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

by Jim Frederick

  But many others dismiss the idea that Sportster, when open, was an insurgent superhighway or, when occupied, acted as a barrier to infiltration. They point to a number of routes on a map that circumvent Sportster on the way to Baghdad or Mahmudiyah. “It was obvious they were still coming into my AO across Sportster,” said Alpha commander Jared Bordwell. “They just didn’t have T-shirts that said ‘Insurgent’ on them when they did. I don’t think we needed to own Sportster. It didn’t do anything except give the insurgents a static target and allow soldiers to get complacent and do stupid things.”

  Others maintain that even if securing Sportster as a resupply route to the JSB was important, it could not be done with so few men. Charlie Company First Sergeant Dennis Largent believed this was obvious from the beginning. “Bravo couldn’t do shit in their own sector because they were tied down to those TCPs,” he said. “As early as November we saw that Bravo Company was getting attrited. They needed some help. That’s where the fucking fight was. It wasn’t in Mahmudiyah with the sewer project or whatever. The focus of that battalion sector should have been clearing out Yusufiyah. Cleaning house in there so that that company would stop getting attrited.”

  A major component of the Sportster effort was psychological, an affirmation that the enemy never tells the U.S. Army where it can and cannot go. “The taking of Sportster was a big moment, because that sent a clear message to the enemy that we were not going away,” Kunk explained. “We said early on, ‘We are taking it back and we are keeping it. And we are going to own it. And not only are we going to own that, we are going to go anywhere we want to go because we are going to dictate everything.’”

  But some officers wondered if this idea of freedom became too much of a priority for its own sake than one that served a larger mission. “Colonel Kunk put his name out there by saying ‘We will own that road,’” explained Bordwell. “Well, in Iraq when you say ‘I am going to own something,’ that means your feet are on it ninety-nine percent of the time. So he bought something by saying that. And no one did the math on what it was going to take and what we were going to sacrifice in order to own that piece of property.”

  On November 2, Sergeant Major Edwards was making a routine battlefield circulation. First Strike had been in theater just over a month. One of Edwards’s priority stops, on the orders of Ebel, was to go to the JSB and impress upon Miller the seriousness of the burn-pit incident. The Personal Security Detachment (PSD), the convoy unit that escorted Kunk or Edwards wherever they went, was another battalion-wide tasking, and each company had to provide a handful of soldiers for the effort. Bravo had detailed several, including Specialist Josh Munger and Private First Class Tyler MacKenzie.

  As Edwards was chewing out Miller, the guys from 1st Platoon had a chance to catch up with Munger and MacKenzie and the rest of the PSD hanging out at the motor pool, just to gab and get the scoop on what life was like for the rest of the battalion. MacKenzie was Justin Watt’s roommate back in the barracks at Fort Campbell and one of his best friends. Once, before deployment, MacKenzie told Watt that he was confident he wouldn’t die in Iraq because he had never won anything in his life, even a raffle, so why should he win the biggest, baddest, anti-lottery of them all? Nah, he assured Watt, he’d be fine.

  Heading back to Mahmudiyah, the PSD traveled along Route Temple in Charlie’s area. Around 12:45 p.m., the lead vehicle of the four-truck convoy crossed a large earthen bridge known as Bradley Bridge, so named because it was where a catastrophic IED had hit a Bradley Fighting Vehicle during a previous unit’s deployment. Here, the lead Humvee met the same fate. An intelligence report later said that insurgents had posed as contractors and dug in a gigantic IED with heavy construction equipment months before. The explosion was enormous, completely obliterating the Humvee, leaving it a smoking and twisted heap of metal.

  First Lieutenant Tim Norton was on patrol with a group of Charlie Company soldiers when they heard the explosion. Norton was assigned to the Lutufiyah MiTT team, but before deployment he had been a Charlie platoon leader. Since Charlie was based out of Lutufiyah, and Norton was a devoted child of the People’s Army, he would hang out with, and patrol with, his old Charlie guys every chance he got.

  The twenty-three-year-old from Mansfield, Massachussetts, was the Distinguished Military Graduate ROTC cadet at Providence College in 2004, a history buff, and a proficient violinist who could identify most songs on a classical radio station within a few seconds. Straight out of Ranger School, he headed to Charlie, where he benefited enormously from the mentoring of his platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Lonnie Hayes, one of the best NCOs in the battalion. Norton was assigned to the MiTT team when somebody discovered he had studied Arabic in college. He had vigorously resisted being moved away from his men on the eve of battle, but it was futile. He was making the best of the MiTT beat, but he far preferred what he was doing now, out patrolling with the Cobras, and he did it every chance he got.

  With the explosion only a few miles away, the Charlie soldiers got a call to head straight there. Reports from the scene were fragmented, but it was clear there were dead and wounded, and medevac choppers started spinning up. Munger, along with Specialist Benjamin Smith, had been thrown more than twenty feet from the vehicle and were likely killed instantly. Sergeant Cory Collins was injured but MacKenzie was missing: he was simply gone.

  Norton and the Charlie guys arrived about ten minutes later. This was Norton’s first experience of combat, and he was surprised at how disorienting it was. The Humvee was obliterated. The entire engine block had been detached and thrown clear of the rest of the assembly. The chassis looked like a scale model of a roller coaster that had been set ablaze. A door had been tossed more than three hundred feet. The roof and gun turret landed in the canal and there were no tires left, just fist-sized scraps of rubber.

  Most of the men in the other three vehicles had taken up defensive positions, while the medic and a few others ran to the canal to try to find their men and treat any survivors. Some seemed to be walking around almost aimlessly in a state of shock. Sergeant Major Edwards himself was in a daze. Several men were firing on suspected trigger locations to the north and west. A .50-caliber machine gun, which fires rounds several inches long that can rip through solid concrete, started banging away at the houses from atop one of the intact Humvees. Its barrage lasted probably only a minute or two but it seemed like an hour, with soldiers tearing through ammo. Once the fire stopped, Norton coordinated with the PSD leaders and sent some patrols out, sweeping the area. Soldiers started picking up smaller pieces of remains and searching for MacKenzie.

  Other soldiers followed the IED’s still-intact command wires back to a chicken coop about three hundred yards away. In the coop was a sand-table model of the area for the triggerman to plan his detonation. In a nearby house, they found four Iraqis and they sprayed their hands with Expray, an aerosol-based field test that diagnoses a range of explosives chemicals depending on what color the spray turns upon contact with a surface. Two of the men “popped,” in the soldiers’ parlance, for a positive reading. (Later, there would be serious doubts about Expray’s reliability in some contexts. Specifically, the spray turns pink in the presence of nitrates, which are a common ingredient in explosives. But in Iraq, fertilizer also has a heavy nitrate content. So, getting caught literally “red-handed” here might mean that a person had been working on a bomb—or was an innocent farmer. The margin of error is so large, for example, that Expray test results are not admissible in U.S. courts. At the time, however, “popping” during an Expray test was considered ironclad proof of being an insurgent.)

  Using the PSD’s interpreter, a couple of NCOs began to question the suspects. The Charlie guys had to pull one of the PSD soldiers away from the detainees. He was shouting, hysterically upset, going for his pistol, screaming and swearing at them about his dead friends. Whoa, dude, you gotta back up, they told him. All you guys gotta back up, or you’re gonna do something you regret. A wrecker co
nvoy and QRF that had been dispatched to recover the Humvee carcass hit a pressure-plate-triggered IED just fifty feet from the original blast site around 3:00 p.m. The explosion lifted the thirty-ton wrecker’s rear end several feet into the air. This time, a gun battle erupted as the Americans started taking fire from several buildings to the west. Two fire teams headed out to flank the new shooting positions, and Norton and Hayes and a couple of other soldiers, trapped just off the bridge and out in the open, started unloading their weapons in counterfire.

  Time slowed down drastically for Norton. While he was fighting, he had time to contemplate the bullets landing all around him. Each one kicked up a pool of dust just like a raindrop did. If he didn’t know any better, he mused, he would swear it was raining. And then he thought that this was a moment they tell you only happens in Hollywood, but here they were, and it was happening. Norton and Hayes were standing back to back and completely exposed, blazing away with their guns like they were Butch and Sundance, taking fire from three, maybe four shooters—and they weren’t getting hit. It was surreal. The combined firepower of their position and the flanking soldiers ran the shooters off.

  Ebel and Kunk and a variety of relief elements arrived shortly after, not that anyone was happy to see them. It is a universal complaint: No matter how much soldiers and junior officers lament the lack of senior leadership presence on the ground during day-to-day operations, the one time when they are uniformly not wanted is the one time they can be guaranteed to show up—in the aftermath of a catastrophic loss. The search for MacKenzie continued. It was Ebel, chest high in the canal water, who pointed to the culvert where his body had likely gotten caught and pulled underwater. At about 6:00 p.m., they finally recovered his remains.

  With many relief units now in place or on their way, Charlie and the PSD got sent back to their bases. Norton’s adrenaline flush was receding, and it was a hollowing experience, a bottomless pit of exhaustion. Not despair or sadness, elation, relief, or any other emotion, just exhaustion. He had a shower and headed to the chow hall. They were serving chicken wings. He had never looked, really looked, at them before. Flesh. Bones. Red sauce. All in a pile. He stared at them, dozens of heaped little carcasses. He decided to have a granola bar instead.

  After the cleanup was finished, Charlie commander Captain Dougherty was ordered to guard that intersection. The insurgents, Kunk maintained, were counting on the 101st to do what the 48th would do—withdraw. It’s great to make that kind of stand, Dougherty replied, but who’s going to provide the men to staff it safely? He and Kunk fought hard about this position. Dougherty believed in force demonstration as a deterrent. He put fifteen men in three trucks on it. “It’s the difference between looking like a chuck wagon and a war wagon,” Dougherty said. When he then complained that he did not have enough soldiers for regular missions, and battalion leadership told him to pull some men off the bridge, he and First Sergeant Largent dug through the thousands of regulations from division headquarters and pointed to the one saying that all convoys had to have three vehicles. “That was the last we heard about it for a while,” recalled Largent. This impasse was laid to rest within a few months without a full confrontation, however, because the Iraqi soldiers in Lutufiyah were more competent than any in the rest of the region, and they were able to take over the Bradley Bridge position fairly early.

  Since the Personal Security Detachment had been pulled from every company, the deaths of Bravo’s MacKenzie and Munger and Alpha Company’s Smith hit the entire battalion hard. Most soldiers can pinpoint three times when their war began. The first is the day they arrived in theater, the second is the day when the enemy first did violence to them, and the third is the day they lost their first comrade. For many in 1st Battalion, November 2 was their entrée to the third and most painful day of war’s stutter-step beginning. “It affected everybody differently,” said Private First Class Chris Barnes. “I was pretty angry. It scared a lot of people. Some people were mad. Some people were in tears.”

  Two days later, Charlie was dealt a blow. At about 8:45 p.m. on November 4, Charlie’s executive officer, First Lieutenant Matt Shoaf, was leading a three-truck convoy from MacKenzie, Munger, and Smith’s memorial service on FOB Mahmudiyah back to Lutufiyah along Route Jackson. He was in the front passenger seat and Staff Sergeant Jason Fegler was driving. Most of the soldiers were having trouble seeing; their night-vision goggles were whiting out due to the oncoming headlights.

  Shoaf saw a spotlight flicked on up ahead and Fegler flashed his back. One of the trucks behind him reported receiving small-arms fire from the right. Others would later say the fire was coming from the left. In sworn statements, several men were very specific about the color of the tracer rounds or the angle of fire they witnessed from rooftops on both sides of them. Shoaf’s gunner saw some flashes to the left and fired at the rooftops. Shoaf was waiting for a report back, leaning down to grab something off the floor or adjust a dial, when rounds, big ones, started hitting his truck from straight ahead. Even though Humvee windshields have bulletproof glass, these large-caliber rounds smashed straight through. Shoaf, already leaning over, ducked under the windshield as best he could as the bullets riddled the truck’s interior, shredding metal, glass, and canvas. Shoaf’s gunner dove into the belly of the truck as bullets penetrated the turret shield. One bullet nicked the lip of the chest plate of Fegler’s body armor but kept going straight to his heart. The two Humvees behind Shoaf’s got hit as well. One bullet hit the gunner of a rear Humvee and he slumped over. Another soldier, Sergeant Juan Hernandez, pulled the hit gunner down and took his place. Hernandez got one burst of rounds off before he too was hit in the left shoulder. The lead truck, pocked with no fewer than three dozen bullet holes, rolled to a stop off the side of the road. Fegler managed to put the truck into park before he fell face-first unconscious into the steering wheel. Shoaf was wounded and in shock. He had been hit in the shoulder and his face had been torn up by flying glass.

  In a mad blur to get out of the kill zone, the back Humvees didn’t realize that their lead truck had pulled off. They floored it, speeding the final few miles to get to FOB Lutufiyah. The two Humvees pulled into the FOB. Both gunners were badly hurt, bleeding profusely. Captain Dougherty called in a medevac to the FOB and tried to figure out what was going on. Where was Shoaf? Where was the lead vehicle? The men in the Humvees didn’t know.

  Left out on Route Jackson, Shoaf and the other soldiers in the truck were having trouble piecing together what had happened to them and what they were going to do. Four of them were slightly or seriously injured, but Fegler was in critical condition. They tried to treat him, but they didn’t have anything but a small first aid kit and though he still had a pulse, Fegler was completely nonresponsive and quickly bleeding to death. Their Humvee didn’t work, the radio was out, it was pitch-black, and they were injured and alone on the side of a large but lightly traveled highway due to a nighttime curfew. Shoaf spotted an Iraqi checkpoint two hundred yards away and started running for it.

  The leader of an Iron Claw platoon from the 2-502nd was listening to the radio network, which had just erupted with chatter. His crew had come south from Camp Striker several hours ago and was checking Jackson for IEDs. It was weird, though, they had just had a very close call not a minute or two ago. The gunner of his rear vehicle had spotted a couple of pairs of headlights coming up fast on him and he tried to elicit a friendly response by signaling with a flashlight twice. When he got no response, he fired a warning burst with his M249 machine gun. When the headlights still kept coming, he switched to his heavier .50-cal machine gun. He aired one more burst of warning shots and then opened fire with shots to kill right between the headlights, tearing through all of his .50-cal ammo. The headlights receded, the threat was neutralized, and they kept driving.

  There was a rush of confusing cross talk on the various radio networks. A Charlie Company Humvee had hit an IED, one transmission said. There is a disabled Iraqi vehicle on the side of the road
, said another. An Iraqi checkpoint was protesting that coalition forces were firing on them, said a third. It took a while for people in company and battalion headquarters to work out what one soldier from the Iron Claw convoy had been telling his truck commander from the beginning: They had just shot up an American Humvee.

  “The two Humvees that just sped past us,” he said. “They were part of the U.S. convoy we just fired on.”

  Shoaf ran toward the Iraqi Army checkpoint, yelling in English as he approached, hoping that he wouldn’t get shot. In pidgin Arabic and hand gestures, Shoaf, soaked in Fegler’s blood, convinced the Iraqis to load up a truck and return with him to pick up Fegler. Bleeding himself, and struggling to remain lucid, Shoaf somehow got the radio working again long enough to contact Charlie headquarters. An air medevac to the site of the shooting was denied because they did not have a precise location, so Dougherty launched a Quick Reaction Force to go find them. Shoaf and Dougherty decided they should get the Iraqis to drive to Mahmudiyah instead of Lutufiyah because the two bases were almost equidistant and the larger FOB had better medical care.

  But they could not leave without an American escort. “It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do,” said Shoaf. “If I sent an unmarked Iraqi civilian truck with no radio to the gates of Mahmudiyah, it would’ve been destroyed. I had to sit there and wait and watch Sergeant Fegler bleed more while our guys came to get us.” After what seemed like an eternity, but was really only fifteen or twenty minutes, the QRF unit rolled up. Fegler no longer had a pulse. In the meantime, Dougherty called Mahmudiyah to tell them that a U.S.-Iraqi convoy was going to be barreling up to the gate soon.

  “One truck is an IA truck,” he told Mahmudiyah. “It has multiple litter-urgent [critical] U.S. pax [passengers] aboard. Do not, repeat, do not shoot that truck.” The good news was that no one tried to shoot up the evacuation convoy. The bad news was there was no one to escort them to the aid station. There was no one manning the front gate whatsoever. The lead evacuation vehicle drove around the FOB for a few minutes trying to figure out where to go. Finally, the driver stopped to ask for directions. Thinking that they had arrived at the aid station, the soldiers in the back vehicle began unloading Fegler. Not knowing what the rear vehicle was doing, and with accurate directions in hand, the lead truck then drove off, leaving the soldiers in the rear to carry Fegler the final seventy-five yards to the medics. Although an autopsy ruled that no amount of medical attention could have saved Fegler’s life, it took, in all, about forty minutes to get him the four miles from the accident site to Mahmudiyah.