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

by Jim Frederick

  Daugherty’s report put the blame squarely on the platoon’s and the company’s shoulders, declaring, “This was an event caused by numerous acts of complacency and a lack of standards at the platoon level.” It recommended that Kunk receive a letter of concern, the lowest and least serious form of admonishment, one that carries no real punitive weight or long-term negative implication for an officer’s career (Kunk said he never received such a letter). It recommended that Goodwin and Norton receive letters of reprimand (although it specifically recommended that Norton not be relieved from his position).

  For many, this smacked of another instance of pushing the blame for bad news as far down the chain of command as possible. “Everybody from the battalion commander on down had been past that OP [observation post] and knew that it was bad, knew that it was a target of opportunity to get plucked,” said Alpha Company’s Jared Bordwell. “But during that whole investigation process, it was all focused on how messed up Bravo Company was. And there was some fault on their end, but there was some fault on the upper end too that I don’t think was ever acknowledged.”

  Years later, Colonel Ebel remained irritated about this investigation. He was not interviewed, and he considered the attack at the Alamo not a lapse of discipline but a well-selected target of opportunity by a savvy enemy. “It was a very hasty investigation,” he said. “And it was aimed at holding someone accountable for what essentially I determined was tactical risk. The enemy voted in what was a very volatile and dynamic battlefield.”

  The second investigation, begun in early July, focused on the rape-murders, specifically looking into “how four soldiers abandoned their post at TCP2 … without being detected” and “the frequency and measures that the chain of command (officers and non-commissioned officers) actually checked on and supervised B/1-502 IN’s tactical sites.” This report was completed by investigating officer Lieutenant Colonel John McCarthy in just five days. Because Sergeant First Class Fenlason was on leave at the time of the investigation, McCarthy never interviewed him and he interviewed only eight members of 1st Platoon total. The report makes no mention of how long the duty rotation at the TCPs actually was in March, never mentions that Lieutenant Norton was on leave at the time of the crime, never mentions that Norton had no part in lengthening the TCP rotation beyond a week, and claims that “Fenlason was generally commented by soldiers in the platoon as coming by the TCPs one to two times a week.” The soldiers’ sworn statements do not support this assertion, it is implausible that they would say such a thing about Fenlason considering he was widely ridiculed for never leaving TCP1, and he himself later admitted that he never visited either TCP2 or TCP6 during that entire March rotation.

  The second AR 15-6 also put the blame on the company-level leaders and below. Of the numerous procedural failures, it said, most notable “was the failure to supervise the operations and enforce standards at the TCPs by the company commander and platoon leader and platoon sergeant.” This investigation recommended that Goodwin be removed from command and that the platoon be busted up. “1LT Norton and SFC Fenlason should be moved to other duties,” it said. “SSG Allen and SSG Payne should be moved to a new unit. 1SG Skidis believes SSG Lauzier has performed well and considers him the strongest squad leader in the platoon.”

  Norton and Goodwin knew they were marked men. “Shit rolls downward” is an old Army phrase. They were certain they were going to get hit, they just didn’t know how badly. When Norton sat down with one of the investigators, he said that he knew he was a walking bull’s-eye. He said he knew that the investigator was there to build a case against him. The investigating officer adopted a tone of bonhomie and straightforwardness with Norton, assuring him, no, no, no, almost conspiratorially, that that was not so.

  “I can throw rocks at some of you or pebbles at all of you,” he said, and he told Norton that he intended to throw pebbles. The results of the investigation confirmed Norton’s suspicions. This was going to be a stoning all along. There was nothing Goodwin and Norton could do but wait until the brigade and the division decided on how to respond to the recommendations of the investigators. “I knew I was going to get fired,” said Goodwin. “It was just a matter of when.”

  * Private Seth Scheller, the other soldier abandoned at TCP2 with Howard on March 12 (but stationed away from him in the Humvee), told investigators he knew nothing about the crimes, either on the day they happened or any time after. The co-accused all corroborated this, and he was excluded from all further inquiries.

  JULY–SEPTEMBER 2006

  26

  The Fight Goes On

  FIRST PLATOON REMAINED at Mahmudiyah, where they would stay for the remaining two and a half months of the tour, doing not much more than pulling guard on the FOB. Charlie Company, who had handed over significant portions of their territory to the Iraqi Army, picked up the JSB from Bravo Company so that Bravo’s 2nd and 3rd Platoons could focus on the traffic control points and Yusufiyah.

  Sequestered from the rest of 1st Platoon, Watt spoke frequently with Lieutenant Colonel Elizabeth Bowler, the psychiatrist who headed up the battalion’s Combat Stress team. After starting strongly, Bowler’s relationship with Kunk had deteriorated drastically over the past few months. They clashed often. Kunk was frequently abusive, disparaging, and disrespectful of her. She was, through one of the oddities of the Army Reserve world, and by virtue of her education, the same rank as Kunk, and she frequently acted like it. Others on the FOB found this grating, notwithstanding any issues she may have had with Kunk. She had a brusque and superior manner with some of the company commanders, whom she technically outranked, and they found that ridiculous.

  Upon Bowler’s first meeting with Watt, she became concerned about his mental health, and his safety. The stress of turning in his friends was weighing heavily on him. She thought that the risks he faced from soldiers seeking revenge were real enough, and debilitating enough to his psyche, that he should be moved to Baghdad, if not evacuated from the theater entirely.

  Kunk, however, called her a drama queen and told her that she was going far beyond her authority to be suggesting something like that.

  “He’s lucky I don’t take him up on charges for making false official statements!” Kunk bellowed, a comment that Bowler did not understand but that disquieted her very much. In the civilian world, as a prison psychiatrist, she worked with skillful liars every day, and she was quite sure Watt was not lying about anything. Kunk later denied that he threatened such a thing. “That’s ludicrous,” he said.

  On June 30, Associated Press reporter Ryan Lenz, who was embedded with a different unit north of Baghdad, wrote a brief story about the investigation now unfolding on Mahmudiyah, relying on anonymous sources who had intimate knowledge of the details of the case. He wrote a much fuller account the next day. What would come to be known as (oddly, for its geographic inaccuracy) the Mahmudiyah Massacre, ballooned into an international scandal in a matter of days. Lenz’s stories included accurate, minute details about the crime: one of the bodies being burned by a flammable liquid, one of the victims being a young child, and one of the accused having already been discharged from the Army. The story infuriated Kunk, who thought the investigation was too premature to appear in the news. Since Lenz had recently been embedded with the 1-502nd, there was rampant speculation that his source was someone on FOB Mahmudiyah. Kunk became convinced that Bowler was the source, something that both she and Lenz have denied.

  Back in the States, Green saw the news stories streaming out of Iraq on all the cable news channels about the investigation. While he suspected it was just a matter of time before he was arrested, a part of him actually thought no one would bother with him. “My mind was so fucked up about Iraqis, I wasn’t even really sure I was going to get in trouble. To my mind, it was like, ‘No one’s going to be mad about Iraqis. They’re Iraqis.’” In fact, the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division had notified the FBI about Green on June 27, and they had been working on an affidavit a
nd arrest warrant ever since.

  Since his discharge on May 16, Green had wandered around aimlessly. “I was still kind of tripping from the war. All I was doing was drinking and smoking weed and driving around with a pistol and an AK in my car. That was it, all day long.” He visited a cousin, who was appalled that he didn’t have any change of clothes, so she took him shopping and bought him several outfits. He met up with old friends, who thought he looked haggard and unwell. Occasionally, when he was drinking, he would tell one or the other of them that he had seen horrific things, including a rape by American soldiers. In the morning, he would tell them to forget he had said anything.

  In early July, Green flew to Washington, D.C., to attend David Babineau’s funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. While in the area, he stayed with Noah Galloway, the 2nd Platoon soldier who had lost an arm and a leg during the December 19, 2005, IED explosion. After the funeral, Green drove to Nebo, North Carolina, to visit his maternal grandmother. That’s where FBI agents stormed the property and arrested him. “I wish you had called,” he told the agents. “I would have turned myself in.”

  In the first few days of July, Cortez, Spielman, and Barker were all moved to Camp Striker, where they would spend the rest of their deployment. They’d had their weapons confiscated and been placed under arrest since they first started confessing, but since their chances of fleeing from Camp Victory were deemed to be infinitesimal, they were not placed in pretrial confinement. Although they had to have an armed escort with them at all times, they were allowed, more or less, to go wherever they wanted on the base, and since they had no real duties except to meet with the Army defense lawyers assigned to their case and continue to be questioned by CID, they could do pretty much as they pleased. They were simply agog at how comfortable life was up at Striker, where the chow halls had steak and lobster night every Friday, some of the soldiers were actually pretty girls whom they could at least look at if not talk to, and many of the palaces converted into barracks or offices still had functioning swimming pools. What would become of Howard and Yribe was still very much unclear, but Barker, Cortez, and Spielman knew, one way or another, that this was almost certainly their final few weeks of anything that resembled freedom.

  First Platoon may have been relegated to pulling guard duty on FOB Mahmudiyah, but for the rest of Bravo and the rest of the battalion, the fight was as hard as ever. Bravo’s 2nd and 3rd Platoons continued to engage and patrol around Yusufiyah, while Alpha, Charlie, and Delta also tried to keep their sectors running.

  In fact, the battle was getting tougher. All throughout Iraq, sectarian violence was increasing. The summer of 2006 would usher in some of the fiercest and bloodiest partisan slaughters of the entire conflict. Baghdad became an open battlefield, with the Mahdi Army and Sunni groups engaging in gun battles and trading tit-for-tat car bombings that would kill dozens and wound scores more at a time. This kind of violence hit the Mahmudiyah area hard. On July 17, a large group of Sunni insurgents drove into the market in Mahmudiyah and killed over seventy people, mainly Shi’ites, with grenades and rifles.

  And the headlines about the rape and murders committed by 101st Airborne soldiers in the Triangle of Death weren’t making anyone’s job any easier. The Iraqi government and the locals were outraged. Kunk claimed that the Mahmudiyah government and the Iraqi Army were understanding. They were upset, he said, but they understood that criminals exist and perpetrate crimes in every society and subculture, including armies, and they did not view the crime as representative of the unit as a whole.

  The locals were harder to convince. Al Qaeda exploited the outrage for maximum propaganda value. On July 10, the Mujahideen Shura Council issued a five-minute video depicting the mutilated corpses of Tucker and Menchaca. The tape’s audio includes clips of Osama bin Laden’s and Zarqawi’s speeches, as well as the message that the video was being presented as “revenge for our sister who was dishonored by a soldier of the same brigade.” The narration stated that the MSC had known that Americans were behind the rape when it happened, but “they kept their anger to themselves and didn’t spread the news, but were determined to avenge their sister’s honor.” This seems unlikely, however, considering that the first message claiming responsibility for the attack in June did not mention revenge or provide any other indication that insurgents were aware that Americans had perpetrated the March 12 massacre. On September 22, the MSC released a longer clip that included an animation of Green’s mugshot (which was widely available on the Internet by this time) being engulfed in flames, footage of Tucker and Menchaca being dragged behind a truck, and a television interview by Al Jazeera with Muhammad Taha al-Janabi, one of the murdered family’s relatives.

  The crime had a palpable negative effect on the men on the ground in the Yusufiyah area. “We were having some form of violence pretty much every day of the week during the month of August,” said one platoon leader in the area. “Before that, it wasn’t great, but it hadn’t been that bad. Until the horrible events of June, things were getting better.” Charlie, which absorbed parts of Bravo’s AO, felt renewed bitterness from the locals. “Let me tell you, those were some pissed-off folks,” said Charlie’s executive officer, First Lieutenant Matt Shoaf.

  Violence targeted against coalition forces would continue to the very end. Alpha lost a soldier, Private First Class Brian Kubik, during another dramatic firefight in Rushdi Mullah. On August 30, Al Qaeda attacked fourteen Iraqi Army checkpoints simultaneously, though the attacks have to be considered a failure because Al Qaeda didn’t manage to injure a single soldier.

  Even though 1st Platoon was not engaged in direct combat operations anymore, they were living a new nightmare all their own. For months many people in the battalion and brigade had considered 1st Platoon to be First Strike’s problem children. Now, however, the men of 1st Platoon were outright pariahs. “That was the worst part, being in Mahmudiyah getting treated like shit by guys that didn’t see a quarter of the shit we saw,” said one 1st Platoon soldier. “We were looked at as the enemy after that.” Even 2nd and 3rd Platoons got caught in the perception that all of Bravo was a disgrace. “When the sector got divided up to other companies, we started hearing, ‘Oh, we’re down here to save Bravo Company’s ass,’” remarked 2nd Platoon’s leader Paul Fisher. “It was awful. It was an awful time.”

  Kunk moved Norton to a job running parts of FOB Mahmudiyah’s headquarters over the night shift. Norton was stunned at how bad the perception was of the two forward-deployed companies. “I started working up in the TOC,” recalled Norton. “And the perspective up there of Bravo and Charlie Company was so negative. I tried to tell people there, ‘These are companies in your battalion, this is your unit, they are not the devil, you know?’”

  Norton’s move to the TOC left Fenlason, upon his return from leave, to run the platoon pretty much alone. “We were just existing at that point,” he said. “I talked to the squad leaders every night about the stuff we needed to get done. We had some equipment issues. We didn’t have all of our stuff. I didn’t know at that time that the reason we couldn’t go back to Yusufiyah was CID was going through everybody’s stuff. It had basically been locked down as a crime scene. I didn’t know that there was an FBI team that was going to come in. I didn’t know any of that stuff. We didn’t have a lot of allies. I just didn’t have a lot of friends at that point. Nobody wanted to be me, that’s for goddamn sure,” added Fenlason. “I wasn’t getting a whole bunch of people coming up telling me, ‘It’s going to be all right, brother.’ The only person that did that when we were in country was Phil Blaisdell. Blaisdell never, ever left FOB Mahmudiyah if he was up there without stopping in and visiting us. Rick Skidis can’t say that. John Goodwin can’t say that. And I’m grateful for that. The fact that he didn’t abandon us says a lot about Phil Blaisdell.”

  Sergeant Major Edwards hatched a plan to break up the platoon. He was going to send the squad leaders throughout the brigade, and the soldiers would be divided up among the
battalion. But the plan floundered because the other first sergeants from the battalion vociferously resisted. They didn’t see the point, this late in the deployment. Plus, nobody wanted to take in any 1st Platoon soldiers. Just leave them where they are, the first sergeants argued to Edwards. It is too complicated to try to integrate new blood, especially given the circumstances and especially this late. Just leave them alone. Ultimately, Edwards relented.

  On FOB Mahmudiyah, HHC commander Shawn Umbrell was in charge of overseeing the wayward 1st Platoon. His priority, he explained, was to treat them as normally as possible. “We got some pretty weird guidance from Battalion. We were told to come up with a training plan, indicating how we were going to reinstill discipline,” he said. “And my first sergeant told them, ‘The soldiers don’t need a training program. What the soldiers need are leaders who can show them what right looks like. Until now, they haven’t had that.’”

  That is something Umbrell thought about ever since. “Clearly a lot of what happened can be attributed to a leadership failure,” he remarked. “And I’m not talking about just at the platoon level. I’m talking about platoon, company, battalion. Even I feel in some way indirectly responsible for what happened out there. I mean, we were all part of the team. We just let it go. And we let it go, and go, and go. And these things happened. And you can say, ‘It was Green’s fault. He was a criminal.’ But it goes beyond that. We failed those guys by letting them be out there like that without a plan.”