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

by Charles W. Sasser

  He wouldn’t let himself consider that one of his friends might have been killed. So far, Delta Company, unlike a couple of other companies in the battalion, had suffered not a single KIA.

  A similar scene played itself out with First Platoon at FOB Inchon. Gathered around chattering radios inside the Company TOC, Gray, Murphy, Anzak, Jimenez, Corny, Fouty, Schober, and all the other men lapsed into a grim, white-faced hush, their attention riveted on the radio and whatever news came out of it next, hoping for the best, fearing the worst.

  “First Platoon!” Sergeant Burke ordered. “Get your battle rattle on . . . Just in case.”

  At the Battalion TOC in Yusufiyah, Colonel Michael Infanti and CSM Alexander Jimenez had just returned from battlefield circulation checking on 4/31st companies in the field when all the excitement began. Infanti’s policy was to stand back and let subordinate commanders fight their own companies unless they started fucking up things. All hell was breaking loose at the scene of the attack, but Captain Jamoles and Second Platoon appeared to be getting control of things.

  A chill crossed the Colonel’s spine as he monitored the company net. All the shouting and crying broke his heart, the pleas for help growing louder and more frantic. He realized what he was hearing were the sounds of soldiers dying.

  THIRTY-TWO

  There is a technique of film making in which action slows down to almost stop time, then suddenly speeds up again to convey the confusion and fast pace of battle. That was the way it was with Sergeant Montgomery after the IED went off. The monster explosion all but obliterated sight of the platoon’s leading wedge in a display of dirty gray and black smoke that began out of a red fire center and billowed upward and outward in agonizing slow motion. Shards of flying metal sliced the air into ribbons, whistling dangerously, but even they seemed sluggish enough to be plucked out of the air with a quick hand.

  Then everything sped back up to double, even triple time, until things happened so fast it was like an old Charlie Chaplin movie fast-forwarded. Montgomery’s wedge went to ground. The sergeant buried his face in the weeds and forced himself to take a deep breath to slow down. Always after initial contact came that period of damage assessment that required a cool and rational mind in order to reorganize an appropriate response.

  The man who rose back to his knees to see what was going on was once more the total professional soldier, a sergeant who knew by heart the Infantryman’s Bible, the Seven-Dash-Eight manual. The first thing he did was grab his nearest section leader, Sergeant Nathan Brooks.

  “Set up security until we get this mess straightened out,” he ordered. An IED often preceded an ambush.

  The platoon’s commo was going crazy. There was no small arms fire. That was a plus. Montgomery broke in on the net to initiate reorganization. “Get a head count going. Everybody okay?”

  “All good to go,” responded a team leader from up front. “We’re all up.”

  “Man down! Man down!” came an interruption.

  Montgomery rushed forward to link with Lieutenant Dudish, bent low and ducking and dodging to prevent making an easy target of himself, Sergeant John Herne right behind him. The lieutenant was already on his feet and on the radio trying to determine the extent of the hit. Nearby in the weeds lay the IA interpreter with a hot piece of metal sticking out of his arm. He was writhing on the ground and trying not to scream. Doc Bailey was bent over him with his aid bag open. He looked up.

  “He’ll be all right,” he said. “It’s not serious.”

  Smoke obscured everything forward from that point. Out of the swirl came the sound of men coughing and calling out to check on each other. Specialist Streibel, the point man, had pushed on through. He stood on Malibu Road next to the security truck, waving his arms to attract attention. From his elevated position, he commanded the patrol’s only overall view.

  “Hey, Sarge! Sarge!” he shouted over the platoon radio. “They’re down. Given and Messer. They’re down!”

  He pointed, then bounded off the road toward them. Sergeants Montgomery and Herne ducked into the smoke toward where Messer and Given were last seen. Montgomery grabbed Doc Bailey on the way. Somebody else could look after the lightly wounded IA.

  The smoke dissipated some to reveal a four-foot crater blown into the raw earth at the gap in the fence. The two Second Platoon soldiers appeared to have been picked up by the explosion and dumped out into the weeds, almost to where last night’s burn began. They must have been standing on top of the mine when it went off. They lay twisted on the ground like a pair of broken mannequins. Streibel was already with them, kneeling at Messer’s side, his rifle cast aside.

  Montgomery took in the situation at a glance. Given lay quietly on his back with his shattered right leg bent sideways against his ribs at an impossible angle. His uniform, webgear, and boots were torn and scorched. The boy’s eyes were closed. Not a drop of blood marred his face. Just freckles and a kind of at-peace expression.

  Messer had fallen a few feet away, groaning and barely conscious but not otherwise moving. Montgomery couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Holy Christ! The man’s legs were blown off below the groin. Nothing remained except strings of torn flesh. Blood pumped from severed arteries. Streibel snatched a cravat from his first aid packet. He looked up helplessly as Doc Bailey dropped down next to him.

  “What do you want me to do?” he pleaded, tears streaming down his cheeks. “He’s bleeding, but I can’t get on a tourniquet. He doesn’t have any legs left.”

  “We gotta put pressure, pinch off the bleeding.”

  Doc went to work with Streibel on one side of the body, Herne on the other. They ripped open combat bandages and stuffed them into cavities where Messer’s legs used to be. Shooting arteries sprayed their faces and uniforms and they were immediately soaked. The copperish smell of fresh blood mixed in the air with the pungent cordite whiff of smoke. Herne and Streibel kept talking to the wounded man at the rate of a mile a minute.

  “Chris! Chris, you can’t leave us, man. You hear me? Stay with us, buddy. Hear me, you can’t go. Damn it, Chris, you can’t leave us. We won’t let you.”

  Horrified as they were by Messer’s condition, they were equally stunned by the realization that everything was occurring almost exactly the way Messer’s dream foretold it. More than once he had instructed teammates that when it happened he didn’t want anyone trying to save him. He said he couldn’t live without his legs.

  “I’m not going back home half a man,” he had said. “I couldn’t stand the pity.”

  Streibel looked up, tear tracks on his face. “Damn! Damn it. He kept saying he was never going home again.”

  “We’ve not lost him yet, Streibel,” Doc Bailey snapped.

  In the meantime, Sergeant Montgomery was seeing what he could do for PFC Given. He took out his knife and cut off the soldier’s gear to check for wounds. Given still hadn’t moved. It was the strangest thing. There was almost no blood. A large hunk of shrapnel had pierced his side beneath one armpit and went all the way through, exiting below the other armpit and apparently sucking out all his blood with it.

  PFC Nathaniel Given, former fuckup turned model soldier, was dead.

  The sergeant rose wearily to his feet and looked around. Lieutenant Dudish had formed the platoon into a protective defensive perimeter around the wounded men. Soldiers glared at the little knots of Iraqis forming in front of houses down the road to watch.

  “Sons-of-bitches!” someone carped bitterly. “They knew. Them fucking ragheads knew what was happening and they let it.”

  Time was critical if Messer was to survive. As Inchon afforded the nearest landing site for a Black Hawk medevac, heartsick GIs loaded their buddies onto stretchers and strapped the stretchers one to a hood on arriving humvees. The hummers scooted around the S-curve to Inchon, soldiers on either side jogging along with them, their rage and sense of loss almost palpable. It would not have been a good time for an Iraqi, any Iraqi, to show any kind of hostile inten
t. There was even another proposal to blow away Crazy Legs if he was stupid enough to present the opportunity.

  Sergeant Montgomery stayed back with a few other soldiers to police up body parts and put them in a bag. The burn and weapons cache forgotten, he still reached Inchon ahead of the medevac. He rushed to the aid station to check on his men.

  Messer was intubated because he couldn’t breathe on his own. The blanket that covered him flattened out below his hips. Given lay on another stretcher next to him, his young face covered.

  “Sarge, you can’t be in here,” Doc Bailey reminded him gently.

  The rest of Second Platoon waited out in the yard in almost total silence. Jared Isbell looked up. Tears stained his pale face. He was twenty years old.

  “Sarge,” he said, choking up. “Today was Chris’ third wedding anniversary. He was upset because he didn’t get a chance to call his wife before we left on patrol.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  Sergeant Ronnie Montgomery knew the score as soon as he spotted the short, square figure of Chaplain Jeff Bryan get out of a humvee at Inchon late the same afternoon of the explosion. The chaplain would be spending the night counseling with Second Platoon, which had been relieved of all duties because of the blow it suffered. The death of even a single soldier made a major impact in limited warfare, unlike at Gettysburg, Normandy, or Hamburger Hill where soldiers were so busy surviving they failed to immediately grasp the enormity of their losses. Casualty rates were so proportionately higher in previous wars because it took hours, days, sometimes weeks for a wounded soldier to reach a hospital. Part of the modern U.S. Army’s creed that no soldier would be left behind included the promise that if you were wounded on the battlefield, the army would do everything it could to save your life and not let you die. A soldier who reached a hospital within thirty minutes of being wounded had a 99 percent chance of surviving.

  Of course, there was always that one percent.

  Chaplain Bryan took Montgomery and Lieutenant Dudish aside. “I’m sorry,” he began. His eyes were red. Messer and he had been close. “Your boys didn’t make it.”

  Montgomery stared back, feeling numb, dead. The platoon’s losses were still sinking in.

  “Damn it,” he managed.

  “You all right, Sergeant?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I guess. I knew Given was . . . that he wouldn’t make it. But Messer?”

  “He died on the medevac. He was DOA when they took him off.”

  “This is so . . . Pardon me, Padre. This is so fucked up. Did you know about his nightmares? Is it possible that someone can predict his own dying?”

  “I think it must be possible. Do you want me to tell the platoon?”

  “We’ll tell ’em,” Lieutenant Dudish volunteered. “They’re our boys.”

  Montgomery didn’t know what to think, what to feel. But he knew he had to hold it together. He kept hearing Colonel Infanti’s words: “How you react when you lose a soldier—and it will happen—sets the tone for the rest of your men for the remainder of the war. If they see you fall apart, they will fall apart.”

  Relaying bad news to the platoon without breaking down was the hardest thing either Lieutenant Dudish or Sergeant Montgomery had ever done. Sergeant Messer was liked and respected. So was Nathan Given once he got himself squared away and stopped playing the company shitbird. Now they were gone. They had people waiting for them at home, people who would now wait forever.

  Delta Company took the deaths hard. Soldiers in the new company formed at Fort Drum only months before out of misfits and castoffs from other units had gotten tight. Emotions of bewilderment, survivor’s guilt, rage, and despair painted themselves large on drawn faces filled with shock. There was a lot of quiet time, a lot of mourning. Many of the guys, like Specialist Brandon Gray, went off to themselves and wept, throwing themselves on their bunks or crouching with their faces in corners. Others sought each other out to talk, to be close, to touch each other.

  “Messer knew it was coming. How can someone dream the future?” Sergeant Victor Chavez lamented.

  “He knew.”

  Soldiers looked at each other as the fears crept in deep. Hadn’t they all dreamed of dying in Iraq at one time or another? Which of the dreams might be considered precognitive?

  Specialist Jared Isbell was particularly distraught, feeling like Given had died in his place.

  “Nathan was supposed to be in the truck instead of me,” he agonized. “He took my place on the ground.”

  “You can’t blame yourself, Isbell. None of us could have known.”

  “Maybe this wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t switched. That could have been me instead of him. Everything might have changed. He might still be alive!”

  Sergeant Montgomery maintained his composure for the sake of the platoon. He walked among the mourners, attempting to engage them in conversation, to talk it out. Some were willing. Others were not. Hostile expressions implied that the platoon sergeant, Lieutenant Dudish, Captain Jamoles, Battalion, the army, America, or some other faceless and collective entity was to blame. That was understandable. They didn’t want leaders comforting them as they grieved; they had each other for that.

  Other officers and NCOs approached Lieutenant Dudish and Sergeant Montgomery to offer their condolences. The sympathetic looks on their faces communicated the same thought: these could have been their men.

  The character of the platoon began to change from that day. Life was expendable. The Joes always told each other that, but now they were facing its reality. A certain grimness set in. It leached away the boyishness, the sense of adventure that had accompanied Delta Company to Malibu Road. Faces became harder, older. Manticore was no longer only a scifi movie, not in The Triangle of Death.

  There was a lot of hatred. Sergeant John Herne called it a “hate fest.” Guys wanted to go out and seek revenge by burning everything in the AO to the ground. Others plotted to start with Crazy Legs, especially after they learned he had been spotted nearby before Messer and Given triggered their IED. Hearts and minds, hell yes. But a bullet through the head and a stake through the heart. Fuck these miserable, murdering rag-heads!

  Men who had never had the habit took up smoking or chewing tobacco as part of the company’s general sense of fatalism. After all, they had a better chance of dying here than from cancer or heart disease years from now. Life shifted into increments of one day at a time. The future no longer existed. Life was lived according to the next patrol, the next run on Malibu Road.

  The Joes built a little memorial to the fallen warriors at Inchon. Above Messer’s photo on the wall hung the machete he always carried. Above Given’s was the unit coin the general awarded him. Below on the floor, according to tradition, sat their boots and helmets.

  “Soldiers die with honor,” Chaplain Bryan eulogized. He swallowed the lump in his throat as he glanced at Messer’s laminated prayer card he held in his hand. “Sergeant Messer and Specialist Given died on enemy soil here a long way from home. They died with honor and belief in America and its people. They died for a just cause to ensure freedom does not become lost in a world where evil attempts to conquer by force . . . They will not be forgotten. Not by their families, not by you, and they will not be forgotten by God . . .”

  A tightness formed in Sergeant Montgomery’s chest. The last thing he needed was a lecture about the sacrifices men make during war. He had a hollow feeling that his two soldiers would not be the last men in Delta to lose their lives in The Triangle of Death. Insurgents seemed to be cranking up the violence, as though desperate not to let the Americans reach that turning point in the war that Colonel Infanti was always talking about.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  In The Triangle of Death, the normal drama of Iraqi life continued to unfold on the periphery of the war: families working and growing; laughing students on their way to a recently reopened school; boys courting girls in a genteel manner reminiscent of eighteenth-century America; farmers bent over hoes and rakes and
scythes in their tiny fields along the river; coy young women in black burkas slipping down their veils to reveal flashing smiles in brown faces; the rush of kids across a rubble-strewn lot toward a convoy passing through, most waving madly, some plucking up chunks of concrete to fling at the American soldiers.

  Sometimes PFC William “Big Willy” Hendrickson of Bravo Company saw himself as more of an observer of the war than a participant, a small cog in a big machine creating one of history’s turning points in Iraq’s long and sometimes tragic saga. When other soldiers could be found in their off-time watching movies on their PCs or playing video games or cards, Hendrickson had his nose stuck deep in a book somewhere, generally a history. A budding intellectual at twenty years old, he envisioned himself in some future academic career where ivy replaced IEDs, and rational discourse took the place of violence. Service in the Cradle of Civilization, for him, was an opportunity to expand his knowledge about the oldest piece of continuously occupied real estate on earth.

  If any soldier was out of place in the military, miscast as a grunt, it was Big Willy Hendrickson. He enlisted from curiosity and a deep sense of duty. After completing basic training, he was assigned to the 10th Mountain Division only weeks before the 2nd BCT deployed. Missing out on most of the unit’s combat up-training left him nervous and apprehensive, worried that he wouldn’t have any more knowledge about army stuff when he reached the war zone than when he got out of boot camp. He soon met another misfit after his arrival in Iraq—the chaplain.

  He and another soldier were manning a security post at Battalion HQ in Yusufiyah when they saw two other soldiers walking around on the grounds, one of whom was short and rather stocky and unarmed.

  “Look at that idiot,” Hendrickson observed. “What the hell is with that retard, goofing around out here like that without a weapon?”

  A few minutes later, the stocky soldier walked up to him. Hendrickson saw the crosses on the soldier’s uniform. Oh, crap! It’s the chaplain!