Finally, he started to understand Laskoski: “You gotta get ahold of yourself, you gotta get composure.”
“Composure,” Yribe thought. “How can I get composure when I don’t even know what is going on?” By then, the dust was starting to settle. Diaz and Yribe patted each other down for injuries. Diaz had a faceful of superficial shrapnel wounds, and something had hit or twisted Yribe’s gut hard enough that he’d ripped his abdomen’s muscle wall. But they were both okay. Laskoski told two soldiers to fire into some treetops about a hundred yards away, since that seemed like the most likely trigger spot. They called in the IED hit to Bravo’s TOC (Tactical Operations Center). Looking around, the men tried to figure out if there was another blast coming or if insurgents were going to follow with a small-arms attack. But it was quiet, completely still. After such violence, it was amazing how quickly mundanity reasserted itself.
Goodwin had hoped that his order was the correct one. He was tense when he overruled Britt’s wishes. He was nervous, and he was still weighing the pros and cons when the call came over the radio at 2:37 p.m. The patrol had hit an IED, the transmission said. They couldn’t find Britt and Lopez, but it was likely they were dead. Goodwin reeled. He felt nauseated. He thought only one thing: “I just sent them to their death.”
“Britt! Lopez! Britt! Lopez!” the men who had been walking shouted. They didn’t know where they were. The two had effectively vanished. But the soldiers in the Humvees across the canal had seen the whole thing. Private First Class Chris Barnes, in one of the Humvee gun turrets, yelled and pointed that Britt was in the water. He’d seen the canal go crimson with blood, but the current had carried the stain away almost instantly.
Yribe turned and said to Laskoski, “Hey, First Sergeant, I’m going in.” He ripped his vest and helmet off and jumped in. Almost immediately, he realized that this was a mistake. The canal’s water temperature was about 55 degrees, its depth was twenty feet, and the current was moving so fast that Yribe was as much trying not to drown as trying to find Britt. Soon exhausted, he barely reached the other bank, where soldiers from the trucks helped him to dry ground.
After a minute or two, as the shock wore off and the permanence set in, Goodwin realized he was about to have a breakdown. He needed to get out of the TOC. He couldn’t let his men see him in that state. Laskoski was running the recovery mission down at the site, helicopters were already in the air, and QRFs were already either en route or being staged from both the JSB and Mahmudiyah. So at least for a little while, the wheels were turning and Goodwin was not needed. Which was fortunate, because he was suddenly, massively, uncontrollably incapacitated by grief and guilt. He told First Lieutenant Habash, “Hey, you’re in charge. I need to step outside.”
Goodwin sought out Combat Stress nurse Lieutenant Colonel Marrs, who was still on the FOB. He broke down in sobs and self-recrimination. “You tell a guy to go across a bridge, and within five minutes he’s dead,” Goodwin said. “With everything that had been going on, I just snapped.” The two talked for about an hour. The session helped. By the end of it, Goodwin was at least able to project a composed demeanor and go back out and do his job. But he wasn’t sure how. “At this point, how do you manage this debacle?” he wondered.
Phil Miller also sought out Marrs later that day. During their discussion, he told her that he thought 1st Platoon had become combat ineffective. “It’s one of the most embarrassing things for a leader to do,” Miller admitted, “to call your platoon combat ineffective, but I told Captain Goodwin, too, that they are not in the fight. Their soul, everything, is gone right now.”
Goodwin went down to TCP4. People there were doing math problems. He couldn’t believe how morbid and mundane it was, but they were trying to figure out how far and how fast Britt’s body might flow through in the canal system. If the canal’s water is traveling X miles per hour, they scribbled, and object A at start point Y has a mass of B, how fast would object A travel to position Z? “We were throwing sticks into the canal to determine how fast the water was running, so we could figure out where the body was,” he said. “It was ridiculous, ungodly, inhuman.”
Multiple relief teams, including the original Iron Claw team, Bravo’s 3rd Platoon, Army dive teams, Edwards and Kunk, and Ebel and a general from division headquarters would eventually converge upon the site, but it was up to the squad on the ground to begin the recovery effort.
The carnage in front of them was difficult to process. There was a jawbone, stripped clean and shiny white, lying in the dirt. There was a large internal organ that Yribe could only think was a liver, Lopez’s liver. Flack vests, or parts of them, were lying on the ground, ripped to shreds as if they were made of paper. They found ID cards, tatters of money, a wedding ring. Lopez’s torso had been thrown two hundred yards from the blast site. His arms were gone from the bicep down and his eyes were wide open. The men put his upper body in a poncho because they didn’t have any body bags. Yribe carried him over to one of the Iron Claw vehicles and handed him off to another soldier. They didn’t know each other, and there was nothing to say. They just nodded to each other.
Captain Jared Bordwell showed up with a team of Alpha soldiers to relieve the shaken 1st Platoon men. Alpha started jumping into the canal and dragging it with grappling hooks. As usual after a catastrophic event, the men on the ground found the senior officers who had flocked there disruptive. Bordwell thought the men could have used a kind word from Ebel about how crappy it was to have to look for a dismembered comrade, but Ebel wanted to know why they weren’t wearing eye protection. Bordwell said that the men in the canal weren’t even wearing their body armor so he didn’t really see what difference eye shields made at this point. Later, the general from division called Bordwell over and inquired what that was that he had found sticking out of the road.
“That is det cord, sir. That is an IED,” Bordwell responded. “You need to back away from that.” The general sent his aide, a captain, to mark it by setting an oilcan on top of it. Bordwell looked at him and said, “Sir, you’re fucking nuts.” The Alpha guys shook their heads in disbelief.
By 4:50 p.m., the medevac took off with Yribe and Diaz to get treatment at FOB Mahmudiyah. That night, they had part of a tent to themselves, and they talked about what they were going to do now, how they were going to survive.
“I don’t even know what to tell these guys anymore,” Yribe said to Diaz. “Because I can’t tell them it’s going to be all right. What do I tell them?” Diaz said he didn’t know—all they could do was get back out there and be with the rest of the men as soon as possible. They both caught the first convoy to Yusufiyah the next morning.
Lieutenant Colonel Marrs agreed with Miller’s and Goodwin’s assessments of 1st Platoon. Later that night at FOB Yusufiyah, she told Kunk that “hostility and vengeance seem prominent in 1st Platoon.” She advised him that the platoon’s mental health status was “red”—non–mission capable—and they should be given respite from their current operations tempo to recover from their losses.
Kunk and Edwards approached Goodwin that same night. They asked him how he was doing and what he needed. This time, there was no joking around, no sheepishness about how unlikely the request was.
Goodwin said, “I need another platoon.” They asked him how he thought 1st Platoon was doing. Goodwin replied, “They are not mission capable, and I don’t know when they will be. They are done.”
Kunk looked Goodwin in the eye, said, “Okay,” and got into his truck. Goodwin was confident that something would be done to reduce the pressure on 1st Platoon. He was sure, now, that some sort of relief was coming.
Later that night, the word came down. First Platoon was being pulled out of the fight for forty-eight hours, after which they would resume their normal duties.
When asked about staffing, Kunk sometimes said that he tried to get more troops down in the AO, but there were none to be had. “If I needed more manpower,” he explained, “then I would ask for more manpower. I
would lay it out to the best of my ability. If the resources aren’t there, then my brigade has to rob Peter to pay Paul, and they weren’t willing to do that.” Other times, he asserted that he rejected Goodwin’s requests for more men because he didn’t think that Bravo needed them. He thought the company had enough troops to complete the job. The problem was that 1st Platoon could not get their act together and Goodwin was not using what he had efficiently.
Goodwin insisted on going through and boxing up Britt’s and Lopez’s personal items that night. He didn’t want to put any of his men through that. Everything was shredded and mangled—Kevlar, ammo magazines, pieces of uniform—and soaking wet, whether from water or blood or both. The smells were ripe, the textures magnified, either extraordinarily rough or extraordinarily smooth. Goodwin tried to separate the stuff as best he could. The wedding ring was obviously Lopez’s. The watch, probably Britt’s. He made two piles, trying to get back to each family as much stuff as possible, so maybe they could feel more connected to their father and husband, or son and brother. The whole time, Goodwin was thinking to himself, “This is what you did. You killed them.”
Around-the-clock dive teams did not find Britt until the middle of the next day. HHC commander Shawn Umbrell was there as Britt’s body was pulled out of the canal, and the sight took his breath away. With the water running so fast and so cold over him for so long, Britt had been thoroughly washed and preserved. He was perfectly white and clean. He was immaculate.
Caveman was declared black (closed to military traffic) after the incident and, with few rare exceptions, it remained black for years afterward. First Strike units patrolled the road periodically, but not in any concerted way ever again. And even though there was still one large concrete span over the canal that his own chain of command would not let him blow up, and all the other bridges could be easily rebuilt, Kunk considered the Caveman missions a success. “If you are stopping the freedom of movement of the bad guy, now you are controlling and dictating where he can move and can’t move. We did go in there and drop a lot of the bridges. And it paid huge dividends. It got to the point where I didn’t need Caveman, but the reason why I didn’t need it was because I took it away. We took Caveman and the use of Caveman away from the enemy.”
Others disagreed. “I don’t know what the hell we were thinking,” Goodwin volunteered. “Seriously. It poses absolutely no significance to anything. And I hate to say that for as many hours as I spent on that fucking road, for nothing. There was no reason for us to go down there. None. It served no purpose. Insurgents could maneuver in there, but they couldn’t get out. There was nowhere for them to go. They were going to run into us or the IAs somewhere. So what did we need this road for?”
14
Leadership Shake-up
WHEN THE PLATOON assembled at FOB Yusufiyah for another Critical Incident Debrief, Colonel Ebel came down too. He was in the potato barn talking to Goodwin and Laskoski when Miller walked up. They talked for a while and Miller mentioned Green, saying that Green was having a particularly hard time dealing with these deaths. Ebel and Green met privately for about thirty minutes, an extraordinary occurrence. Although Ebel spoke briefly with a wide variety of soldiers every day, frequently consoling them during times of loss, he cannot remember another occasion when he met one-on-one with a private for half an hour.
During the meeting, Green told Ebel that he hated Iraqis and wanted to kill them all. Ebel thought that this was a normal reaction to what he had just been through. When you watch a comrade destroyed by the enemy, Ebel felt, everybody goes through a full range of emotions.
Green asked about the rules of engagement, wanting to know, “Why can’t we just go shoot them all?”
Ebel responded, “Because that is not what American soldiers do.”
“I’ll be all right,” Green told Ebel. “I’m just frustrated.” Ebel was reassured by the conversation and told Green’s immediate supervisors to keep looking after him.
Green said Ebel’s high rank made it just the most noteworthy example of a fairly common occurrence: he’d simply agree to what a superior officer was asserting about treating Iraqis humanely, and the officer would think he had fixed him. “I would tell them right from the get-go how I was,” he recalled. “And then they would tell me, ‘No, this is how you’re supposed to look at it.’ And I would say, ‘All right.’ They outranked me by so many levels, it’s not like I’m going to get into a big argument with them.”
The debilitating effects of warfare have likely been known to humankind since warfare existed, at least since Homer described Achilles’ rampage and desecration of Hector in the Iliad. But scientists have been studying the topic in earnest only since World War II. And that work, though constantly growing and being revised, is conclusive on several major points. Primary among them: A soldier can endure combat for only so long before he begins to break down. In The Face of Battle, military historian John Keegan wrote that early studies concluded that a soldier “reached his peak of effectiveness in the first 90 days of combat, and after that his efficiency began to fall off, and that he became steadily less valuable thereafter until he was completely useless.”
It is tempting to contrast the great battles of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge and even the Tet Offensive—massive waves of tens of thousands of soldiers clashing against one another as gunfire rained down for days and thousands of men died—with Bravo Company’s fight and say the two don’t even compare. And that is true in certain respects. Bravo faced no force-on-force battles that lasted more than a few hours, and these were rarely larger than a squad fighting a handful of insurgents. But to then conclude that Bravo’s struggles were somehow less significant or more bearable does a disservice to the way that warfare has changed in the last few decades and glosses over the psychological effects—still largely uncharted—that these changes have wrought. During World War II, units would be thrown into major battles that could last a day, a week, perhaps a month or even two—but then they would be withdrawn from the front lines for weeks, sometimes for several months, before being sent into battle again. American policy during WWII was to never leave troops on the front lines longer than eighty days.
The men of Bravo stayed in a combat zone, went “outside the wire”—onto the front lines—every single day for eleven months straight. In the case of the TCPs, they lived outside the wire twenty-four hours a day. And they experienced some form of enemy contact almost every single day. Deployments where every day is a combat day are a fairly new phenomenon in the U.S. Army. As former lieutenant colonel and psychological researcher Dave Grossman writes in his 1996 book On Killing, “Spending months of continuous [emphasis his] exposure to the stresses of combat is a phenomenon found only on the battlefields of this century…it is only in this century that our physical and logistical capability to support combat has completely outstripped our psychological capacity to endure it.”
Even pushed to the limits this way, the vast majority of Bravo did not crack. But all men start any endeavor with different capacities to cope, and in this environment, with so little support from superiors, it is not surprising that some were overwhelmed. After Britt and Lopez died, an already fraying platoon began to unravel more quickly. Its psychological separation from the company and the battalion became more pronounced. The platoon began falling in on itself. In the turmoil of combat and stress, violence and death, they started to redraw moral and social codes that they believed applied only to them. Foremost among their rationalizations was their conviction that no one else had experienced what they had, and no one else could possibly understand it. “We didn’t want to hear anything from anybody, because nobody knew what we were going through,” explained Sergeant John Diem. “That’s the leitmotif: ‘Nobody knows what we’re going through.’”
They became isolated in every sense; the Pygmalion effect was in full swing. After being continuously told that they were screwups and outcasts, 1st Platoon consciously or subconsciously decided to live up
to their outcast status. This “shrinkage of the social and moral horizon,” as psychologist Jonathan Shay puts it in Achilles in Vietnam, is a common phenomenon for small groups of soldiers in prolonged combat settings. Such soldiers, Shay writes, “sometimes lose responsiveness to the claims of any bonds, ideals or loyalties outside a tiny circle of immediate comrades. An us-against-them mentality severs all other attachments or commitments.”
Extreme hatred of Iraqis was now common, widespread, and openly discussed. Paul Cortez rated his hatred of Iraqis as a 5 on a scale of 10 when he first deployed. By December, he said, it had hit 20. The platoon became more aggressive. Suspects were routinely beaten before being brought back onto the FOBs. There was a hierarchy that governed who got to punch or kick a detainee—new men were not allowed to participate until they had experienced a sufficient amount of combat. There were insiders and outsiders and you had to earn your way in. “If you weren’t there the whole time,” said one soldier, “new guys would get told, ‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’ ‘Stay away from me. I don’t even want to know you.’” Many of the men suffered from other well-documented symptoms of extended combat exposure, including fatigue, anxiety and panic attacks, increasing irritability, and obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Drinking increased, became more open, and was not limited to the lower-enlisted. Some NCOs not only allowed their soldiers to drink, they were drinking themselves. A common attitude was: Everything’s fine as long as it doesn’t get out of hand.
“The platoon rejected anything that wasn’t tailored to the reality that they had crafted to protect them from what was really happening,” explained Sergeant Diem. “And what was happening is they were debasing themselves as individuals. I’m not coming down on these guys any harder than I come down on myself. Because I can church it up and say, ‘I was doing the best I could. We were doing the best we could.’ I allowed myself to feel overwhelmed and I allowed myself to misinterpret reality, allowed myself to basically become insane in order to make it as easy on myself as possible.”
Black Hearts: One Platoon's Descent into Madness in Iraq's Triangle of Death Page 19