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

by Jim Frederick

  Soon after that altercation Fenlason told somebody over the radio, “Well, I guess I got my CIB!” The CIB is the Combat Infantryman’s Badge and it is one of the most prestigious medals in the Army because it indicates that you weren’t simply an infantryman in a war zone but that you took direct enemy fire. Guys from real combat units had nothing but contempt for the rear-echelon types up at Striker who would go running in the direction of a mortar impact that landed harmlessly two hundred yards away so they could try to convince their superiors that they were “under fire” and get their CIB, or its non-infantry equivalent, the Combat Action Badge. And now, 1st Platoon sneered, they were being led by one of these pogues. Fenlason later said he had no recollection of saying such a thing and doubted he would have. “It’s not the kind of thing I would have cared about one way or another,” he stated.

  Norton and Fenlason had no problems getting along. While no platoon sergeant would probably ever live up to Norton’s idealization of Lonnie Hayes in Charlie Company, Fenlason was, in Norton’s eyes, an improvement over Gallagher. Though Fenlason usually did most of the talking, Norton felt he could have real conversations with him about goals and progress for the unit and the area. Fenlason thought they should be doing a lot more community outreach, more counterinsurgency. That sort of stuff was a high priority up at Brigade, and other companies were moving far ahead of them in that regard. Bravo wasn’t even trying in Fenlason’s eyes. Part of the problem was that these platoons were moving around too much, especially in and out of the TCPs. The people of Mullah Fayyad and surrounding villages could hardly get to know, much less trust, any of the soldiers if they were always just passing through. There should be more ownership, Fenlason thought.

  Norton definitely agreed, at least in theory. He was wary of doing anything drastic, however, because he did believe that Bravo’s sector was hotter than the other companies’. Maybe this area wasn’t quite ready to make the big transition to community building yet, Norton wondered. Or maybe it was. Maybe it was something to try, or at least think about, but Norton reminded Fenlason that he was going on leave on February 22. He assumed they would pick up the discussions after he returned in about a month.

  As Fenlason settled in, the men determined another thing they could hate him for: He almost never left the wire. He rarely patrolled. He never went on IED sweeps. He seemed never to ride along on a Quick Reaction Force when anyone got into a scrape. And the thought of Fenlason pulling guard the way Gallagher had made the soldiers laugh out loud. Fenlason always made sure to get a full night’s sleep, they said. “Sergeant Fenlason didn’t do anything,” said Sergeant Daniel Carrick, one of the battalion’s young stars, who was transferred from 3rd Platoon to give 1st Platoon better junior NCO leadership. “He sat around smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and that’s it. He’d do patrols once a month to go talk to some leaders.”

  Fenlason conceded that he did not get out very often. “I did one IED sweep my first few days there,” he said. “I did a half a dozen walks in Mullah Fayyad. And I did the two walks out and back to Rushdi Mullah.” But he does not see this as a failing. “Iraq in 2006 was a squad-level fight. The patrols were squad-level patrols, or fire-team-level patrols. I don’t go on fire-team-level patrols. Why would I? I never considered the perception of the soldiers or even the junior leaders. It never occurred to me to look at it through their eyes.”

  In the early morning of February 22, about a dozen men, possibly dressed as policemen, entered the venerated Shi’ite Askariya mosque in the city of Samarra, wired it with some five hundred pounds of explosives, withdrew, and detonated it remotely. Zarqawi was among the suspected masterminds, and AQI’s umbrella organization, the Mujahideen Shura Council, issued a statement celebrating the Shi’ite outrage that followed. AQI never explicitly took credit for the attack, however, and several of the bombing’s characteristics were atypical of an AQI hit. Regardless, it was spectacularly provocative and successfully ushered in a new escalation in the civil war between Shi’ites and Sunnis, throughout Iraq and in the Triangle of Death.

  The Samarra bombing galvanized and remotivated Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army (also known as Jaish al-Mahdi, or JAM) to push into locales they had not been operating extensively in for months, including Mahmudiyah. More Iraqi civilians were killed in Baghdad during the first three months of 2006 than at any time since the end of the Saddam regime. Sectarian killings now claimed nine times more lives than car bombings, and executions had increased 86 percent in the nine weeks after the February mosque bombing.

  According to Captain Leo Barron, the 1-502nd’s intelligence officer, this trend played out much the same way in Mahmudiyah. Ethnic tensions erupted anew and violence spiked past all previous levels. Less than a week after the bombing, Alpha Company witnessed the first open gun battle in Mahmudiyah they had ever seen between the Mahdi militia and a local Sunni tribe. Alpha did not get involved. “I don’t want to get in the middle of that,” Alpha company commander Bordwell told Stars and Stripes at the time, but added, “If that were to continue, that would be a real concern.”

  It did continue. In fact, an all-but-government-mandated Shi’ite counterattack was already beginning before the Samarra bombing. On February 7, seven masked men in IA uniforms and one in all-black clothing carrying AK-47s and 9mm handguns had “arrested” the Sunni mayor of Mahmudiyah, who had been elected by a council of elders Kunk had organized several weeks before. Four men pulled security outside his office and told anyone who asked that they were working “for Baghdad.” Inside, the other team presented the mayor with an arrest warrant that appeared to have been issued by the previous mayor, the same one who had been arrested just as First Strike was taking over this area. That first mayor, is, today, the mayor of Mahmudiyah, and the second mayor has never been heard from again.

  Prior to the Samarra bombing, Barron said, violence in the area was dominated by Sunni locals planting IEDs for money. AQI or other Sunni insurgent groups paid up to several hundred dollars to locals to lay an IED. But after the Samarra bombing, Barron saw an increase in violence committed by Shi’ites and then a counterreaction from Sunnis who started fighting back, not for money but out of hate. In this spiral of violence and battle for control, JAM became even more brazen. “Shi’ites took over many of the city council positions in Mahmudiyah, they were pushing Sunnis out of their neighborhoods,” Barron said. “What started as threats and propaganda turned into intimidation and then murder and assassination. Over time, the demographics of the city changed completely. It flipped from being a mixed city to one with an overwhelming Shi’ite majority.”

  First Strike was not powerless to stop this ethnic cleansing: they were ordered not to. “We had a massive amount of intelligence on JAM,” said Barron. “We knew JAM’s hierarchy inside and out. But the orders were very explicit: Go after Al Qaeda. Do not worry about JAM.” A reluctance by U.S. commanders to antagonize the Shi’ite-dominated Iraqi government, many of whose highest-ranking members had long-established ties to the militias, drove such decisions, but it badly damaged U.S. forces’ credibility among Sunnis in places like Mahmudiyah. “It was very frustrating,” Barron admitted. “Sunni sheikhs came in and asked, ‘So how many Shi’ites are in your jail?’ And the answer was, not a lot. Part of the reason the Sunni insurgencies were having so much success, especially in Bravo’s AO, was because the locals, Sunni locals, did not see us as evenhanded.”

  On February 28, almost five months to the day since the deployment started, Lauzier was scheduled to go on a month’s leave. He didn’t want to go. He was afraid of what would happen if he left his men. Not every squad leader went on a lot of patrols, but Lauzier went on every one he could. “He would try to take point on every mission, and it got to where it bothered me because I would be like, no, man, I got it, you know?” Specialist James Barker recalled. But Lauzier couldn’t bear the thought of sending somebody out and them not coming back. If that happened, how could you live with not having been there? Now that he
was going on leave, who would lead in his place? He would have been confident leaving Sergeant Tony Yribe in charge, but Yribe had been moved to 1st Squad after Nelson and Casica got shot. Specialist Paul Cortez and Specialist Anthony Hernandez were his team leaders, but they weren’t even sergeants yet. He loved his guys, but without him, he was worried they were going to get killed.

  The truth was, for all his bluster, this deployment was wearing Lauzier down. Under Lieutenant Britt and Platoon Sergeant Miller, Lauzier had been far and away the favored squad leader, but with Fenlason in charge, Lauzier had lost status fast. He felt marginalized. The new golden-boy squad leader was Payne, which made Lauzier bitter.

  “Sergeant Fenlason and I didn’t talk too much because he wasn’t around,” said Lauzier. “But when we did talk, it never went well. Whenever I offered a suggestion, Fenlason would shoot it down straightaway. ‘Oh, did you read a book?’ he would say. I called Norton, Fenlason, and Payne the Circle of Three. I was not included in their little club.”

  Lauzier’s fall from favor was obvious to most in the platoon, and many thought it was unfair. “Lauzier was very, very tactically sound and very tactically minded,” opined Sergeant Roman Diaz, who served in both 1st and 3rd Squads. “Weapons were always clean, night vision and optics were always functioning. Lauzier took his responsibilities very seriously. Things like noise and light discipline were very important to him. Third Squad had this reputation for being cowboys, but we jumped when we had to jump, and we ran when we had to run, and we operated like an infantry squad.”

  Halfway into his second deployment Lauzier was rapidly losing his taste for combat. “Killing AIF is useless beause there are ten more to replace each one,” he said. “It is a pointless fight. When you first get here it’s like, yeah, let’s go kick butt. But that ends real quick. It gets to the point where you hear a gunshot and all the strength zaps out of your legs.” His body was breaking down, too. He was suffering from painful back problems, and a worsening bone spur was making it difficult for him to walk.

  Increasingly alienated, Lauzier started falling back on the men from his squad for support, especially Barker. “The Army would probably say I’m a shitbag soldier for that because I’m confiding in one of my subordinates. But I had no one to talk to,” he confessed. “What am I going to do? I’m human. You get real close out there, closer than a mother’s bond with her child. That’s how it was for me. Those men were my responsibility. I’m their mother, I’m their father, their counselor, police officer, principal—whatever you want to call it, that’s what I am.”

  The affection was reciprocal. “He would have done anything for us and we would have done anything for him,” said Barker. When asked what kind of leader Lauzier was, Cortez said, “By the book, led from the front, took care of his guys first, looked up to by everybody. Loved. Respected.”

  But outsiders to the 3rd Squad dynamic said Lauzier was, in fact, losing control of his men. “They were a bunch of loose cannons,” pronounced Sergeant Carrick. “He was either babysitting one guy or he was trying to stop that guy from kicking in some girl’s face, just because he could.” This was the difference between control and influence. “Yes, he had control if he was there watching them all the time,” said Sergeant Diem. “But nobody supervises their subordinates that much. He had no influence over his squad. He had no power over their behavior when he wasn’t there.” And even though Lauzier thought highly of his men, many of the other guys in 1st Platoon thought some of the characters in 3rd Squad, especially Barker and Cortez, were just hoodlums who happened to be wearing uniforms.

  Cortez was particularly tweaked these days. Just before Lauzier’s leave, 3rd Squad got the call to go fill in some IED holes off of Fat Boy. It was, the men thought, a typically dipshit mission. “That was the order: Go out there to fill holes, so that the insurgents could put bombs back in them and blow the fuck out of us again,” said Lauzier. “If you wanted to fill the holes with concrete and do an overwatch until it was all dry, that’s one thing, but this was just dumb—and we got ordered to do stuff like this all the time.”

  It was common for soldiers to complain, even vehemently, when sent on these types of missions. A soldier screaming, “This is fucking bullshit!” and then throwing something across the room was a normal occurrence, but it would always be followed by his picking up his helmet and continuing to suit up. He might be grumbling to himself the whole time about how he didn’t sign up for this shit, this was the dumbest fucking thing he’d ever done, this is the dumbest fucking idea in the motherfucking history of warfare and he can’t wait to get out of the Army so he can go to the White House himself and shove an IED so far up George Bush’s ass that they are going to have to pry his teeth out of the walls. But he would continue to suit up and be ready to go when it was showtime.

  With Cortez, this time, it was different. He was teary-eyed, sometimes blubbering, sometimes shouting, hysterical about how he was sick of it, he couldn’t do this anymore.

  “They don’t give a shit about us!” he shrieked. “They don’t fucking care if we die, they don’t fucking care. This is suicide, every day is another suicide mission, day after day after day! I’m not doing it!”

  Lauzier tried to talk him down for a minute or two, but that wasn’t working. He tried to get him into a separate room, away from the other men, because Cortez’s losing his mind was now freaking them out. Either freaking them out or, for the guys who didn’t like Cortez, confirming that he was a little bitch after all. Lauzier wanted to punch him.

  “You’re a specialist, for chrissake!” Lauzier yelled once he had gotten him into a semiprivate corner. “You’re about to get promoted. Everybody feels the stress. Go ahead, have a breakdown! But you can’t do it in front of the men.” Cortez continued to spout hysterics. Lauzier decided he really didn’t have time for this, so he got angry. “Fuck it, Cortez, then stay back!” he yelled. “If you don’t want to go, then don’t go. Just stay the fuck back, okay? We got it covered. You’re good, all right? You’re good. Don’t worry about it.”

  Lauzier and his squad-sized patrol headed out. Lauzier stewed on it during the patrol, and when he got back he happened to pass Norton and Fenlason while he was still fuming. They asked him what was wrong, and he vented. Fenlason called Cortez in. This was not what Lauzier wanted to have happen. He should have held his tongue. He did not want Fenlason involved. Fenlason chewed Cortez’s ass.

  “I will bust you a rank and make you a SAW [squad automatic weapon] gunner if you pull shit like that again!” Fenlason yelled. Lauzier took Cortez aside and apologized for losing his temper, and apologized for getting Fenlason involved.

  “But,” Lauzier told Cortez, “you can’t pull that shit in front of the guys. If you are freaking out, you need to talk to me in private. I am going on leave soon and Fenlason has it in for all of us. He is gunning for us, waiting for us to fuck up. So when I am gone, you have got to be shit hot and wire tight, you hear me?”

  “I hear you,” said Cortez.

  MARCH 2006

  18

  Back to the TCPs

  BEGINNING MARCH 1, 1st Platoon rotated back out to the TCPs. Norton had gone on midtour leave in the third week of February, so Fenlason had sole control of 1st Platoon. Goodwin was aware that morale had not come around, but he was optimistic, and he had expected the adjustment to Fenlason to be rocky at first. “About thirty days into it, they’re at the lowest point,” he recalled. “This is when everybody is just fed up. They hate each other. The guys just are pushing back. It’s what happens. New guy comes in. There is always a downturn. Then the body adapts.” He was hoping the body would adapt soon.

  But 1st Platoon was at a far lower point than even those who were supposed to monitor it realized. The psychological isolation that 1st Platoon had been experiencing throughout the deployment was becoming nearly total. “First Platoon had become insane,” declared Sergeant Diem flatly. “What does an infantry rifle platoon do? It destroys. That’s what it�
�s trained to do. Now turn that ninety degrees to the left, and let slip the leash, and it becomes something monstrous. First Platoon became monstrous. It was not even aware of what it was doing.”

  Some of the mental states that the men describe are well documented by psychologists studying the effect of combat on soldiers. The men spoke about desensitization, how numbed they were to the violence. They passed around short, graphic computer video compilations of collected combat kills and corpses found in Iraq. One, with a title card dedicated to “Mr. Squishy Head”—a dead body whose skull had been smashed in—was set to the track of Rage Against the Machine’s “How I Could Just Kill a Man.” It was a horror parade of stills and short clips of gore and carnage.

  Justin Cross, who had been promoted to private first class in March, admitted he talked with some of the other men about how the social breakdown and the extreme Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence around them would be a perfect cover for murder. “I was on guard one day and they radioed in to be extra alert because people were rioting,” he said. “At that point in time, in that state of mind, I had this bright idea. I said, ‘You know what’s funny, man? Go behind the TCP, kill anybody. Kill anybody. And fucking blame it on the riots. And we’d get away with it.’ After saying that shit, everybody looked up and was like just looking at each other. Barker and Cortez were just staring at each other. It was like, ‘That’s a damn good idea.’”