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

by Jim Frederick

  27

  “This Was Life and Death Stuff”

  FRUSTRATED, BORED, ANGRY, and demonized, much of 1st Platoon were at each other’s throats during this period. While most of the soldiers agreed that Watt did the right thing, there was talk that a few were plotting to take violent revenge on him. Watt had been moved to a different area of the FOB, but anybody who wanted to find him on Mahmudiyah could. Private First Class Shane Hoeck, one of Watt’s best friends, tipped him off, telling him to watch his back; some soldiers were saying some stuff about making him pay.

  But that wasn’t the only way platoon unity was fracturing. A rumor got around that CID thought 1st Platoon was a kind of Murder, Inc., kill squad, complete with blood rituals and civilian-murder initiation requirements for new soldiers. Word was, CID was trolling now for any suspicious killings that they could turn into murder probes. Early on, investigators had heard rumors that there was more to the story about the woman Sergeant Tony Yribe had shot and killed at TCP3 on November 18, 2005. Some soldiers alleged that the account of the vehicle refusing to stop that day was not merely a lie to make an accident sound more plausible, but a cover for a cold-blooded murder. By July 17, CID had begun investigating the incident as a potential murder, questioning everyone who was there multiple times during an inquiry that would drag on for more than two years before being dropped for lack of evidence.

  Paranoia skyrocketed. Lauzier, for one, was not coping well. He felt a blinding anger and crushing disappointment at what Cortez and Barker were accused of. TCP2 was 3rd Squad’s mission that March day; Cortez was his designated proxy while he was on leave. It was a personal betrayal. But he also felt tremendous guilt. If one of the truest tests of leadership is how your people perform when you are not around, how could his example be considered anything other than a failure? It was debilitating, disorienting, dispiriting. How could they do this? he wondered. How could they think they would get away with it? How could they not consider how it would impact the rest of the unit? Was this what he led them for? Is this what he taught them? And, as he ground himself up inside, no one was putting his arm around Lauzier’s shoulder, telling him not to take it so hard. In fact, he was treated like an outcast and encouraged to think of himself that way by this chain of command and the ironclad Army traditions that hold that you are directly responsible for everything your immediate subordinates do or fail to do. “In a way, the individual soldier is a perfect being,” remarked Justin Watt. “The soldier is never late, the soldier never makes a mistake—any failure on the soldier’s part is a failure of his direct supervisor. That’s what Lauzier was dealing with.”

  A few weeks earlier, Lauzier had been one of the best-regarded squad leaders in the company. On June 13, for example, Kunk approved a recommendation from Bravo’s leadership that Lauzier receive a Bronze Star for meritorious service throughout the deployment, and he passed that recommendation up to brigade headquarters. On the routing sheet, Kunk wrote, “SSG Lauzier led from the front in the most lethal area of AO Strike. He is a warrior. Outstanding duty performance under the most dangerous environments.” Now he was being treated like a cancer, under suspicion for being the ringleader of some kind of death squad. His interviews with CID were more like interrogations, as if they were trying to pin something major on him too. “This isn’t over, you know,” investigators would say to him at the end of every session. That phrase alone almost gave him a nervous breakdown. He couldn’t bear to hear it.

  His men found his obsessive tendencies steering into borderline psychosis. If any of his possessions looked different from the way he had left them, he would freak out, yelling, “Who is the mole, who is working for CID!?” Once, he left a piece of official paperwork with his home address and his parents’ address on his cot for a few minutes. When he returned and the paper was gone, he pulled his 9mm pistol on the handful of 1st Squad and 3rd Squad men standing there.

  “I don’t know who is fucking with me,” he said, “but if anything happens to my wife or my family, I will waste everything the motherfucker who did it holds dear and kill him last.” Stunned, the men put their hands up and sputtered that they did not know what he was talking about. Cross approached, trying to calm Lauzier down, but Lauzier cocked his pistol. “Take one more fucking step, Cross, and I will shoot you right here. I’ve got nothing to lose.” Cross backed off and Lauzier lowered his gun. Shortly after that episode, Lauzier decided he was probably long overdue for his first visit to Combat Stress.

  Watt was having trouble coping with the strain of being a whistle-blower as well. Despite his ultimate conviction that he had done the right thing, the feeling that he had been a rat was inescapable. And the thought that some of his former friends wanted to kill him was utterly terrifying. Over several consultations with him, Lieutenant Colonel Bowler became worried about Watt’s mental state. She felt Kunk was not taking the psychological burden of what he’d done seriously enough. She likewise thought the whole battalion was taking the threat that Watt felt far too cavalierly. She increasingly implored Watt to protect himself legally. Demand a lawyer, she told him. They are not going to protect you, they may even come after you. Do not talk to Kunk or CID again without a lawyer, she advised.

  When Kunk got wind that Watt was acting on that advice, demanding a lawyer before he said another word, he became unhinged.

  “Hey, Sergeant Davis,” Kunk asked Bowler’s deputy, “is your doctor a lawyer?”

  “No, sir,” Davis responded.

  “Well then, what the fuck is she doing handing out legal advice?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Get your commander down here as soon as possible.” When Davis did so, Kunk told the mental health commander, “If you don’t get her off my FOB in the next forty-eight hours, I will have her up on charges like that.” The commander went back to the Combat Stress tent and told Bowler to pack her stuff, she was going back to Baghdad.

  Though banished, Bowler over the next several weeks kept in touch with Watt via e-mail, in which she continued to beseech him to get legal help. She also tried to arrange for him to get sent out of theater, something she said should have happened as a matter of course. On Camp Victory, she spoke to another Combat Stress psychiatrist about Watt’s case, who spoke to an attorney, and, again via e-mail, she relayed the attorney’s advice to Watt. She told him to write a sworn statement about the threats he was receiving, and then the battalion would be forced to take action.

  On July 25, Watt did just that, writing a sworn statement about a specific incident that had happened the night before. At about 8:00 p.m. the previous evening, Hoeck approached him in the chow hall to say that while several 1st Platoon soldiers were grumbling about Watt’s being a snitch, Private First Class Chris Barnes in particular was talking about making him sorry, whether here in Iraq or once they returned home. Another soldier told Watt that Barnes had been trying to find Watt’s new tent.

  When Watt told Sergeant Major Edwards later that night what he’d heard, Edwards replied, “That should be the least of your worries. It’s the people who talk that you don’t need to worry about.” Edwards told Watt, “I’ll take care of it,” but offered no specifics.

  Barnes later acknowledged, “I might have said something to someone else. Supposedly I said ‘I’m going to cut his fucking throat.’ I might have said it, being pissed off. But I never actually threatened Watt.” Barnes said he never intended to do Watt any harm, but to this day he doesn’t support Watt’s decision to come forward. “What they did was wrong,” he explained. “But war is fucking hell, and the shit they went through, if they went crazy, whether it’s three minutes or three fucking hours, I can see how it happened to them. I would never have turned them in. They’re your brothers, you know? There has to be some kind of loyalty there that you don’t break no matter what. Let God judge them. If they’re not sorry, they’ll go to hell. And if they are, if they really are, they’re going to have to live with that for the rest of their life.”

>   Bowler had arranged for two members of a Combat Stress team who were heading down to Mahmudiyah on other business to meet with Watt. After speaking with them about Watt, she was confident they would recommend he be moved up to the Victory Base Complex, away from the battalion. To Watt, it looked like a done deal.

  But it was far from a done deal. When the two mental health specialists returned to Camp Victory, Bowler was expecting to see Watt in tow. He was not there. When she asked about him, one of them, a psychiatrist, replied, “He’s doing great, he’s doing fantastic. He is a strong young man with a lot of inner strength.”

  Bowler was floored. Whatever may have happened, she was certain that Watt could not have given the impression that he was doing fine. “I was stunned,” she said. “What kind of mental gymnastics did they have to go through as clinicians to come back and tell me that he was doing great, fine, fantastic?” When she started to protest that that was impossible, she was, she said, told to back off; she was overly involved in this matter. Shortly thereafter, she was ordered to have no further communication with Watt. “It was crazy,” she felt. “A whistle-blower in a case like this should have been moved out of theater immediately. All of these friends of these people who are now arrested and charged with rape and murder are running around with guns and he’s the whistle-blower? The way Watt was treated was just unthinkable.”

  The same day that Watt met with the psychiatrist, Sergeant Major Edwards informed him that he was being sent down to Lutufiyah, where he would complete his tour as a member of Charlie Company.

  After expecting to get the ax immediately, Goodwin was at first confused and then hopeful as July turned into August and no moves were made against him. The end of the deployment in September was looming ever closer. The advance parties of the 10th Mountain Division, which was relieving First Strike, would be showing up in their AO soon for their right-seat, left-seat rides. After expecting every day to be his last, Goodwin had begun to allow himself the fantasy that he might be allowed to finish the deployment in command of Bravo Company. “I was like, wow, maybe I’m going to make it through this,” he said.

  That was not to be. On August 15, Kunk came to Yusufiyah for a routine circulation through the AO. But the next day, he came back for an unscheduled visit. The soldiers working the radios at Bravo’s TOC let Goodwin know that Kunk was en route.

  “He is coming down to Yusufiyah?” Goodwin asked.

  “Roger that, sir.”

  “What for?”

  “We don’t know, sir. They didn’t say.” Goodwin knew that was it. He walked back to his hooch and started packing up his stuff. When Kunk arrived, they talked privately for half an hour, during which the battalion commander told Goodwin that he was out of a job. “Kunk was probably the most cordial he has ever been to me in his life that day,” Goodwin remembered. “We had a very decent conversation. Almost person to person.”

  Sent back up to Striker, Goodwin had time to draft rebuttals to the AR 15-6s and the letter of reprimand he had received. His rebuttals were, Goodwin said, filled with emotion, finding errors and bad leadership at every level in the chain of command.

  Ebel called Goodwin into his office. “So this is how you feel?” Ebel asked.

  “Sir, that’s exactly how I feel,” Goodwin responded.

  “To include Battalion, Brigade, and Division?”

  “Sir, I’m not backing down,” Goodwin replied. “I fucked up. Tim fucked up. Squad fucked up. Battalion fucked up. You fucked up. Division fucked up. There were mistakes at every level.”

  “It didn’t really help my cause,” Goodwin mused later. Perhaps not, but it probably didn’t hurt, either, since Ebel never thought Goodwin’s conduct warranted harsh judgment. Colonel Ebel, who had always resisted removing Goodwin from command, clarified that even now Goodwin “was not relieved in its purest sense. He had just met his timeline” for one year in charge of a company and was simply being reassigned. “I told him I won’t relieve him because the fact is this guy’s a hero too,” he said. “He had incidents of breaches of discipline I had witnessed in other commands. His just happened to all fall at the wrong time and the wrong place.” Bravo Company’s executive officer, Justin Habash, who had been promoted to captain in July, was given command of the company.

  On August 14, First Lieutenant Tim Norton had received a letter of reprimand from General Thurman citing both the AVLB attack and the rape-murders. On August 16, he got a letter from Ebel suspending him from his position. Like Goodwin, he also was never technically “relieved for cause” from his position. He was simply suspended and never reinstated. No punitive or disciplinary action was ever taken against Sergeant First Class Jeff Fenlason. He finished the deployment as 1st Platoon’s platoon sergeant, and he continued in that role after the unit’s return to the States.

  On August 21, Captain Bill Dougherty, the commander of Charlie Company, took it upon himself to write a personal e-mail to Rick Watt, Justin Watt’s father. The ongoing rape-murder investigation was making international headlines and Justin’s name had surfaced in the press as the whistle-blower. Dougherty wanted to assure the elder Watt that his son had found a supportive home.

  “I have told your son that I am proud of him for coming forward,” Dougherty wrote. “It took moral courage. I am sure that you are proud of him and I am glad to have him in my company. I know that he has been through a lot and I am looking out for him to make sure he is ok…. I can assure you that the Soldiers in Charlie Company all agree that he did the right thing and support him fully.”

  Dougherty encouraged Rick Watt to stay in touch regarding his son, and he passed along word that Goodwin and Norton had been relieved of their positions (he did this, he later said, in case Rick Watt was wondering why he had not heard from either man himself). Dougherty assured him that Justin “is not wrapped up in anything concerning them being fired. Right now he is driving on with normal activities of an Infantryman serving in South Baghdad.”

  It was the only direct communication that Rick Watt had received (and would ever receive) from anyone in a leadership position in 1st Battalion. Rick Watt was desperately worried about his son’s well-being and had been writing e-mails to commanders and senators, trying to get his son removed from Iraq entirely. Delighted finally to have any validation or expression of support for his son’s actions from someone in a position of authority, Rick Watt passed the letter on to Gregg Zoroya, a reporter from USA Today.

  When USA Today ran a story about Justin Watt’s anguish, the paper included a short snippet of Dougherty’s e-mail. Kunk and Ebel were furious. Rather than commend Dougherty for thinking of Watt’s and his family’s well-being (though perhaps recommending he do a better job of ensuring that his correspondents kept his e-mails confidential), Ebel issued Dougherty a letter of reprimand for “the gross error in judgment you displayed recently by sending an e-mail communication to PFC Justin Watt’s father.” Even though Rick Watt prevailed upon Zoroya not to mention anything in print about Goodwin’s situation, Ebel accused Dougherty of betraying his peer, writing, “You acted recklessly and worst of all you did so without any consideration for the professional courtesy and loyalty due your fellow commander and this brigade…. The most profound impact of your poor choice is the attention that your negative comments will draw away from the hard-won accomplishments of the Soldiers of Strike Brigade: secure streets, open shops, flourishing businesses, and hopeful people.” The reprimand was, to Dougherty, as demoralizing as it was nonsensical: There was nothing attributed to Dougherty in the article that could be even remotely construed as negative. It was baffling.

  As the deployment wound down, men from all of the FOBs began handing over responsibility to the 10th Mountain Division throughout early September, packing up and preparing for the trip home.

  After two weeks of transition, the last remnants of First Strike left Mahmudiyah in mid-September and arrived at Fort Campbell shortly after. For a frontline deployment such as this one, it was common for NCOs
or officers in positions of squad leader or above to receive a Bronze Star. First Platoon’s squad leaders—Chaz Allen, Eric Lauzier, and Chris Payne—were not awarded Bronze Stars. First Lieutenant Tim Norton also did not receive a Bronze Star for his 2005-2006 tour of duty, but Sergeant First Class Fenlason did.

  Following several weeks of battalion-wide leave, the usual changes in leadership and the routine discharges and transfers of men into and out of the unit commenced, but with this added difference: Bravo Company’s 1st Platoon was being disbanded and would be reconstituted with almost entirely new personnel. Despite all they had been through, it was, for many of the men, one of the saddest, toughest days of the entire experience. Bravo’s new company commander, Justin Habash, choked up as he delivered the news. “Nothing I could say to them would erase their feelings of betrayal or feeling like the black sheep for all that they had been through,” Habash said, “but they were not to blame for the murder or other things that they felt they were carrying black marks for.” He declared the breakup an unnecessary step, opining that 1st Platoon could and should be allowed to continue the rebuilding it had already begun.

  That would not come to pass. Most of the men of 1st Platoon soon got scattered throughout Fort Campbell and across the rest of the Army, and the 1-502nd Infantry Regiment began the business of training up for their inevitable return to Iraq. First Strike would deploy again, this time to Baghdad, in the fall of 2007.

  “This was life and death stuff,” concluded Sergeant John Diem with respect to the 2005-2006 deployment, of which he and all the men of Bravo are still trying to make sense. “You line up three people in a row, and one of them dies. That’s the kinds of numbers we are talking about. In ways that are important to young men, like what you do, what you stand for, and what you are willing to put on the line, this was the defining moment in a lot of people’s lives. And I don’t think their actions will withstand their own scrutiny. I know mine don’t. But I know what kills soldiers now. I know what kills them. Not in the physical sense, but in the psychological sense; what causes soldiers to fail themselves, and what command can do to set them up for failure or not. It was the feeling of isolation at all levels of command that caused what happened. There’s only one reality. There’s only one thing that is happening, and there’s only so many variables that surround it. It can be figured out and responsibility can be meted out and then problems can be fixed. If people continue to treat this like a mysterious event that came out of nowhere, and we don’t change how we lead soldiers, and we don’t honestly look at what caused this to happen, it’s going to happen again. I mean, this isn’t the only time. It’s just the most notorious time.”