed that, then he had to be crazy. Or supremely out of touch,” said Habash. “When we tried to say that we weren’t like Alpha and Delta, with all our troops inside the wire, sleeping peacefully at night, Battalion reacted like we were just making excuses.”
Kunk railed that Bravo was not getting the job done. Even the way they filed their daily reports was deficient. Battalion wanted highly detailed updates every day about everything that happened in each company’s sector. Alpha and Delta platoons at Mahmudiyah could go on patrols and then debrief company leadership in detail, in person, down to the color of every car they had searched. It wasn’t that simple for Bravo. “When you’re spread out and half of your reports are coming via the radio, the transmissions are unavoidably less complete,” commented Habash. “I understand what Battalion was trying to do. But there was a certain level of reality we needed to confront.” But every time he attempted to explain why Bravo’s reports were more fragmented, he said, “they thought I was blowing smoke up their ass.”
Those reports should have been the company commander’s job, but Habash started doing them because almost immediately, Goodwin seemed overwhelmed. It wasn’t more than a week or two into the deployment that the officers and NCOs around FOB Yusufiyah noticed something odd, and disconcerting: Goodwin never left the TOC. Twenty, twenty-two, even twenty-four hours a day, you could find him by the radios trying to keep tabs on the entire company’s operations. Sometimes he would skip meals. Often, soldiers would find him passed out, in the middle of the TOC, sitting in a folding director’s chair he liked to use, with a poncho liner pulled over his head. “I just thought it was the growing pains of starting up,” said 3rd Platoon’s Second Lieutenant Mark Evans. “I thought surely as we got more settled, he’d start to go to sleep. You’d just say to the guy, ‘Sir, you look like hell. You’ve been here for four days.’”
Beyond the relentless pace and the incessant violence, working with the Iraqis was maddening. “Take whoever was supposedly the mayor,” said Goodwin. “The locals tell you, ‘This is where he lives.’ So you go to the house. ‘Where is he?’ ‘He’s not here.’ ‘Well, does he live here?’ ‘No.’ ‘So where is he?’ ‘I don’t know.’ You know, you could be talking to the guy’s brother. Hell, you could be talking to the guy himself. One of the big questions: ‘Where’s so-and-so?’ ‘He’s in Baghdad.’ ‘What’s he doing in Baghdad?’ ‘He’s looking for work.’ That happens all the time. Or, asking somebody: ‘Do you speak English?’ There are two answers. Either ‘No’ or ‘A little bit.’ Sometimes ‘No’ means they are fluent, while ‘A little bit’ means that ‘A little bit’ is the only thing they know how to say. You never know what the real answers are. I would send squads out, saying, ‘You need to go find this guy.’ They would come back. ‘Where is he?’ ‘He’s in Baghdad looking for work.’ It became a running joke. One of the things I was trying to work on, and one of the things that I didn’t accomplish, I was trying to find out where everybody lived. Basically trying to build a phone book. But in a town that size it’s kind of hard, especially when half the people were squatters.”
Men up and down the ranks echoed similar frustrations. First Platoon’s Tony Yribe, who had been deployed before, didn’t trust the Iraqis at all. The ones who were insurgents would lie, the ones who supported insurgents would lie, and even the ones who didn’t also lied, all the time, for seemingly no purpose or gain. He described a common scene: “We went to a house because they had a boat, and there were supposed to be no boats along the river. And I was like, ‘Whose boat is that?’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, it’s my brother’s.’ And I’m like, ‘All right. Who lives on the other side of this house here?’ He’s like, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ So we go over there, and we’re like, ‘Hey, whose boat is that?’ ‘Oh, that’s my brother’s.’ ‘Where does he live?’ ‘Right over there.’ Where we just came from. There’s a big pile of hay nearby. And I said, ‘Hey, what’s in the haystack?’ And he said, ‘Nothing.’ And I was like, ‘Lieutenant Britt, you see what I’m saying? This is exactly what I’m saying. That guy lied to you. And now this guy is lying, too.’ Of course, we pulled out an AK and some rounds hidden in the haystack. I ended up grabbing the Hadji over my head and I threw him down. We kept searching and there was a fucking mortar pit behind his house. It had a baseplate, it had defilade. You could see the white line measuring marks. And guess what they were aiming at? The JSB. Wherever you’re from in the United States, if your neighbor’s up to something, you’re going to know. And that’s how they are. Everybody that you see knows or has participated in some kind of insurgency, or if they haven’t participated, then they’ve supported it in some way. And I told Britt, ‘You’ve got t
o think that way.’”
The Iraqi Army (IA) was as frustrating as the locals. It was well known around the battalion that Yusufiyah’s IA unit was the weakest in the sector. To many of the men, they were worse than useless: they were dangerous. In a diary entry, a squad leader in 2nd Platoon wrote about his frustration at being sent out on patrol with a squad of Iraqi soldiers on a particularly dangerous stretch of road. “The Iraqis were weak, they were tired and wanted to quit about two clicks into it,” he wrote. “I told them to suck it up and continue to walk or I’m gonna throw them into the canal. I told my interpreter to tell them that they need to learn to fight for themselves or they are gonna get whacked when the Americans leave. One of the IAs even took out his bulletproof plate and threw it in the canal because he said it was heavy and it hurt his back. Then an Iraqi sergeant gave his weapon to the interpreter and told him to carry it because it was too heavy. I will request to never go on another patrol with them.”
The biggest concern of the deployment quickly became apparent, however: the perfect terror instrument that is the IED. In their vernacular, “getting blown up,” say many of the soldiers, is by far the craziest and scariest experience of their lives. They dare you to imagine what it is like: You are driving along, handing out Beanie Babies or patrolling a road or bringing water to people, and then, boom, a violent jolt of heat, light, and force upends your universe. There is no warning and there is nothing you can do except hope you don’t die. And it doesn’t happen once, it happens over and over and over again. So, obviously, it doesn’t take long before every time you roll outside the wire, you are terrified, truly terrified that you are going to get hit. And which is worse? Getting hit or the anticipation of getting hit, the pain and damage being done to your body or the feelings of inevitability and helplessness that come before? Because that uncertainty is as pure a torture as has ever been invented.
Black Hearts: One Platoon's Descent into Madness in Iraq's Triangle of Death Page 10