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

by Jim Frederick

  19

  The Mayor of Mullah Fayyad

  DURING THIS TCP rotation, Fenlason decided to begin a community-building initiative he had been mulling over for several weeks. Having most recently been assigned to the brigade’s community affairs office, Fenlason was in tune with the counterinsurgency ideas that were gaining traction around this time. And upon his moving into this AO, the town of Mullah Fayyad had caught his attention. A cluster of a couple of hundred houses and other buildings in a compact area that bordered Sportster and was the home of TCP1 and TCP5, Mullah Fayyad seemed to him the perfect target to begin a serious effort to help locals get better control of sewerage, water, electricity, education, and other basics of civilized life. “I went to Goodwin with the idea of changing the focus,” he said. “Let’s do the CMO—the civil-military operations stuff. We are not finding insurgents in Mullah Fayyad, we’re not getting anywhere with these IED sweeps, except finding IEDs, because we’re not really establishing ourselves in Mullah Fayyad in any way that makes sense.”

  They were already five months into this deployment and Mullah Fayyad was still only a town in the sense that it was a dense collection of houses. There was no government, and due to vagaries of demographics and tribal dynamics, the town was so mixed that there was no dominant sheikh or local strongman there. Fenlason wanted to jump-start a campaign that would put the town on its feet, or at least start to. He believed he could do this by providing the Iraqis continuity, familiar faces. Rotating soldiers through every three to five days was not enough time to get anything done. “Every patrol that went out, my guidance to them was to engage people, talk to them, find out what is going on,” he said. He told 1st Squad to make contacts and ask them what they needed and what they thought the Army might be able to do for them.

  Alpha and some of the other companies throughout the battalion were successfully beginning such programs, and some were quite advanced, but Bravo, because of its restive area, lagged. Blaisdell was adept at achieving a rapport with the locals and had developed an extensive network of Iraqis who liked him and worked with him, but Fenlason had grand plans to bring a whole town to a higher level of healthy functioning. Encouraged by the progress he said he saw in just a week, and believing stability to be paramount, he lobbied Goodwin to let 1st Platoon stay in place while he tried to get something going.

  Goodwin was encouraged. “They started doing minor patrols outside of the TCPs,” Goodwin said. “They’re starting to improve, starting to clean things up.” Fenlason told him he wanted to stay a month, Goodwin remembered, but Goodwin responded, “Let’s see how it goes.”

  Fenlason got this extension without speaking to Blaisdell or Gebhardt, which irritated them immensely; each move a platoon makes—or does not make—impacts the other two. “I was fucking pissed,” Blaisdell admitted. “We had shit going on in Mullah Fayyad too. We could have shared that shit. I remember yelling at him on the radio, ‘Who in the fuck put you in charge of the goddamn company?’”

  Gebhardt, as usual, was more understated. “It was a unilateral call by one platoon sergeant. There was no discussion. I think that’s what upset people more than anything.” He acknowledged that one reason he wasn’t as upset as Blaisdell was because his platoon was down at the JSB, which was the choicest of the three missions, and he certainly wasn’t dying to have 2nd Platoon cover the TCPs. “If there is one position that the privates hated, it was the TCPs,” he said. “But it was bearable because you did it seventy-two hours or so. But weeks at a time? That would drive me crazy.”

  The impact the extended TCP rotation was having on 1st Platoon was manifest, said Gebhardt. “A lot of his guys were upset by that. And that was obvious, just as you drove through. If you ever drive through the TCPs, platoon passing another platoon, there’s friendly waves and chitchat as you go through. But they wanted none of that. They didn’t want to talk to anybody. They were just mad. Not that I blame them. I’d be mad too.”

  Charlie Company’s First Sergeant Largent remembered driving through Bravo’s sector and looking at the soldiers manning the checkpoints. “You know, you see guys in the movies, and they’ve been in combat for months and they’re just ragged and dirty and filthy and they got that thousand-yard stare and they’re just burnt out?” he says. “And they’re not all there mentally? That was Bravo Company. Those guys were strung the fuck out.”

  Fenlason was operating in a cocoon. He wasn’t talking to the other platoon sergeants, nor was he communicating the mission, the importance of it, or the success he was having to any of the TCPs but his. Those not stationed at TCP1 had no idea what was going on when they radioed about when they were rotating back to the FOB. Fenlason said he couldn’t tell, because he himself didn’t know: the mission was results-dependent and could end at any moment.

  Private First Class Justin Cross had one of a couple breakdowns around this time. “My brain was overheating. I started sweating, got really light-headed. I just fucking broke down, started crying and shit. There was no end to this. When the fuck is help coming? Shit, how long are we going to do this?” Cross was ultimately evacuated to Camp Striker during this TCP rotation for a complete psychological evaluation and a stay at Freedom Rest.

  With the TCP mission now indefinite, Fenlason instituted a complex system where nine out of the approximately thirty-five soldiers in 1st Platoon rotated back to the FOB every day for four or five hours to take a shower, grab a hot meal, make a phone call, use the Internet, pick up their laundry, or get supplies for the TCPs. That left, on any given day, two dozen or so soldiers spread across four battle positions, which resulted in some of the thinnest staffing scenarios the men had ever experienced. TCP2 and TCP6 were routinely left with three or four people to man each spot. Staffing became so strained that at least once a single U.S. soldier got stranded alone with four or five Iraqi soldiers at a checkpoint. Despite this regular, methodical rotation system, which required nine soldiers to travel back and forth to Yusufiyah every day, Fenlason not only never visited TCP2, he never arranged for the men to receive better defensive supplies or hot food because, he said, “You don’t want to travel if you absolutely do not have to. You don’t want to travel predictably. Those are two things that are going to get you blown up.”

  One major initiative Fenlason got under way was a local leaders’ meeting. During the few times he went on patrols himself, he asked old men, anyone who looked as if they qualified as an elder, whether they would come to an informal meeting. Many men, including a veterinarian and the town’s only doctor, said they would attend. The meeting took place late in the first week of March, with Fenlason and a translator alone in a large room at TCP1 with about a dozen Iraqi men who showed up. Fenlason asked them what they wanted. They responded, overwhelmingly, that they wanted security. They wanted the insurgents to go away. Fenlason tried to align America’s interests with theirs, telling them that if they would just tell the Americans where the bad guys were, he and his men could go get them. “So we just kind of went around and around in circles for about two hours, just sort of saying the same things over and over again,” he recalled. “They had some food that a friendly family next door had made, and the group ended with an agreement to meet again in a few weeks.”

  Goodwin was getting an uninterrupted stream of good news from Fenlason about how great everything was at the TCPs. “Fenlason was calling me,” Goodwin recollected, “and he is saying, ‘Hey, we’re talking with so-and-so, we’ve got this, and we’ve got this.’ It’s like, holy crap. They’re coming back with information that I just haven’t seen in a while. I’m sitting there thinking, ‘This platoon is doing great stuff.’”

  Unfortunately, the men of 1st Platoon did not see it that way. “The chain of command cared more about what was happening in Rushdi Mullah than what was happening to us,” said Cross. “The frustration got to the point where pretty much everybody at the TCP started taking it out on people coming through. It kind of became a competition, bragging who’s fucking them u
p better.”

  Drinking and drug use were on the rise, frequently right under Fenlason’s nose. “The vast majority of the Joes were drinking,” Private First Class Steven Green acknowledged. “Most of the NCOs. Of course, the NCOs were all like twenty-two years old, though. Since I can chug a pint of whiskey, Sergeant Yribe would be like, ‘Hey, chug that bottle.’ By February or March, I was doing some type of intoxicant every day. A lot of Valiums, and a lot of these pink pills that were some kind of a hallucinogen. A lot of other guys were taking those too. Iraqi Army guys would sell them to us. TCP1 was where all of the drugs were coming from, because that’s where the most IAs were, and then they were getting spread to the other TCPs.”

  Some soldiers had started getting drunk and going out looking for Iraqis to beat up. “Cortez, Barker, and them, they’d get on whiskey and shit,” said Cross. “They’d get rowdy. Cortez and Barker at one point went on a two-man drunken patrol. They were like, ‘Fuck this shit, let’s go find some people and fuck them up.’ They took off by themselves. We had to send another soldier, who was sober, over there to keep an eye on them so nothing happened.” These rogue patrols were not uncommon. “They’d go out in Mullah Fayyad and beat up some people,” recalled Collin Sharpness, the medic. “They’d tell me all about it when they got back. There was a lot of shit going on. You got a twenty-two-year-old, a twenty-three-year-old in charge of a bunch of nineteen-year-olds? Controlling a checkpoint? Who knows what they’re doing?”

  On March 9, with so many 3rd Squad soldiers on leave, Cortez needed two more soldiers from the other squads to fill his ranks. Private First Class Jesse Spielman begged Cortez to take him, just so he could get away from Fenlason. No matter how bad TCP2 was, it was better than being around him, Spielman said. Fenlason’s approval was easy to secure. He simply didn’t care what personnel, in what combination, went down to TCP2. “Turns out to be Spielman and Green,” he said. “Which, sure, why not? As long as I’ve got nine, I don’t really give a shit.”

  Around two or three in the morning of March 10, TCP1 got a call from TCP2 saying they had detainees they needed help bringing in. They had been on their way to the house of an informant known as Mr. B when someone fired a rocket at them. They followed the rocket back to the house they thought it came from and now they had some suspects. Sergeant Yribe got Babineau and a couple of guys in a truck to go help out the guys from 3rd Squad. They didn’t really know where the house was, so Babineau and Yribe got out and started filing down some of the alleyways as Cortez guided them in over the radio using landmarks. Finally, they were within shouting range.

  “Cortez, that you?”

  “Yeah, over here!”

  Yribe walked into the house. Cortez, Spielman, a couple of other soldiers, and an interpreter were all there. In the room there were some electrical works, fuse boxes, wiring. Definitely shady, Yribe thought, so, okay, good grab. But walking in, Yribe could smell alcohol. And looking around, he could see that the soldiers had been drinking. The guys down at TCP2 were drinking at least every other day these days. Tonight they were so drunk they were practically falling down. They were trying to stand the detainees up, so they could punch them again or kick them, but they were so wasted, sometimes they wouldn’t even connect and fell to the floor themselves. Realizing just how serious the situation was in terms of their safety as well as their getting into trouble, Yribe tried to take control. He had no problem roughing up Iraqis. Catching a guy who shot at you, or tried to blow you up, and putting a lot of hurt back on him? Not a problem. But you have to do it in a controlled, even methodical way. This was way, way, insanely out of control and, maybe more important, they were in danger of getting caught.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Yribe asked. “Cortez, you need to get a grip.”

  “What?” said Cortez, slurring.

  “You guys are way out of line. What if it was anybody but me and Babs who came after your call? You’d be fucked. Where is your brain? We need to get these guys back and you need to get your stupid asses back to TCP2.”

  “Fuck you, motherfucker.” Cortez always was a belligerent drunk.

  “Whoa, who are you talking to here, dude?” Yribe responded.

  “You’re a fucking dick,” Cortez slurred. Every time Yribe turned around, one or the other of the soldiers would shout at the Iraqis.

  “Fucking motherfucker! You probably helped kill Nelson and Casica!” Spielman yelled as he tried to stomp on one of them.

  “Bro, you just need to stop, all right?” Yribe repeated to Cortez. “You’re drunk. You don’t know what the fuck’s going on. I’m trying to make it to where you don’t get busted here, okay?” There was a brand-new soldier there, Private Nicholas Lake, who, according to platoon rules, had not earned the right to beat suspects. He was guarding the women and the children.

  “All these Hadjis are motherfuckers!” one of the other drunk soldiers yelled. “We ought to just kill them all now.” Another soldier butt-stroked one of the guys across the jaw. Blood went flying across the room. The man was knocked out cold, his jaw hanging in an unnatural way.

  “Dude,” Yribe yelled, “did you just kill him?” He hadn’t, but the man was knocked out. Babineau and Yribe managed to wrangle the detainees and herd the drunk soldiers back to the truck. The whole time, Cortez was indignant that Yribe was not being cooler about this, saying he would have expected him to have his back. Spielman was an emotional drunk, telling Babineau how much he loved him and how Babineau had always been there for him. Yribe and Babineau got the guys from 3rd Squad back to TCP2, and they passed the detainees over to the IAs. No beating was ever reported.

  20

  The Janabis

  ON MARCH 12, Green was pulling predawn guard in the gun truck at TCP2. He’d been up for eighteen hours. “I’ve had it,” he thought to himself. This was it. After the morning IED sweep down Sportster and back, he was hanging out with Barker and Cortez in the courtyard area of the TCP, where Barker would always hit golf balls with a club he had scrounged somewhere. Whenever soldiers found Barker’s balls on patrols and IED sweeps, they’d bring them back to the TCP.

  “When I’m on guard next time,” Green told them, “I’m going to waste a bunch of dudes in a car. And we’ll just say they were running the TCP.”

  “Don’t do that!” Cortez exclaimed. “Don’t do it while I’m here. I’m supposed to be running this shit. I don’t want to get in trouble.”

  Barker agreed. “I’ve got a better idea,” he said. “We’ve all killed Hadjis, but I’ve been here twice and I still never fucked one of these bitches.” Cortez’s interest was piqued. They talked about it, the three of them, semiseriously but somewhat distractedly as they did other things throughout the rest of the morning. Sometimes Barker and Cortez would confer privately, sometimes Green and Barker would, and sometimes all three of them would talk.

  Barker had already picked the target. There was a house, not far from here, that would be perfect, he said. They had been on a patrol there just a little while ago. There was only one male and three females in the house during the daytime—a husband, a wife, and two daughters. One was young, but the other was a teenager or in her twenties, it was hard to tell with all the clothes the women wore, as they frequently lamented. But Barker thought she was pretty hot, at least for a Hadji chick. Barker told them that they should go over there right now.

  Witnesses were a problem, however. They knew that they couldn’t leave anyone alive. Barker asked Green if he was willing to take care of that, even if there were some women and kids involved. Barker knew Green was always begging to kill Iraqis, if only someone would say the word.

  “You’ll kill them, right?” Barker asked.

  “Absolutely,” Green replied. “It don’t make any difference to me,” Green said. “A Hadji is a Hadji.”

  They refined their plan. Barker and Cortez told Green where the father hid the family’s AK-47. They described the layout of the house and instructed Green on how to kill the family
: Lay everyone down on their faces, put pillows over their heads, and shoot them once right in the back of the head real close, they said.

  Over several hours and several conferences, they went back and forth on whether to do it or not.

  Invoking the privileges of rank, Cortez asserted, “If we are going to do this, I am going to go first.” Barker was pushing hard, and Green was game, but Cortez was waffling. Finally Cortez said, “No, fuck it, this is crazy. Fuck this. There is no way we are doing this shit.”

  At around noon, with a new wave of boredom taking hold, the three of them, along with Private First Class Jesse Spielman, sat down outside with a cardboard box as a table to play Uno. They drank Iraqi whiskey. Barker had bought five or six 12-ounce cans of the stuff from an IA at the very reasonable price of $5 per can. There was some bottled whiskey on hand too. Most of them mixed the whiskey in an empty one-liter water bottle with some Rip It, a carbonated energy drink. Green liked his whiskey straight. Over several hands of cards, they got drunk as they talked about all the things they usually talked about. Girls, cars, music, sports, how much they hated this place, how much they hated Fenlason, how much they hated Hadj.

  During most of the game, Private First Class Bryan Howard had been on his cot, listening to his CD player in another room. Howard was just eighteen, a brand-new private who had arrived in November. Though he had missed only a little more than a month of the deployment, he was still considered a new guy. He was hazed often and not included in a lot of things.

  The men, as they played, got drunker and drunker. Cortez later rated their level of intoxication at a 6 or 7 on a scale of 10. Barker said he felt about the equivalent of having six to eight beers.

  During one of the rounds, Cortez popped up and declared, “Fuck it, we are going to do this.” He outlined the mission and he divvied up the duty assignments just like a legit patrol. He and Barker would take the girl, Green would kill the rest of the family, Spielman would pull guard, and Howard would stay back and man the radio. He told everyone to grab their rifles and get ready to head out.