None Left Behind: The 10th Mountain Division and the Triangle of Death

by Charles W. Sasser

  The tire was full of explosives ready to go off on a remote electronic signal. As soon as the Iraqi was near enough, he hurled the tire against the tank and took off down a weeded canal. The explosion ripped tracks off the tank and busted the turret gunner’s eardrums. The Joe taking a leak got up, dusted himself off, and vowed not to take another piss for the rest of his time in Iraq.

  Husky led Delta Company’s convoy. It resembled a road grader with a very sensitive metal detector up front instead of a blade. Whenever it sensed a metal object buried in the road that could be an IED, the operator marked the spot with paint and summoned Iron Claw to come forward.

  Iron Claw—officially designated as “Mine Protected Vehicle—Buffalo”—was layered with armor so thick that it was nearly impervious to blasts short of a bunker buster. It carefully unearthed the suspected IED with its moveable iron arm and claw. Once the bomb was exposed, an EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) team that accompanied Iron Claw moved in to disarm and remove it.

  Several IEDs were discovered and neutralized along the short route, providing the men of Delta with their first look at what would become their prime nemesis. Most were salvaged 105 or 155 howitzer casings filled with dynamite or black powder and rigged with pressure-detonating wire. Others were lengths of pipe stuffed with a crude but effective homemade mixtures of diesel oil and ammonia nitrate fertilizer—poultry manure. Before the war began, The Triangle of Death had contained many of Saddam’s major arms depots. Anticipating an insurgency, radical Sunnis had immediately raided the depots and appropriated the weapons, everything from 82mm mortars and machine guns to thousands of grenades, RPGs and AK-47s. If anything, the Islamic insurgency was well armed.

  The sun hung low in the western sky by the time the slow-moving procession reached the big crook in Malibu Road. Company Commander Captain Don Jamoles took Lieutenant Joe Tomasello off to one side near a rather nice house—at least by local standards—that sat among palms about fifty meters off the north side of the road, right in the bend. They smoked cigarettes, looked at the big house, and talked.

  When Tomasello returned to Fourth Platoon, he said, “We have to hold what we got for tonight. This is where we’ll build the first battle position on Malibu.”

  On this rock I will build my . . . fort?

  Iron Claw and Husky rumbled on up the road, followed by the rest of Delta Company. Soon, they were gone and Tomasello’s platoon of about twenty men was alone in The Triangle of Death, on what was considered the most dangerous road in Iraq, and the sun was going down. Corporal Menahem couldn’t seem to shake Manticore from his mind. Monsters come out at night.

  Tomasello circled his wagons, blocking off the road. There wasn’t any traffic anyhow; checkpoints all over the AO restricted vehicles to military and emergency transport. Each of the four hummers backed up to a common center on the blacktop, each facing outbound to cover its own quadrant, bristling with .50-cals and M240B machine guns, 5.56mm SAWs, MK-19 40mm grenade launchers, carbines, sidearms and knives. An awesome amount of firepower for so small a unit. Even a conventional infantry company would think twice about attacking it.

  That was little consolation, however, to the Joes in the trucks about to spend their first night surrounded by the enemy, deeper into the AO than any platoon had ventured before, gone where no man had gone before. For all they knew, they had been left with their asses hanging out ready to be chewed off. This was frontier in every sense of the word.

  Private Michael Smith, who was always joking around, suggested they should have hooked up two or three more trailers filled with mortars and tanks instead of MREs and water. Lieutenant Tomasello ordered everyone to eat and get out and take a piss before nightfall. Nobody would be allowed to get out of his truck and take a chance on getting picked off by a sniper until after daybreak.

  “Either do it now or pee in your pocket,” he said.

  “I’ll pee in Smith’s pocket,” Pitcher said.

  Although a hummer looked square and solid and roomy, like a souped-up Jeep on steroids, five or six soldiers and all their gear and weapons crammed into one left little room for stretching out to get any rest. Not that they were likely to sleep anyhow, even off-watch. They were too hyped.

  The distant echo of a muezzin summoning the Muslim faithful to prayer reminded the Americans of how very far away they were from home. A half-baked moon rose through the date palms and eucalyptus that lined the road. It was October and nights were becoming cooler, especially along the river. Sergeant Joshua Parrish, manning the turret in his vehicle, commanded a view of the Euphrates River sheened by the moonlight. Fog rose in ghostly tendrils from the water. He could almost feel hostile forms creeping up on him.

  Also in his vehicle were Michael Smith, Pitcher, PFC Justin Fletcher, and Corporal Menahem. Parrish constantly swiveled the .50-caliber machine gun, searching, watching. The others stared out into the gathering darkness, even those who had removed their NVs, ostensibly to get some sleep.

  “Mayhem?” Smith whispered.

  “Yeah, man?” Menahem said. Delta’s First Sergeant Aldo Galliano had dubbed him “Mayhem” for no particular reason other than the similarity to his actual name. It stuck. From Florida, Mayhem, twenty-two, was of average size with an olive Mediterranean complexion and quick, dark eyes.

  “This ain’t no place for a good Southern boy,” Smith said.

  Smith was asking him if he was scared without actually coming out and saying it. It was so dark in the vehicle by this time that faces even close up were blurs against a darker curtain.

  “I’m scared spitless,” Mayhem admitted, interpreting the code. One thing about Mayhem, he never hid behind any phony macho.

  “Naw, man,” Fletcher said. “Know why? Yea, though we walk through The Triangle of The Valley of Death, we shall fear no evil—’cause we the baddest motherfuckers in this valley.”

  “You got that right.”

  They gripped their weapons and peered out the windows into the forest of shadows creeping closer all around them. Mayhem remained silent. He was scared; he had been in Baghdad during the 10th Mountain Division’s last deployment in 2004–2005. Only a fool or a greenhorn wasn’t scared.

  The moon shone weak and pale, stars cold and distant. A cow lowed somewhere, answered by sheep bleating from somewhere else.

  “You know,” said Smith, “one of these days we’re all gonna be back at Fort Drum having some beers and we’re gonna look back on this shit and just laaaugh.”

  “Maybe so,” Pitcher agreed. “But right now all this shit does is suck.”

  “You gotta love this job,” Sergeant Parrish joked half-hearted from the turret. “Guys—”

  He froze.

  “Hold everything. I thought I heard something.”

  Tension shot right out the top of the hummer. Parrish scanned through his NVs. After a few minutes, he relaxed.

  “It’s okay. It’s a fucking goat.”

  “Light him up. Barbecue the bastard,” Pitcher proposed.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” Smith said plaintively. “I’ve gotta piss.”

  “Quit being a pussy. Suck it up. You know, the way I look at things, I’d kill every bitch and her son from here to Baghdad if it’d get me home a day earlier.”

  Looking through NVs made everything liquid and surreal. There wasn’t much to see anyhow, what with the foliage and shadows. This land along the Euphrates was nothing like the desert most of the soldiers imagined Iraq to be. It was a very scary place where you couldn’t afford to let down security. Ghosts of night fog creeping through the trees became, in the imagination, terrorists and bombers plotting, scheming, waiting for the right time to attack. The brush of a breeze through palm fronds, the snap of a falling twig, the sleepy chirrup of a night bird was enough to make soldiers flinch and look nervously about.

  Hardly anyone dared doze off. Bad guys could sneak right up on the trucks and no one would know it until they were right there.

  Around midnight, the so
und of a distant explosion reverberated across the land, further escalating tension inside the trucks. Mayhem wasn’t supposed to be here, not this time. Except for Stop-Loss, he would have been a civilian by now, hanging around the beaches back in Florida ogling the foxes in their teeny-weeny, itsy-bitsy bikinis.

  He thought about going home at the end of all this and never coming back to this shitbag country where the babes covered up their faces, hajjis shot off AK-47s in the air every time they got drunk, and where American soldiers in The Triangle of Death were the biggest targets in the world.

  NINE

  For the first platoon to venture onto Malibu Road and stay, daybreak seemed an eternity coming. But arrive it did at last, as all things in time do, with a burst of color that first illuminated the sluggish stretch of Euphrates River visible from the curve in the road. After touching the river gently, slow sunlight melted yellow butter over an expanse of forest and undergrowth before touching the roofs of the few houses in the vicinity and reaching the covey of four humvees arrayed in defensive posture on the blacktop.

  Corporal Mayhem Menahem opened his eyes when the sunlight caressed his face through the window. He blinked, surprised that he had managed to doze intermittently between watches after all. He looked out and saw an Iraqi man way down the road herding a flock of sheep from one side to the other, a scene from the Old Testament, including the crooked shepherd’s staff the man carried. The muezzin were calling the faithful to prayer at the mosque on down the road, a five-times-a-day event. The magnified voices sounded like racing go-carts.

  Things appeared so much less threatening in the full light of day than they had last night when most of Fourth Platoon soundly expected the enemy to hit them. A few even considered the possibility that they might never see another sunrise. Michael Smith, doing his turn in the turret, shifted to a more comfortable position and grinned down at Pitcher sitting behind the steering wheel. Both of them seemed a little abashed that, in the darkness, they had succumbed to their fears and imagination. Hell, there wasn’t a damn thing out there after all, was there?

  “How many armies over the centuries do you suppose have seen the sun rise like this over the Garden of Eden?” Mayhem mused.

  “I really don’t give a rat’s ass,” Smith decided. “What I need is a hot cup of coffee.”

  They ate in shifts, half on watch while the other half heated canteen cups of coffee over heat tabs and rummaged through the trailer for MREs. They stood around inside the circle of hummers flapping their arms against the morning chill that would quickly become a morning scorcher, farting, yawning, joking a little, and behaving in general the way soldiers do in an all-male environment.

  Even before everyone finished eating, Iron Claw escorted up a convoy of army engineers with chainsaws and axes, along with an IA (Iraqi Army) interpreter who would remain with the platoon. Lieutenant Tomasello put everyone not pulling security to work with the engineers clearing timber and brush on the river side of the road where they would erect blast walls and stretch tents for Delta Company’s first battle position along the road. It was going to be a primitive site at best—living in tents with few amenities. By comparison, the Battalion FOB at Yusufiyah was the Waldorf Astoria. Sergeant Parrish dubbed the budding patrol base Fort Apache; Smith referred to it as the Alamo.

  From his experience of having been to Iraq once before, Mayhem questioned the tactical advisability of building in the curve of the road, which limited visibility in both directions. Lieutenant Tomasello agreed with him, but it wasn’t their decision to make. Work continued.

  Neighborhood residents shunned the newcomers. A few ventured out onto the road to watch from a distance, but almost no pedestrian came by, unusual in a country where everybody was constantly out walking.

  “What, no welcoming committee?” Michael Smith wisecracked.

  “You probably won’t be getting cake and cookies,” Lieutenant Tomasello said.

  Mayhem looked up from work once to wipe sweat and happened to notice a rare, lone pedestrian. He was big and young, maybe nineteen or so, with his head bare. He wore baggy, filthy trousers and a shirt that might once have been any color but was now a dingy gray. His most striking characteristic, however, was the way he walked. He weaved back and forth, dragging one crippled leg and leaning forward sharply with each step to throw the bad leg forward. Scrape, Thunk! Scrape, Thunk! Stalking down the road in the gait of a physically challenged T-Rex.

  A short while later, along came a gawky teenager on a rusty bicycle, pumping along bare-headed wearing sandals and a robe even dingier than the crazy legs guy’s shirt. That was it until in the afternoon when the owner of the rather nice house down the road and his skinny son timidly took the initiative to come over. Mayhem observed them standing at the edge of the road, smiling and looking interested. He went up to them, along with Lieutenant Tomasello and the IA terp (interpreter).

  The kid looked about thirteen or fourteen, wiry and strong. The father was short and rather stocky with a broad face, a scraggly beard, amicable brown eyes, and that perpetual smile. He said his name was Abu Ahmed Rafi Ibrahim Al-Hasan Al-Tikriti. Mayhem blinked. The terp, whose name was Sabah Barak, laughed softly and explained how, in Arabic culture, names were made up of a combination of the names of a man’s grandfather, father and given names, along with tribal affiliations. Abu at the beginning meant a man had a son. Simply by looking at a man’s name, you could tell to whom he was related, where he was from, and even where his loyalties lay.

  The kid’s name was Nezham. That was enough for his size.

  Both appeared genuinely glad to have the Americans move into the neighborhood. Insurgents, the father explained through the terp, were vicious beasts that killed anyone who opposed them, including women and children and unborn babies. Americans would drive them out so the people could live in peace. Mayhem didn’t know how much of that to believe, having learned from his previous tour to trust no Iraqi completely. If the guy was legit, he had a set as big as basketballs. Sooner or later, the insurgents would make him pay for consorting with foreign soldiers.

  Abu Ahmed and Nezham went beyond lip service and volunteered to help in clearing the woodlot. For the next two days, they labored cheerfully alongside the soldiers in clearing a substantial portion of the woodlands. Fourth Platoon soldiers slept better at nights in their trucks in front of Abu Ahmed’s house, having grown to trust him. They assumed he would notify them of anything suspicious. They also felt less vulnerable after having survived that first crucial night. They were also exhausted from playing lumberjack.

  The engineers were about ready to start putting up blast walls when brass showed up from Battalion and declared that the blind curve was a shitty place to build a patrol base. Mayhem snorted in disgust. If the assholes at Battalion had had their heads out of their rectums, they could have saved everybody a lot of work and several tense nights forted up in trucks.

  The brass strode across the road with Lieutenant Tomasello to look over Abu Ahmed’s house. It was the same scoured dirty brown as most ordinary Iraqi houses, one story tall, with a flat roof that had a lip around the edges about three feet tall and two feet thick. Larger and nicer than most houses in the area, its five rooms would be quite adequate for a platoon base. It sat about fifty steps off the road in a grove of palms, but the open roof allowed views over and through the palms to an expanse of the road in either direction.

  “It’ll do,” the officer from Battalion declared. “Cut down the trees and erect a blast wall around it.”

  So this was how they were going to repay Abu Ahmed and his son for their toiling—by kicking them out of their house?

  TEN

  Surprisingly, Abu Ahmed took his dispossession cheerfully enough. Of course, the U.S. would certainly compensate him generously. Some of his neighbors showed up with flat-bedded bongo trucks, and the Americans helped load the family’s few possession onto them. The departure was cordial enough. Ahmed, his son Nezham, and all the neighbors with trucks in
sisted on shaking hands with every American.

  While this was going on, the man with the crazy legs stalked past. Scrape, Thunk! He stopped and looked, then kept on going. Scrape, Thunk! Ahmed made a screwing motion with his finger against his temple.

  “He is not right,” he said through Sabah Barak, the interpreter. “He was once shot in the head.

  By Americans or by insurgents? Mayhem wondered.

  War is such that just when you begin to forget you’re in one, it comes back to bite you in the ass. Mayhem’s squad and several of the Iraqis, including Ahmed and his son, were gathered in the road saying last farewells when, suddenly, the air filled with the bloodcurdling whistle of an incoming mortar round.

  “Holy shit! Incoming!”

  Corporal Mayhem and Pitcher the new SAW gunner were standing next to their humvee with skinny little Nezham when the first round impacted only a few yards away, erupting in a fireball. The blast knocked Mayhem off his feet. As he slammed to the road, he heard shrapnel and road debris ricocheting off the truck. From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed the Iraqi boy being lifted off his feet and flying through the air like a foul ball until he landed on the other side of the road.

  Soldiers scrambled for cover, some running for their armored chariots, other diving underneath them as mortar rounds exploded in a concentrated area around the vehicles, filling the air with sound and fury, smoke, fire, and shrapnel.

  A shelling could be a terrifying event, especially if you were out in the open and explosions were walking all around and over you and there was nothing between them and you except God. Mayhem thought he might dig a hole with his fingernails right into the concrete.

  He lifted his helmeted head an inch off the blistering blacktop. What he saw only a few feet away filled him with shock. Pitcher lay face down on the road, bloodstains on his back, his legs and arms working like an insect pinned down with a needle through its torso. Casting aside concerns for his own safety, seeing only a fellow soldier in trouble, Mayhem crawled to him as shells continued to stomp around in terrible eruptions all over the road.