“It’s like someone has a gun to your head and you don’t know whether they’re going to kill you or let you live,” remembered one soldier. Even in a firefight, as scary as those can be, at least you feel like you have some control over your destiny, which is why, let’s be honest, they can also be exhilarating. You can fight back, there are people to engage, and even though some Americans might get shot or even die, an undeniable confidence remains because you seriously doubt that a bunch of insurgents, even a large group of them, will beat a group of Americans in a straight-up firefight. But IEDs? They are inescapable, they are frightening in an almost unimaginable way and they begin to weigh on you.
Every ride in a Humvee, every one, is an exercise in terror. You’re riding, with your butt cheeks and fists clenched, doing deep breathing to get control of your heart rate and your nausea the whole time, waiting for it, waiting for it, waiting for it. And still, when it happens, it is still the most surprising thing in the world. One fraction of a second, everything is normal, and the next, well, it depends, but it is definitely not normal. Depending on the size of the bomb and how closely it detonates, any combination of light, heat, pressure, dirt, fire, metal, wind, and noise will hit you in a way your body can never be prepared for. Sometimes you remember every millisecond of the thwomp of that elemental combination blast. Other times you black out for those crucial few seconds, come to with your body in any number of surprising contortions, and wonder, what, what happened? How long ago did it happen? Am I okay? Is that other guy okay? Are we all okay? And if you are not cut and bleeding, you’re probably still hurt in some way. You might not be able to hear for hours, and you might not hear right for days. Your vision might be blurry. And the headaches, there will be headaches, because you can’t knock around your brain like that without there being some aftereffects. And if you are not injured but the vehicle is undrivable, you should settle in, because you have to cordon off the area and there’s a good chance the wrecker is not going to show up for several hours. And while you are sitting there, the anger builds as you review what just happened. Somebody, not far from this spot, someone right around here—it could be him, or him, or him—just tried to kill you. Who of these motherfuckers just tried to kill you? If you conduct a search and are a combination of lucky and good, you might find a guy or two who have incriminating evidence on them. And then you can lay into them, have a momentary lick or two of revenge. But otherwise? Nothing. There is nothing you can do. There is no release for the anger and the adrenaline coursing through your veins. And look around. There’s a man on a cell phone, a lady putting out some washing, a kid walking down the road, and you just cannot figure it. How can none of these people know anything about what just happened here? All of them said they have no idea. How could they not know? Of course they know. Somebody tried to kill you, he got away, and all of these people know something, yet they aren’t saying anything. How could you not want to kill them, too, for protecting the person who just tried to kill you? How would you contain that rage?
On October 25, less than a month into its deployment, Bravo took its first serious IED casualty. Led by Second Lieutenant Mark Evans, 3rd Platoon was running a heavy schedule, at least three or four separate patrols that day. They had already been on a 3:00 a.m. patrol when, at 11:00 a.m., they headed back outside the wire from FOB Yusufiyah. Evans was in the first of four Humvees in an eighteen-man patrol, driving down Mullah Fayyad highway when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a rag tied to a power line that he had never seen before. Great, he thought, that’s a marker for an IED. Before he had time to complete the realization, an IED exploded near the No. 2 truck. Everybody got on the radio as they checked men and machines. You good? You good? they asked one another. Okay, we’re all good. Everybody was fine, except for the gunner. His bell was rung a little, but he’d be okay, so they pressed on. The patrol headed back to the FOB.
Later in the day, Evans got assigned to inspect a site where insurgents had previously fired mortars at the FOB. He generally regarded these as a waste of time. Sometimes there was evidence, or it really was someone’s backyard, but most of the time the enemy mortar teams were good about cleaning up all of their equipment or any other trace that they had been there. More often than not, Evans and his men would go out, look at an empty field, and return, which is what happened this time. But driving back, Evans saw a guy on Route Peggy, just hanging out around his car. As soon as the convoy slowed down, the Iraqi got into his car and sped away. Evans had his gunner fire a warning shot, and the man stopped. He spoke excellent English and his car was clean. Both of these facts were out of the ordinary, but not exactly suspicious, either, so Evans let him go. As the convoy started up again and turned at the next intersection, 3rd Platoon’s second IED of the day went off. Again, after a quick check of everyone, there were no injuries. Evans decided to dismount everyone and search the area. The men fanned out, looking for wires, blast fragments, witnesses, anything. Walking up to the crater in the center of the road, which was about twelve feet wide and four feet deep, he saw some wires, which he figured must lead to the trigger position. He had removed his protective eye shields to get a better look at them, and he was getting ready to call some men over to help him investigate, when he had the distinct sensation he was being watched. He stood up to find who might be looking at him. There was another IED still buried next to the crater he was inspecting, and he was standing on top of it. The triggerman closed the connection and Evans’s third IED of the day exploded.
He felt no pain. Just the sensation of wind on his face, and then what felt like a bad sunburn. Evans couldn’t tell at first if he was standing anymore (he had been knocked off of his feet, several feet in the air, and was now lying on his back), but, to himself, his thought process was calm and rational.
“As long as I have all my fingers and toes,” he told himself, “everything’s going to be okay.” He couldn’t see a thing, but he was much more concerned about accounting for his digits than the fact that he had been blinded. He counted his fingers and wiggled his toes. “All right, I’m good,” he thought and sank serenely into a kind of catatonia. For some time, his sightlessness did not bother him very much. The medic ran over and started applying an IV to Evans, telling him he was going to be okay.
“Am I burned, Doc?”
“Oh no, sir, you’re fine,” said the medic, lying. In fact, he was badly discolored, his neck was bleeding, his eyes were swollen shut, and he had several broken bones in his face—he looked much more like he’d smashed his face on a car windshield than he’d been hit by an IED. Another soldier had been knocked off of his feet by the blast, too, but he did not have a scratch on him.
Evans had entered a very placid state of shock. His primary thought was that tonight he was guaranteed a good night’s sleep, a prospect that pleased him very much. When they returned to the FOB and prepared for the medevac helicopter, Evans still wasn’t registering just how seriously he had been injured. Probably because he couldn’t see how disturbing his bloody and disfigured face was, he wasn’t grasping why everyone was freaking out. In his mind, everybody just needed to chill out.
When they loaded him into the helicopter, the medevac guys were all business. They kept asking him his Social Security number, his birth date, his hometown. He was pretty sure he was speaking coherently, so what was this all about? he wondered. Was this supposed to keep him from falling into shock?
“My birthday is the same as the last time you asked,” he finally said. They put a heart-rate clip on his finger. He held his breath, and the thing started beeping.
The paramedic started rattling around in his bag and yelling, “Come on, buddy! I need you to breathe, buddy! Come on!”
“Hey dude,” Evans said, “I’m just messing with you. I’m fine.” The medic was not amused. Evans was flown back to the States.* Bravo Company had just lost its first platoon leader.
While Kunk and the rest of the battalion leadership already had their concerns about Brav
o’s 1st Platoon, an early major noncombatant injury ensured that the unit registered quickly in brigade commander Ebel’s mind as well. As a part of routine hygiene and maintenance down at the JSB, some unlucky private would have to burn the platoon’s WAG Bags and other accumulated garbage in a large pit every day. It was common practice to use diesel fuel to speed the process. Diesel is ideal because it burns slowly and is less volatile than other types of fuel. On October 28, the private in charge of the pit-burning detail did not douse the waste with diesel but used JP-8, the Army’s standard kerosene-based vehicle fuel, which, like gasoline, is highly combustible.
He leaned over the open pit, looking down as he threw a match. Whoomph! A geyser of flame and green and black and brown debris shooting thirty feet high engulfed him. Soldiers scrambled out of the way of the incoming shit as burnt, runny plastic remnants cascaded down like a fecal fountain. When the flame died down, the private was still standing there, blackened and crusted like Wile E. Coyote when one of his inventions blows up. His shirt was gone—it had been blasted off of him—and his hair and eyebrows were burned off. His skin was literally smoking. And he was in tremendous pain.
Paul Cortez, who was out on patrol a mile or two away, called back on the radio, “Hey, did you guys get hit? We saw an explosion.” Several soldiers, already laughing their asses off, found Cortez’s call utterly hilarious. Others, however, realized the seriousness of the situation, that the soldier was covered in second- and third-degree burns. He was so badly hurt, in fact, that he had to be medevaced out and ultimately sent home. Kunk and Edwards were apoplectic. The first major casualty that 1st Platoon suffered was not just a completely preventable noncombat injury but a humiliating one at that: a soldier blew himself up with a pile of shit.
Once Ebel learned what had injured the Bravo soldier he was visiting in the Camp Striker hospital burn unit, he was dismayed as well. And when Ebel saw Miller after the accident, which was the first time the two had ever met, the initial impression he had was that the young platoon sergeant was immature and overconfident and had failed to appreciate the enormity of what had just happened: a classic case of a poorly led, poorly supervised soldier.
Miller was not aware that opinion of him was already turning. He readily accepted his reamings from Kunk and Edwards, and a letter of reprimand from Ebel, over the burned soldier because, no question, there was a lapse of discipline. But he also said he got a lot of praise and left his first JSB rotation believing everybody thought he had done a good job. “I’d probably personally talked to Colonel Kunk four times, including the ass chewing for the accident and one other time he was unhappy about us being sloppy,” he recalled. “But the other two times he stopped by, he said we were doing great things, telling us, ‘You guys are doing a good job. Keep it up.’ So I felt comfortable at that point. I felt real comfortable.”
* Back in the United States, doctors determined that his corneas were so scratched and one retina was so badly detached that it took three weeks and scores of experts’ consultations before anyone was sure he would be able to see again. After surgeries to both eyes and six months’ recuperation, Evans made a full recovery and is still serving in the Army.
NOVEMBER 2005
7
Route Sportster and Bradley Bridge
ON OCTOBER 29, a 3rd Platoon Bravo patrol was heading down Route Peggy on the way back to FOB Yusufiyah. Only a few hundred yards from the intersection with Sportster, one of the Humvees hit an IED that blew the front of the vehicle clean off. The triggerman miscalculated by a split second. If the blast had been a belly shot, everyone in the vehicle would have been vaporized. The truck’s chassis skidded to a stop and everyone checked themselves over. Amazingly, no one was hurt.
After toying with the Sportster problem since the moment they got there, Goodwin and Kunk decided the time had come to secure it for good. On October 30, 2nd Platoon, which had been sent out as the original Quick Reaction Force (QRF) for the IED hit, took over a house on the northwest corner of Sportster and Peggy. It was a large, square, two-story home on the southeast corner of Mullah Fayyad with storefronts on the two street-facing sides and living areas in the back and on the second floor. This house would come to be known as TCP (traffic control point) 1.
A day or two after that, with the help of an Iron Claw IED-sniffing team, Bravo mounted an all-day clearing mission of Sportster. But everybody already knew that once you cleared something, if you turned your back, insurgents could reseed a road in a matter of hours. In order to keep Sportster clear, they had to hold it. So Goodwin started dropping Humvees with fire teams at one- or two-mile intervals down the stretch.
“We just started parking vehicles on the road, telling them, ‘Stay here until properly relieved,’” said Goodwin. But the ideal relief, in the form of Iraqi soldiers manning the checkpoints, never came. Kunk intended the TCPs to be a way for the Iraqi Army to take more responsibility for this sector, but, especially this early in the deployment, they simply refused to operate in so dangerous an area. In Mahmudiyah and Lutufiyah, Kunk had more success persuading the Iraqi Army to participate, but, he says, “anything on the west side, Yusufiyah, Mullah Fayyad, Sportster, they would say, ‘Ali Baba is there. The bad guy is there.’” Kunk’s idea thus became to use the TCPs as a stairstep. Build them with U.S. forces and then, as the IA gained confidence, slowly hand them over.
The vehicle drop positions, over time, would evolve and harden into TCP positions 2, 3, and 4. “We thought it was going to be a seventy-two-hour mission,” said 3rd Platoon’s platoon sergeant, Phil Blaisdell. “Seventy-two hours turned into like six days. I had a beard. And all of a sudden it was permanent. We started getting concertina wire down there. And I’m like, ‘Good God, what are we doing?’” The numerical designations and configurations of the TCPs would vary slightly throughout the year. A fifth TCP would open on the northwest corner of Mullah Fayyad, and a TCP6 would ultimately open between TCP2 and TCP3. Bravo Company was now in the road checkpoint business, and by the end of the deployment, the stairstep strategy had resulted in the Iraqi Army claiming full control of only one checkpoint on Sportster.
Across the battalion, the TCPs were controversial. It was far from unanimous that they were a good idea. The TCPs were static positions, and they were not well defended. They were not patrol bases, but outposts in true enemy territory with no more—and usually far less—than a squad manning each one. TCP1 and TCP4 had buildings where troops could eat and have some form of downtime, while TCP3 had not so much a building but, as Goodwin put it, “a bunch of cinder blocks piled together in an organized manner.”
In the first incarnation of TCP2, troops lived out of two Humvees, including trying to sleep in them, for days at a time. Early on, there were no HESCO Barriers, large six-foot cubed mesh baskets that when filled with dirt by a backhoe provided admirable protection from gunfire but when empty were no better than a chain-link fence. When HESCOs did arrive, there was no heavy equipment to fill them.
Even with each one so thinly manned, the TCPs were also a drain on the company’s combat power. Manning the TCPs consumed a whole platoon. Bravo’s initial staffing philosophy—one platoon at the JSB and two platoons at Yusufiyah, with one to be home guard and one to run maneuver operations—was out the window. Goodwin worried about the staffing pressures the TCPs were putting on his company. Between guard rotations, scheduled and unscheduled patrols, and sleep, the “troops-to-task” math was already not adding up. “The first time I requested more men in November, I was, I don’t want to say joking, but we’d sit down at a Commanders’ Update Brief, and it would be like, ‘What do you need?’ And I would say, ‘I need a platoon,’” Goodwin remembered. “‘No, really, what do you need?’ ‘Well, I need water, and I need this, and I need that. And a platoon would be nice.’ I know the battalion is short on manpower. The brigade is short. But I need another squad or four to keep doing what I’m doing, to give my guys a break.”
This frustration was echoed at every l
evel. “Before,” said 2nd Platoon’s platoon sergeant, Jeremy Gebhardt, “if you were a platoon back at the FOB, you rotated with another platoon, so when they patrolled, you got some downtime to catch your breath. Once a platoon’s on TCPs, you’ve lost that completely. You look at it on paper, and you’re like, ‘Okay, this can work.’ But even when guys are just sitting at the TCP, there’s several hours per day just doing patrols around your area that aren’t factored into what’s on paper. Then, at that point, you start seeing guys getting strung out, and you start getting concerned for how they are holding up. That was a yearlong struggle trying to convince the battalion level of this. But it all came back to, ‘Hey, you’ve got this many guys. It takes this many to do this.’ And that was it.”
Second Platoon’s platoon leader, Lieutenant Jerry Eidson, said his faith in his superiors evaporated once he took stock of the TCP mission. “It was ridiculous,” he said. “We were a company spread out trying to operate like we were a battalion. Nobody in my platoon had any confidence in our command structure at all after that.”
Kunk maintained that the strategic importance of Sportster left him no choice. “It had become a superhighway for the insurgents to get into Baghdad, so we had to take it back,” he proclaimed. In that regard, the Sportster plan fit with Ebel’s strategy for the brigade as well. Sportster, in Ebel’s words, became “the base of the anvil” upon which the rest of the brigade, and special operations forces, would continue to hammer the insurgent hideouts to the west. “The risk was, if we gave that up, we would have released an avenue where the enemy would skirt around,” he said.
Black Hearts: One Platoon's Descent into Madness in Iraq's Triangle of Death Page 11