“Somebody get down here! I need more guys,” Whelchel screamed into his radio. He had taken some shrapnel near his eye, and blood was running down his face. Blaisdell and several soldiers moved forward to help Whelchel. Whelchel lobbed the grenade at the front of the house and then pulled back to pull security on Reilly as he gave Strobino first aid. Reilly wrapped the leg, applied a tourniquet, and asked Strobino if he was ready. Strobino had seen the movies. He knew what was going to happen. Reilly would crank the tourniquet, the pain would be so unbearable that he would pass out, and then he’d wake up in a few days in a nice hospital in Germany with pretty nurses and strawberry ice cream.
“Yeah, I’m ready,” Strobino said. Reilly cranked, Strobino screamed. And screamed, and screamed, fully conscious of excruciating pain.
Blaisdell responded to Babineau’s hails. “I need you guys up here now. I got multiple wounded.” Ordinarily, that would be bad news, but all Norton could think was, “Thank Christ. They’re not all dead.”
“Okay. Where you at?” he asked.
“Just head up the center road and you’ll see us.” Since the fire to their farmhouse had petered away as soon as they took cover inside, Norton grabbed the bolt from the dismantled AK-47, which rendered it useless even if the woman could reassemble it, left her there, and took his guys to meet 3rd Platoon. Blaisdell radioed for a medevac and sent several guys to prep a landing zone and several more to secure the perimeter of the house.
This was far from the only emergency that the battalion was dealing with that day, however. At almost exactly the same time that Blaisdell was calling for a medevac, soldiers in Delta Company were facing a catastrophe themselves. Just before 5:00 p.m., a two-vehicle convoy hit a massive IED on a road parallel to Route Tampa. The IED’s location was chosen well and the explosives were perfectly concealed. Made of two or three 155mm artillery shells, the bomb rested in a sharp dip and curve in the road. Even traveling slowly, soldiers in Humvees would have had a hard time spotting it before they were practically on top of it. The detonation was perfectly timed, ripping the center of the truck apart and leaving the front and the back relatively untouched. Platoon leader First Lieutenant Garrison Avery, gunner Specialist Marlon Bustamante, and driver Private First Class Caesar Viglienzone were all killed instantly, their bodies ripped to flaming pieces and thrown, along with massive hunks of the truck, as far as seventy-five yards by the blast.
The 1st Platoon fire team spotted Whelchel, who waved them forward. The medevac chopper, which had just come from the Delta IED site, started its approach toward the landing zone about two hundred yards away. Because Strobino could not move his leg and was in agonizing pain, it took about six people to carry him to the bird. Blaisdell supported one of Strobino’s arms while members of 1st Platoon took his other arm and legs. Reilly ran alongside pushing up on his hips. As they loaded him into the chopper and Reilly hopped in as well, Blaisdell looked Strobino in the eyes and then kissed him on the forehead. Fully loaded, the medevac lifted off at 5:40 p.m.*
Back at Freedom Rest, Goodwin was feeling better than he had in months. Since it was getting to be a reasonable hour in the morning back in the States, he had just logged on to IM and pinged his wife.
“Did you hear?” she typed.
“Hear what?” he responded.
“There is a communications blackout down in Yusufiyah. I was talking to Justin and all of a sudden the line went dead.” It is not uncommon in the information age for the company commander’s wife or some other representative of the family support group back home to get daily updates on the unit’s goings-on. In this case, Goodwin’s wife just happened to be getting an update from Bravo’s executive officer, Justin Habash, at exactly the moment things started getting hairy.
“No,” Goodwin typed. “I gotta go. I’ll talk to you later.” Goodwin’s heart began to race and blood rushed to his head. He was having trouble thinking. “This is exactly why I didn’t want to go,” he thought, “if something happened when I wasn’t there. And now it has. Phone. Need a phone.” Goodwin rushed to the front desk and said, “I need a phone, I need a phone. Now.” He dialed through to Habash. “Hey, Justin, what’s going on?”
“We’ve been in a firefight. Third platoon. Rushdi Mullah. Looks bad.”
“Freedom Rest is over,” Goodwin thought. He started calling around, trying to get on a Black Hawk back to Yusufiyah.
“Sorry,” he was told, “there are none available until the morning.”
There was a lull. A long lull. The helicopter had evacuated the wounded, but there was still one fighter inside the house. They couldn’t tell if he was dead or wounded. Maybe he had booby-trapped the house, maybe he was just lying in ambush. Whatever he was doing, he wasn’t firing anymore. The 3rd Platoon and 1st Platoon men conferred. An Apache Longbow combat helicopter buzzed overhead.
“How do you want to go about this?” Blaisdell asked Norton. After floating several options, they decided to do a “mad minute,” shooting rounds into every window and lobbing rifle-fired grenades in there as well, hoping to kill the insurgent or, if he survived, enrage or frighten him into shooting back. They shot hundreds of rounds and several grenades into the house. The grenades ignited something in the house. Smoke began to leak out of one window. When they ceased fire, nothing. No response from the house.
“Now what?” asked Blaisdell.
“Air strike?” Norton offered.
“Just what I was thinking.”
“Requesting destroy,” Blaisdell radioed to the pilot.
“Roger,” replied the Apache. But, the pilot followed up, “We’re not sure which house it is. Can you confirm?” Blaisdell and Norton looked at each other.
“Um, it’s the one that’s on fire, over.”
“Sorry, still can’t make it out. Can’t see a fire.”
“Okay, we’ll point some lasers at it.” Everybody had a PEC2 laser-pointing device, which can be seen only with infrared optics. Blaisdell called the men around and had them lay a beam on the house. They had more than a dozen targeting the house.
Sorry, came the word from the Apache, can’t make anything out. We can’t read PEC2s.
“Seriously, what the fuck,” Norton said to Blaisdell as Blaisdell radioed the pilot.
“Um, how about a Phoenix?” A Phoenix is also an infrared signaling system, but it’s a throwable beacon about the size of a baseball, powered by a nine-volt battery.
“Roger, that’d be good,” said the pilot.
Norton turned to the men. “Who wants to go throw this on the house? Anyone? Anyone?”
“Fuck it,” responded Diaz, “I’ll do it.”
“Be careful,” Norton said, “that guy might have set up a shooting position by now.” Diaz grabbed the Phoenix, ran out about a hundred yards into the street, and heaved it. It landed short of the house, bounced in front of a car out front, and, in a one-in-a-million throw, flew into the car’s open window. Diaz returned out of breath.
“Strobe is activated, can you read?”
“Negative” came the call.
“Motherfucker!” Blaisdell shouted. The roof of the car might be blocking the signal, the guys hypothesized. Maybe it broke. Diaz shook his head, swore, rousted himself, and sprinted back out, all the way to the car, where he reached inside, pulled out the strobe, and put it on top of the car, then hauled back.
“How about now?” Blaisdell asked the pilot.
“Roger,” he replied.
“Thank God,” they exclaimed.
“Request destroy,” Blaisdell said.
“I am not approved for Hellfire,” the pilot said, referring to the rockets that are the Apaches’ main weapons system.
“What is the point of being out here, then?” one of the guys muttered.
“We are approving you,” said Blaisdell, looking at Norton, who nodded. “We are the on-ground commanders.”
“Negative,” said the pilot. “That is a no-go. I need clearance from my chain of command.” Another
round of “what the fuck” mutterings from all the men. The pilot came back a moment or two later and said, “Hell-fires denied.” The men let loose with a long and committed round of profanities.
“But I can do a gun run,” said the pilot. Apaches have a 30mm cannon for strafing.
“Roger, do it,” said Blaisdell. Apaches are like hovering tanks. They are designed to move slowly, rise up out of the tree line, unleash a hellacious Hellfire barrage on big targets such as bunkers, armored vehicles, and artillery batteries, and then recede. Unlike nimbler helicopters, Apaches are not particularly good at close-quarters combat or strafing. “You’re gonna need to push your cordon out,” the pilot said.
“Roger.” The men moved about fifty yards farther back from the house, finding refuge in a stable filled with livestock.
“Okay, we are coming in,” said the Apache. “Guns are hot, and we are cleared.” The Apache came in drastically short, hitting very close to the stable where the men had taken refuge. Doss was sitting near a mud-wall berm when the first of the Apache’s rounds impacted twenty to thirty yards away from him, blowing that part of the berm to particles. Doss, taken totally by surprise, was blown off his seat and accidentally squeezed a burst from the light machine gun he was carrying. The first run completely missed the target house, shooting up the livestock field between them and the house. One of the cows got hit and started moaning in a sickening and nerve-racking wail.
“Describe effects,” said the pilot.
“Describe effects?!” shouted Blaisdell. “You almost hit us, you jackass! That shit is danger close! You did not, repeat not, hit the target!”
After a minute or two of the cow caterwauling and writhing in pain, Norton said, “I can’t fucking stand this,” stood up, and shot the cow in the head. It gave a final moo-gasp and fell to the ground. Sheep and goats and chickens scurried around the men in various states of distress. The Apache swung around and returned, this time moving much more slowly. It almost hovered above the house and fired six to eight rounds that blew some sizable holes into and through the house, but the structure remained standing.
“Okay, you’re good,” said the pilot, who pulled back to circling distance. This was not at all what they had had in mind.
“What in the fuck do I have to do to get a house blown up around here?!” Blaisdell yelled. “Seriously,” he asked Norton, “what do I have to do?”
“I don’t know, man, I don’t know,” replied Norton. “We told him everything.”
Blaisdell and Norton conferred between themselves and talked to the TOC and they decided to breach the house. Arnold took the lead, with Specialist Owens and Specialist David Shockey behind. They threw a frag grenade into the foyer and piled through the front door. They did not have a floor plan, and they had discussed how they had no idea what the layout of the house would be, but Arnold found the entryway even more confusing than expected. It was a tiny vestibule with four doors leading off of it, each covered with a sheet, and the house was filled with a haze of smoke. Moving clockwise, they cleared the first two rooms. They had all just regrouped back in the foyer and Arnold had started moving into the third room when the insurgent, in the fourth room, started firing into the foyer. Owens got hit with multiple rounds, slumped, and started screaming. Shockey, the number-three man, tripping up on Owens, took several bullets too. Arnold, whose momentum had carried him out of the line of fire, stepped to the side of the doorway and pumped rounds through the sheet covering the fourth door as Shockey pulled Owens out. Arnold followed them both.
Norton, Diaz, and Gregory rushed forward to pull Owens out of the front yard, and Blaisdell called in another medevac. Arnold prepped a grenade and threw it into the house. Norton, Diaz, and Gregory started working on Owens. He’d been shot several times and his breathing was labored. He could not speak and was barely responsive. Shockey had been hit in the leg. He was in pain, but he would be fine. By 6:25 p.m., the second medevac had arrived, taking Owens and Shockey. Shockey did not want to leave the battlefield and had to be ordered onto the bird. Owens’s injuries looked serious, but the men were optimistic. Everybody had seen worse, and they were getting him to the hospital well within the golden hour. He was not speaking, but he squeezed Blaisdell’s hand as they loaded him aboard.
Goodwin was still trying to get on a flight, but nothing was opening up. He called Habash back and found out that the situation had deteriorated. Owens, Habash told him, was dead. He died from massive internal bleeding forty minutes after the medevac picked him up. Goodwin headed straight to the front desk of the hotel.
“When you guys checked us in, you said we could talk to Combat Stress,” Goodwin said. “I need them now. Right now. I don’t care where they’re at. I don’t care if they’re at frigging chow. I need to talk to them right now.” Goodwin spent three hours talking to two different members of Combat Stress. Topics ranged from the responsibility he felt when soldiers under his command died, to his relationship with Kunk, to his constant sensation that he was barely keeping his head above water. After he finished with them, he made more calls about finding a helicopter back to Yusufiyah. Actually, came the answer, if you get down to LZ Washington, we might be able to get you a flight tonight. Goodwin walked back to the front desk. “I need my gear,” he said. “I need to get out of here.”
Owens was dead, another soldier had been injured, and the men in Rushdi Mullah were right back where they were several hours ago. There was an insurgent in the house and they did not know if he was alive or dead. Blaisdell got back on the radio to request Hellfire destruction of the house. He was tired of putting his men at risk when there were multimillion-dollar choppers out there that could end this with one missile. This time, Blaisdell’s request was approved. “Another scenario where somebody has to die in order to get what you want,” Norton later observed.
It was 9:00 p.m. The bird came back in. Again, it could not acquire the target house. It’s the same house you guys already fired on, Blaisdell said, incredulous. It has dead insurgents in front of it, and it is on fire—what more do you need? Negative, came the response from the helicopter, we can’t see it. Again, they shined lasers and threw beacons at it and, again, nothing worked. Finally, Blaisdell ran up to the house so he could capture an eight-digit grid location of it, and he passed the exact coordinates up to the helicopter.
With the grid in hand, the helicopter fired one rocket. It missed.
“I think I’m going to hit it again,” said the pilot. The men looked at each other: Again? He circled around and fired two more missiles, both of which slammed home, finally reducing the house to smoking rubble. A patrol to the house confirmed that the final insurgent was finally dead. That night, Blaisdell’s and Norton’s men took over a house nearby to wait for EOD to show up the next day to deal with the suicide vests and to make sure more insurgents didn’t try to retrieve the bodies. First Sergeant Laskoski and a Bravo relief patrol showed up bringing food, water, and more ammo.
Back at LZ Washington, Goodwin spotted two of his men, Shockey and Reilly.
“What are you guys doing here?” Goodwin asked.
“We got tore up, sir.” Medevaced out, they had been treated and released. Now they were looking for rides back to Yusufiyah themselves.
Third Platoon left the next morning as elements from Headquarters and Headquarters Company, Explosive Ordnance Disposal, and more relief units arrived. EOD retrieved the insurgents’ explosives and, after photographing and analyzing the vests, blew them up. Passports found on the fighters indicated one was Yemeni, one was Lebanese, and two were Syrians. The mission was not over, however. Word came down that Brigade wanted to air-evacuate the insurgents’ bodies out. This was not unheard of, but after a daylong battle and an overnight away from the FOB, most of the men were not excited about babysitting and playing taxi service to a bunch of dead enemies.
The helicopters never arrived. The delays were various: The birds had to refuel, so they sent another tandem from another base. But they
got diverted into another mission, so the original copters were back on the job. But one had a mechanical malfunction, so they headed back again. One hour stretched into three and then five.
Norton called up to ask if photos of the insurgents were good enough, distinguishing marks, scars? Negative, came the call, higher headquarters wants the bodies. Kunk was getting involved on the radio chatter too, and he was getting heated. He wanted his men out of there, but Ebel or somebody higher than him was insisting on retrieving the bodies. Sitting in the same position for hours on end, the men started taking mortar fire and sporadic small-arms fire. Bravo was getting more and more irritated. Norton called in to see if they could get some mortars to counterfire on the insurgents’ mortar positions.
“Negative” came the word. “There are high-tension power wires in the area, and there is collateral damage risk.”
“Okay, when one of their mortars hits us, I will let you know,” Norton snapped back. “And if you don’t hear from us, it’s because we’re dead.”
They were still waiting for the helicopters when some men pulling guard on the roof noticed lots of women and children fleeing Rushdi Mullah. More than a hundred of them, in an orderly evacuation. They had donkeys, carts, and shopping bags filled with clothes and goods. Soon after that, three or four Bongo trucks drove up from the power plant and parked on the outskirts of town, at different points, like they were cordoning off the town from the west, just as the Army had done from the east the night before. This was not looking good.
Black Hearts: One Platoon's Descent into Madness in Iraq's Triangle of Death Page 24