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

by Jim Frederick

  “Why?”

  “I just killed a woman.”

  Yribe and Cortez conferred briefly, and Cortez started moving the concertina wire and the stop signs farther out, so that it looked like the truck had driven into the TCP’s kill zone. Although the shot had been an accident, the men were scared that no one would believe them. Yribe had been involved in an accidental shooting just days before. By simply moving the wires and fabricating aggressiveness on the part of the driver, it would be far easier to convince the inevitable Army investigator that the death was justifiable.

  Within an hour and a half, a lieutenant from one of the battalion’s other companies had been assigned to conduct the AR 15-6. Common investigations in the Army, AR 15-6s are routinely ordered up by a commander in the aftermath of a death or other major event. They are usually informal, with an officer assigned to gather evidence, conduct interviews, formulate an analysis, and offer findings and recommendations. While merely fact-finding reports, they are frequently used to determine whether to proceed with a legal investigation, and they can be presented as evidence later because they include sworn statements from participants and witnesses. By the time the lieutenant showed up that afternoon, most of the men at the TCP had already written sworn statements about what had transpired.

  The statements filed by Cortez, Barker, and Watt, the only soldiers who claimed to have seen what had happened (Yribe either never wrote a statement or it has been lost—he does not recall writing one), are as consistent as they are inaccurate. They lied that Cortez was pulling a strand of concertina wire across the street when a fast-moving truck approached and did not stop, forcing Yribe to shoot before the vehicle hit Cortez. With no reason to suspect that the sworn statements were bogus, the investigating officer found no wrongdoing on Yribe’s part.

  10

  “Soldiers Are Not Stupid”

  OFTEN, THE BRAVO platoons received missions that they viewed as recklessly dangerous or a waste of time, or both. One of the most hated types became known as “Chasing the J-Lens.” The J-Lens was a high-powered video aerial observation system with remote-controllable camera mounts attached to a high tower, so a technician could search wide swaths of the company’s sector from FOB Yusufiyah’s tactical operations center. When the company headquarters saw something on the screen it deemed suspect, it would often send a fire team or two to check it out.

  After the first JSB rotation, parts of 1st Platoon were ordered to investigate some suspicious-looking crates in a field. They mounted up and headed to the coordinates, but the J-Lens had not been properly calibrated, so they were perhaps miles off course. For hours, Bravo headquarters had them crisscrossing the area looking for the crates.

  “Bulldog Main, this is 1-7. We just gave you our grids, and now we have our infrared strobe on. Can you see us, over?” Miller asked at several points.

  “Negative” came the response from the TOC (tactical operations center). The calibrations were so far off, they weren’t even looking in the right zone.

  “Well, I don’t know what else to do, because we are where we are,” Miller said. “And the crates aren’t here. Over.” When they finally found suspicious boxes, they were full of eggplants.

  Even when the J-Lens was properly calibrated, these were still unpopular missions. Bravo headquarters would routinely send J-Lens chase missions straight to the TCPs to investigate a suspicious vehicle, say, or check out a guy who was digging a hole in the middle of the night. And again, a squad leader would be forced to split an already small unit into two smaller elements.

  “You know we only have six dudes, right?” the squad leader would ask. Usually by the time they walked out to the grid location, whatever they were trying to check out would be gone.

  Another despised mission company-wide was the “gravel run”—escorting convoys of gravel from Camp Striker to FOB Mahmudiyah. The fractured relations between Bravo and 1st Battalion were already trickling down to every level of the company. Word was getting out that Kunk had it in for Bravo, so it did not take much prompting for Bravo to view all of the battalion’s moves with suspicion. A major source of resentment was the notion that Bravo, with all that was going on in their sector, had to assist in the beautification of FOB Mahmudiyah, especially when that FOB had Alpha, Delta, Echo, and HHC on site. “Colonel Kunk wanted gravel on the battalion FOB,” said 2nd Platoon Leader Jerry Eidson. “He wanted rocks, I guess, because it was muddy. I don’t know why. But I do know I routinely had to give up half of my platoon to Colonel Kunk so he could have gravel on his FOB. I’m not sure if Colonel Kunk’s intent was malicious, but facts are facts. My guys spent a lot of time pulling security for gravel trucks, not fighting the insurgency.”

  “Area Denial” was a third type of mission that raised hackles throughout the battalion. The idea was to lay an ambush in a zone that someone in division or brigade headquarters had calculated to be an ideal place from which to launch a rocket or mortar at the Green Zone. It was irrelevant that no rocket had ever been fired from that area before or that local commanders had no intelligence that rocket teams ever operated in the area. Company commanders had long lists of places where they wanted to set ambushes based on actual enemy behavior, and they resented having to send a platoon to stare at an empty field for eight hours based on hypotheticals. These kinds of missions took their toll on the men’s confidence. “Soldiers are not stupid,” said Lauzier. “They know when the chain of command does not know what it is doing.”

  It wasn’t just the soldiers, either. Soldiers complain, all the time, about everything. To complain is part of the soldier’s very essence. But one of the most valuable functions a platoon leader serves is to explain to a bunch of complaining soldiers why a mission is not stupid, a time waste, or a death trap. He helps the soldiers understand the often nonobvious logic of unpopular missions. But 2nd Platoon’s Lieutenant Jerry Eidson found he had trouble rationalizing missions to his men, because he didn’t understand them himself.

  Bravo’s platoon leaders frequently received missions they had to saddle up for immediately, even though Goodwin knew about them the night before or several days before. Often the missions were delayed for hours because men were either taking showers, sleeping, or otherwise unavailable, simply because they did not know they were on deck. And once the missions were assigned, the instructions were vague and incomplete. “The orders we got didn’t make sense at all,” Eidson recalled. “They were ‘Go here and do this’ and that’s all. There was no purpose why. I had a hard time dealing with that. I needed more information about why we were doing things. I would call up to get Task and Purpose and some of those were just retarded. Some of the missions I just wouldn’t do. Is that wrong? Yes, it’s probably wrong. But I was not going to risk the lives of my men for something that didn’t make sense.”

  Charlie’s relationship with the battalion brass was no better than Bravo’s. In many ways, it was worse. Dougherty and Largent were by far the most combative of the company leadership teams with Kunk. Like Bravo, Charlie was away from the flagpole, so seemingly simple things, such as communications connectivity, were difficult, especially during the early days. Battalion and brigade headquarters wanted immediate, accurate, and complete reporting for every event, and they were impatient with the excuse that some time delay and errors were an inevitable part of any information relay system. “If I were up in Mahmudiyah,” said Largent, “I could walk over and explain everything in detail and answer all of your goddamn questions, and everything would be fine. Instead, you’ve got questions about my reporting, and you’re not going to see me in person for another three or four days. And that shit just festers and causes a rift.” Like Bravo, Charlie also had an early, dumb accident—a soldier fell out of a guard tower—that earned them unwanted attention and created lots of second-guessing.

  But unlike Goodwin, Dougherty and Largent did not silently absorb Kunk’s vitriol. Dougherty and Largent consciously decided, painful as it was, that they would not let Kunk bully
them, and they would object, every step of the way, to his insistence that he knew how to run their company better than they did. When Kunk told Dougherty he was fucked up, Dougherty would respond, “No, sir, we are not fucked up,” and try to explain why. Sometimes he would rebuff Kunk’s abuse with a tenacity and vehemence that would elicit knowing smirks and glances that said “Here we go again” from the other commanders. He and Kunk got into loud, long fights on every topic imaginable. “They would argue about the color of an orange if they could,” as Goodwin put it.

  And during the first sergeants’ meetings, Largent’s interactions with Kunk were just as fractious. “I can only assume that it was because of our personal dislike for each other,” said Largent. “I hated him. I grew to hate him as a leader. And I’m sure that came across in some of those meetings. I tried to keep my mouth shut, but I just couldn’t do that sometimes.”

  The best way to hunt for IEDs was a constant source of tension. Early on, for example, Bordwell’s Alpha Company was having great success in their area doing dismounted IED searches with the V formation. Because many of the roads he hunted on allowed his men to spread out, and most of the IEDs were command-wire-detonated with two hundred or more yards of wire, his guys would frequently jump the triggerman in the bush or find the wire. Based on that success, Kunk enforced this method of IED hunting throughout all areas of operations.

  “Well,” said Bordwell, “different AO, different terrain, different IED cell.” In other areas, remote-detonated or pressure-plate IEDs were more common; there was no wire to intercept. Likewise, some roads were bounded by canals, making it impossible to search a road on foot unless you were standing on it. “So it’s ignorance saying this or that technique works for everybody,” said Bordwell. “That was one of the fights we were fighting as company commanders. To say, ‘Hey, don’t tell me how to do that. Because it doesn’t work in my AO. Or, it might have worked last week, but it doesn’t work this week, because that guy has a brain, and he’s watching me respond, so he’s changing his techniques.’”

  Increasingly frustrated by Kunk’s micromanagement, Largent and Dougherty focused on the concept of “commander’s intent” instead. They aimed to fulfill what the battalion wanted accomplished, and ignored its proscriptions on how to do it if they disagreed with them. “The battalion commander’s job is not to tell you how to suck the egg,” Largent quipped. “But he was just terrible about telling you exactly how to hold the egg, and on and on. We refused to let them tell us how to suck the egg.”

  More galling to Largent was that Kunk would explode if he figured out they had deviated from his instructions, even if they had been successful. “Why would you direct us to do the most tactically unsound method of clearing that route for the type of terrain we had? And then, when we didn’t do it your way but were successful anyway, you still got angry? But he’d get off-the-charts pissed if we didn’t use the technique, the exact technique, that he had specified. It came across like he was angry that we didn’t get blown up. That’s how silly it was. But we weren’t going to put our guys at undue risk if there was another way to do it safer, and we would get yelled at about it later.” Sometimes they told Kunk, “If you want me to do it that way, you’ll have to issue an order, because then it is on you.”

  The battalion leadership didn’t see it that way and came to believe that soldier safety was taking precedence over mission accomplishment. So they generated even more detailed instructions. Those, in turn, increased Charlie’s perception that they were being babysat. “If I gave Dougherty a mission, I would tell him, ‘Your task is to interdict along this route,’” explained Operations Officer Salome. “Well, if I just said that, he would take the fastest method he could to get what I said done to keep his guys from getting hurt. They’d go out and do that mission in an hour, which, in my mind, should take four to six hours. That does not achieve the commander’s intent. So I had to write, ‘You’ll take a platoon. You’ll leave no later than this time. And you’ll return no earlier than this time. And you’ll go in this area from here to here.’ It wasn’t necessarily that they were blatantly not doing what we said. It was that they were being less than honest with the way they accomplished it. They were doing the task, but they weren’t achieving the intent, so they weren’t accomplishing the mission.”

  Largent had little patience for Salome’s lectures. “Major Salome?” he exclaimed. “He might have left the FOB three or four times. None of those guys had a clue. The reality of what was going on out there, they were blind to it.” In Charlie’s opinion, the battalion did not understand that the operations tempo they were asking the company to perform outstripped the limits of long-run human endurance. “I’m going to be honest about this: we intentionally pulled the patrols sometimes,” revealed Matt Shoaf, Charlie’s executive officer. “We definitely walked the border of not obeying orders from time to time. And we’d just take the heat for it.”

  First Strike’s second month in theater ended with a spike in violence that hit both U.S. forces and Iraqi locals. On November 23, Sergeant Yribe, a group of IAs, and a MiTT team took a patrol down Caveman, a dirt road that ran from Sportster northwest all the way to the Russian power plant. During this patrol they discovered a shallow grave with a body that had been there for a while. Yribe called it up, providing grid locations. “We were real lackadaisical,” he confessed. “If we had known at that time how dangerous Caveman was, we wouldn’t have been there. We were just ignorant enough not to be scared.”

  At about 1:40 p.m. the next day, some military police from the 170th MP Company, 3rd Infantry Division, traveled out there to retrieve the body. Near the gravesite, they hit an IED big enough to blow the Humvee upside down and into the canal, killing four. Earlier that day, a suicide car bomber, whose hands were wired to the steering wheel, drove into the southern gate of the Mahmudiyah Hospital, killing at least two dozen locals, injuring thirty more, and wounding several soldiers who were on a Civilian Affairs visit. And, after weeks of constant shelling, a mortar round finally slammed home at FOB Yusufiyah on the afternoon of the 24th, injuring three soldiers. Five days later, a 120mm round crashed right through FOB Mahmudiyah’s headquarters. No one was injured because much of the staff was at the chow hall for lunch. If the headquarters had been fully staffed, much of the leadership of First Strike would have been wiped out.

  DECEMBER 2005

  11

  Nelson and Casica

  AFTER FIRST STRIKE took back Sportster, Lieutenant Colonel Kunk turned his attention to other initiatives throughout the battalion’s area of operations, including doing more community outreach, bolstering water and electricity capacity, establishing better relations with the locals, and helping to build government institutions that had both power and credibility. Within Bravo’s area, specifically, he saw the next priority as pushing out to terra incognita in the west and making overtures to the Quarguli sheikhs who lived along Route Malibu on the banks of the Euphrates.

  Some sub-clans of the Quargulis, along with certain arms of the Janabis, were among the tribal groupings most deeply entrenched in the insurgency. But at least in official, daytime, face-to-face meetings, Kunk built a fast rapport with them. “The Quarguli would guarantee my life the whole time I was there,” Kunk said. “I could move up and down Malibu freely. I was known as the Sheikh of Peace. I felt secure when I would go meet the Quarguli sheikhs.” Sheikhs, with ties to various factions of the insurgencies or organized crime, were similar to Mafia bosses. They may have had their hands in all sorts of shady dealings, but they were smart enough that it was difficult, if not impossible, to tie them directly to anything illegal. And, like syndicate kingpins, they invested great energy in maintaining a veneer of respectability. A particular sheikh might be an essential ally in keeping a specific stretch of road free of IEDs. But his underlings might have been just as active in funding an IED cell that focused on a different geography or in running guns the whole time he was talking to the Americans about a weapons turn-i
n program. The military had no choice but to work with the sheikhs even when they were of questionable character and loyalty.

  It was from these and other sheikhs that Kunk got the idea of how he would take control of Caveman, the road about a mile or so to the northeast of Route Malibu and the Euphrates River, where Quarguli Village was located. Caveman was a gravel road split down the center by one of the larger canals in the area. The canal was concrete-lined, sixty feet across and twenty feet deep. Since neither side of the road was paved, it was very easy to plant large, deeply buried IEDs there. The key value of Caveman, according to what the sheikhs told Kunk, was the bridges that spanned the canal, which made north-south travel easier.

  “The sheikhs would say, ‘How dumb are you, Coalition?’” Kunk remembered. “‘Why don’t you drop the bridges along the canal, then the insurgents can’t move across them?’ So that is what we did.” But before those bridges could be blown up or dismantled Caveman had to be cleared, and Caveman was a beast.

  Others considered Caveman unimportant, because it ran parallel between Route Malibu and Mullah Fayyad Highway and perpendicular to Sportster, all of which were hard-topped roads and fairly well controlled by the Army. Throughout November, Bravo had done some sporadic patrolling of Caveman, but in early December it began dedicated clearance missions. The IEDs were so densely packed that the road was more of a minefield than a thoroughfare. Once, they found twenty-six IEDs in one three-mile stretch. But because the insurgents could re-seed the dirt-topped Caveman so easily the moment U.S. forces left, it had to be recleared every single time. “The first time we went down there, we just turned around and came back,” remembered Goodwin. “No intentions of setting TCPs up there or staying in any way. So why are we doing this?”