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

by Jim Frederick

  By far the biggest complaint the men had with the Sportster TCPs was the way they were forced to look for IEDs. Every morning around dawn, soldiers had to conduct “dismounted IED sweeps,” essentially walking from their post to the next TCP and back looking for makeshift bombs. The policy was to walk in a V formation, with the tips of the V well off of the road looking inward, but Sportster was so narrow, with built-up areas or other features such as reeds or canals coming all the way up to the shoulder, that soldiers had to do the sweeps basically walking on top of the street. For many, this was almost unbearably stressful. “Every morning before conducting an IED sweep, you truly felt that this was the day that you were going to die,” Lauzier once wrote. The fear and the mental stress were cumulative. It was not so much that the men were asked to do something hazardous, it was the daily, grinding awareness that tomorrow they would have to do it all over again.

  “Let me put it to you this way,” explained Private Justin Watt. “Take something you do every day, like go to the mailbox. Every day, you go to the mailbox. Now say that every time you go to the mailbox, there was, say, a 25 percent chance that the mailbox was going to blow up in your face. The explosion might not be big enough to kill you. But it could be. You just don’t know. Either way, you do know that there was a one-in-four chance that it was going to blow right the fuck up in your face. But you have to go to the mailbox. There is no way you cannot go to the mailbox. So, I ask you: How many times do you think you could go to the mailbox before you started going crazy?”

  The strain, for some, was debilitating. “How many times can you wake up in the morning knowing you have to do this death walk?” wondered Private Justin Cross, an eighteen-year-old from Richmond, Virginia. “How many times can you walk down the road saying, ‘I might die this time’ before you’re like, ‘Fuck it, I hope the next one does just fucking kill me, because I’m tired of this shit’?”

  Lauzier, as one of the leaders, did his best to keep his fear hidden, but he could not understand why the Army would make him do this. They found a lot of IEDs this way, no doubt, but they also got blown up a lot too. “Men would be engulfed by the smoke and you would lose visual,” Lauzier wrote. “Debris from the explosion would be hitting you.” Once the postexplosion fear subsided, the headaches, ringing ears, or deafness might last for hours or into the next day. But no matter how fatalistic Lauzier and his men became, and how convinced that the battalion and the brigade valued their Humvees more than their men, he took pride in the fact that they kept getting up in the morning and kept doing what they were told. “It is amazing that these men, mostly boys, did their duty and conducted themselves with such courage and constantly put themselves in harm’s way to preserve the lives of their fellow soldiers, with total disregard for their own personal safety,” he wrote.

  Ebel understood that the men disliked the TCPs, but he mistook the primary emotion they inspired, and he argued that it really wasn’t that bad out there anyway. “The thing is that it gets boring,” he said. “That’s the reality. And it doesn’t matter how effective you are, for the individual soldier he’s just seeing his job as ‘I’m in the Humvee, I’m in this hut, I don’t have the best food, my other guys are out there on base camps. They don’t have to live like that.’”

  The NCOs would constantly ask to do IED sweeps using the Humvees, but the requests were always denied because the human eyeball is, in fact, one of the best IED-finding devices on Earth. Some of the squad leaders devised workarounds. Lauzier would study a map and plot a route the morning before. On the morning of the patrol, his men would take over a house, head to the roof, scout a stretch of road with their binoculars, and then move forward. Scout, move forward to the next building. Scout, move forward to the next building. It was a completely unauthorized way of doing business, but it was effective.

  The TCPs never eliminated IEDs on Sportster. People still got blown up all the time, though the IEDs did decrease in deadliness over the year. With American eyes on the road fairly regularly, insurgents could not lay in hundred-pound bombs anymore. But they could drop small package bombs out of a hole cut in a car’s floorboard or quickly bury one while pretending to change a tire. Even so, the staffing rotations were exhausting the men. “My vehicle got hit on Sportster once,” related Alpha commander Bordwell, “and I could see the eyes of the dude in the tower from where I got hit with the IED. I went to that tower, and I looked back and I could see the hole, nothing obscuring it. So I asked the soldier, ‘What the hell, man?’ He was like, ‘Ah, sir, I’ve been on guard for eight hours.’ So, you can’t really yell at the soldier. Well, you can. But how does anybody stay sharp for that long a time when there’s no one to replace him?”

  Staffing became a constant and contentious topic of discussion at battalion-wide meetings as well as during one-on-one consultations between battalion staff officers and company-level leaders. These discussions rarely deviated from this: The companies routinely declared they did not have enough men, and Battalion countered that they did, but they weren’t using them efficiently. Kunk always sneered at claims of overtaxed duty rosters.

  “Bullshit!” he would shout. “Do I have to show you how to do it? Do I have to draw it out for you myself?” When presented with compelling shortfalls, he would ask, “What are your cooks and mechanics doing?” When told that they were cooking and working on vehicles, he insisted that every specialist in the Army is a rifleman first, and they could soldier too.

  “That was always his big thing, to use them on missions,” said First Lieutenant Tim Norton. “Sure, sounds great. So they come with us for a huge operation. And once we come back, everybody is saying ‘Man, I can’t wait for some fried chicken.’ Oh, but whoops, the cooks are racked out. Can you really tell them, thanks for coming on that mission with us, and now that we are all taking a break, you need to get cooking?”

  Operations Officer Salome believed troops-to-task calculations were straightforward mathematics. “I would take the task that we had assigned each of the company commanders, and then I would say, ‘Okay, this is what they have.’ I had been a commander of two companies by that point, and I’d say to myself, ‘If I had the resources that they have, could I accomplish the mission that they have?’ And, you know, we always felt like they had what they needed.” Executive Officer Fred Wintrich concurred. “If you had a combat power problem, you always had a sympathetic, attentive audience, but it had to start with a cogent argument. If your math sucked, you got told to pound sand.”

  Salome conceded that sometimes it took a little creativity to solve an apparent staffing scarcity, but he found Goodwin the least adept at this kind of thinking. “If a unit from 3rd Platoon was going out to recon a certain area in their Humvees, and 1st Platoon needed chow at TCP1, then why can’t 3rd Platoon take the chow out to TCP1 on their way to the other mission?” he asked. “That is a simplified example, but I don’t think that John ever really looked at it like that. He looked at those tasks as discrete things. He didn’t multitask anybody. And if you don’t multitask everyone, then you’re never going to get it done.” Sometimes, Salome said, Goodwin would send three separate patrols to Mahmudiyah in one day, each for a reason as mundane as picking up a spare part, even though a scheduled supply run the next day could have accommodated all four trips.

  “Hey, man,” Salome would say. “You just wasted a patrol, and you didn’t get the mission done that I had given you because you were running supplies back and forth all day long. Help me help you, okay?”

  But others maintain that 1st Battalion’s quests for efficiencies didn’t just stretch the staffing models to their limits; they started violating them. “Several times, Kunk tried to tell me I could do something when my troop-to-task roster said I couldn’t,” asserted one of the companies’ first sergeants. “He said, ‘You got this amount, and you can do this.’ I said that was possible only if I plan on letting this guy who just came in from a twenty-four-hour mission sleep for five hours before rolling him out for an
other twenty-four-hour mission. And you can do that—for a day or two. But for a week or longer? To have that be the normal duty rotation? No. Someone’s going to get hurt.”

  Charlie’s First Sergeant Largent asserted that not only was the math not working, the battalion was playing loose on their reports to brigade. “They would call three guys a squad,” he said. “But you can’t turn three guys into nine unless you are lying. They were bullshitting brigade. They were sending up reports saying this checkpoint is manned, but if the guidance is you got to have at least a squad out there with two vehicles, and if you’re not doing that, then you are bullshitting them.”

  Charlie’s Executive Officer Shoaf had similar convictions that information was getting distorted as it got passed up. “I saw reports that I had written myself misquoted by the time they got up just to the brigade level,” he said. “It’s not like that one little piece of information is going to lose the war, but when you see the cumulative effect of information becoming washed in order to tell a story that a battalion or brigade commander wants to tell to their highers, then you got real problems. That’s the more sinister side of it.”

  9

  The Mean Squad

  IN THE EARLY days of the deployment, whenever Bravo’s 1st Platoon was on a TCP rotation, Lauzier’s 3rd Squad usually volunteered to occupy TCP3, because that’s where shootouts were most likely. They preferred to be out hunting bad guys rather than sitting on their butts waving through cars all day. Whenever they had enough men, they would do patrols, search houses, see if they could draw fire. The Army phrase for this is “moving to contact,” and, until they got sick of absolutely everything about the war, including killing, that is what 3rd Squad liked to do best. They were always up for a mission—especially if the answer to their questions “Will we get to shoot something? Will we get to kill people?” was yes. Lieutenant Britt called 3rd Squad “Task Force Lauzier.” It was a designation Lauzier loved.

  The Arabic interpreters (called “terps” by the soldiers) who worked with the company told them that the locals knew who everybody was. It did not take the locals long, they said, to know which platoons were which. And if the locals knew you all, they told the men, it was an easy bet that the insurgents knew you guys too. One interpreter told them that the locals even knew which squads were which, and that 3rd Squad was known as the Mean Squad. Third Squad did not mind this at all. They took a kind of pride in it.

  They ran their checkpoints ruthlessly. If they were stopping and checking cars, it could be a slow process, with only one car allowed through the barbed-wire serpentine at a time. Long traffic jams were common, and the soldiers were impatient with Iraqi impatience. “They’ll push your buttons,” Watt said. “They will play a game of chicken with you. They’d get impatient, pull out of line, and gun the engine to the front of the line. We’d say, ‘Stop!’ and, bang, put a shot through their engine block. I don’t know who they are. I’m not going to let a VBIED [vehicle-borne IED] roll up on me.”

  When the battlion put out orders to stop firing warning shots at the cars themselves, they would fire into the dirt and find other ways to teach a lesson. “You didn’t come in our wire without my okay,” said Lauzier. “Because once they are inside your wire, you have already lost. If you came in our wire without my say-so, you got thumped. We would pull them out and rough them up. Check them against the vehicle. Give them a kidney shot, tell them, ‘I’m not fucking around. Do not come in my perimeter. I own this shit. I’m the sheriff here.’”

  Sometimes the soldiers would sit the offenders in the sun for three or four hours. Not do anything else to them, just sit them in the sun. “I would drink my water in front of them, and go, ‘Mmmmm, so good,’” said Watt. “‘Are you fucking hot, you dumbass? You want to be stupid? If you keep being stupid, I’m going to treat you like an idiot.’”

  Occasionally, one or the other of the lieutenants would pull Lauzier aside and tell him that he was being too aggressive, that he should tone down the physicality. He would, respectfully, tell the young lieutenant that he didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “I’ve been here before,” he told them. “I know how these fuckers are. You can’t show them any kindness, because kindness is weakness. You gotta let them know you’re in charge.” If there was an error in judgment regarding the use of force, he’d rather use too much than too little. He’d rather absorb the second-guessing consequences than have more Americans dead.

  Yribe and Lauzier were in absolute agreement on this, and they formed a unified front on how the squad conducted itself despite their vastly different personal styles. Lauzier was a bundle of manic energy, excitable, almost hyper, while Yribe was Mr. Chill, self-possessed and laid-back, even when in a firefight.

  The constant gunplay bred an intense hostility. “It is well in excess of a hundred and twenty degrees, you had just been out on a six-hour patrol, and some sort of bug you just caught made you vomit and shit yourself with watery diarrhea all at the same time,” described Lauzier. “You have finally gotten back to the TCP, and you are just starting to clean yourself up, and then somebody starts shooting at you. All you can think after that is ‘All right, motherfucker. You want to shoot me? I’m going to fucking kill you.’ So you head to the house where you know the shots came from, and you are going to put a lot of hate and discontent out there. We would patrol in there, toss their house, throw their shit around and go, ‘Who the fuck fired at us? They were from your house. And we know you know. So I’m going to be a pain in your ass until you tell me.’”

  On November 11, Yribe and members of 3rd Squad went out on their first-ever patrol with Civilian Affairs, the community outreach arm of the Army, to hand out Beanie Babies or pencils or soccer balls. They left FOB Yusufiyah and hadn’t walked more than three hundred yards when Yribe noticed a car speeding toward them too fast for his liking.

  He shouted, “Stop!” and got no response, so he fired a warning shot into the dirt. Still getting no response, he fired two more shots until the car finally slowed down. One of those shots had ricocheted and hit a teenage boy standing nearby. From the front, it looked like he just had a pinhole wound, but the bullet had blown a crater the size of a grapefruit out his back. The Civilian Affairs patrol was over before it started. “You can’t really go hand out Beanie Babies after you shoot a fucking kid,” said Watt.

  Since Watt had taken an advanced first aid class, he was frequently the designated medic whenever Specialist Collin Sharpness, the platoon’s real medic, wasn’t on patrol. Watt started patching the boy up. It was his first major injury and it was an odd one. On the one hand, much of the kid’s back was missing, and Watt had to quickly go through a series of complex procedures: sealing the wound off, deflating the boy’s lung. On the other hand, the boy was conscious and alert, it didn’t seem like he was in too much pain, and there wasn’t a lot of blood. “You’re doing it all wrong!” Lauzier shouted.

  “I’m nervous. I’ve never done this shit before!” Watt yelled back. They sent the boy to the local hospital. Back at the FOB, Yribe got yelled at for about thirty minutes but it was ultimately deemed a clean shot.

  Six days later, 1st Platoon headed back out to the TCPs to relieve 3rd Platoon, with 3rd Squad taking over TCP3. The next morning, Lauzier woke up Yribe to tell him that somebody had found an IED farther north on Sportster and that he and Miller were going to go check it out. Lauzier was leaving Yribe in charge of Cortez, Barker, Watt, and several other soldiers. Bravo halted all traffic on Sportster until the IED threat was resolved. When Yribe got onto the road, there was a line of cars stacked up, honking, trying to get through, trying to figure out why the traffic was stopped.

  Tension was escalating, and Yribe was nervous that he was losing control of the situation. He decided to fire a warning shot to get the locals to disperse. He passed by Cortez and Watt, walked over to the front of the wire, and aimed his rifle into the ground near the line of vehicles. He fired one shot but it ricocheted off of a tractor r
ather than hitting the ground, and pierced the windshield of a pickup truck. There was much commotion. All the other cars that were waiting in line peeled out and sped off. The driver of the pickup started pulling a woman out of the cab.

  “You fucking shot her in the head,” Cortez said. Yribe yelled to the medic, who was at the other end of the TCP. The medic started running as Watt got his first aid bag and ran over as well. By the time they arrived, the woman was on the ground, her head oozing blood. Watt knelt down and stopped cold. Her brains were coming out of her skull, white and gelatinous, and she was making shallow, rattling breaths, which the medic said meant she was “expectant”—medic-speak for “about to die.” The other woman in the truck had been injured by flying glass, and the medic started treating her.

  Watt did not move. He was watching a woman die and there was nothing he could do about it. A third woman from the truck knelt down next to him, grabbed his hands, and pushed them toward the first aid bag, as if to say, “Do something, do something to save her life.” It was always this way, Watt thought. Sometimes Iraqis seemed not to believe that Americans did not have magical powers. They seemed to think that the Americans were capable of fixing every problem—generate their electricity, make their water run clean, bring their sisters back to life—but just chose not to.

  Watt didn’t know what to do except say to the woman, “I am sorry. I am so sorry.”

  Yribe called Lauzier on the radio: “Dude, you should get down here right away.”