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

by Charles W. Sasser

  Hendrickson relished long intellectual discourse. So did Chaplain Jeff Bryan. On that basis, they developed a relationship and made a point of getting together whenever duty permitted. It was the chaplain who encouraged the private from Bravo to expand his knowledge not only into the secular history of the region but also into its historical period in the Bible.

  During its five thousand years of hosting empires, of invading and being invaded, the fertile valley between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers had suffered many tyrannical rulers—Sumerian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Mongol, Turk, British, and, more recently, Saddam Hussein. Between the seventh and thirteenth centuries when few in Europe could read, much less write, Baghdad was renowned for its scholars and artists.

  In 1258, however, a Mongol invasion from the east cast the region back into the Dark Ages, a collapse from which it had never fully recovered. In more than a millennium of conflict between Christianity and Islam, Islam had been the aggressor most of the time. Scholars generally agreed that the problem of Islamic terrorism had its roots in the Mongol invasion and the fall of the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley. History was asking the Islamic world to adjust to modernity in less than a century, a condition it took the West nearly six centuries to achieve.

  Hendrickson discovered the prominence of the River Euphrates in the Bible to be extraordinary. It was mentioned in Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament, and in Revelation, the last book of the New Testament—and twenty-five times in-between.

  “Israel is mentioned more times in the Bible than any other nation,” Chaplain Bryan pointed out. “But Iraq is a close second place, although that’s not the name used in the Bible. It’s called Babylon, Land of Shinar, and Mesopotamia.”

  “Mesopotamia” meant “between the two rivers.” Its later name of Iraq meant “country with deep roots.” Indeed, Iraq had deep roots. If the Bible was believed, mankind began in the region of Iraq—and mankind would end there.

  Iraq was the approximate location of the Garden of Eden, where God created Adam and Eve in the beginning. The Greatest Story Ever Told unfolded from there step by step, event by event.

  Satan made his first recorded appearance in Iraq. The Tower of Babel was built in Iraq, followed by the confusion of languages. Abraham hailed from a city in Iraq, as did Isaac’s wife. Jacob spent twenty years between the two rivers. Iraq was the site of Persia, the world’s first empire. The greatest Christian revival in history occurred in Nineveh, now the city of Mosul. The events in the book of Esther took place in Iraq. The book of Nahum prophesied against a city in Iraq. The Euphrates River was the far eastern border of the land God promised Abraham. Finally, the book of Revelation warned against the resurrection of Babylon.

  The Euphrates River was 1,800 miles long. According to Revelation, it would dry up after a full-scale invasion of the West coming from the East. And blood would rise to the level of a horse’s bridle.

  “America has invaded the Garden of Eden,” Hendrickson speculated. “Does that mean we are to be a part of the Battle of Armageddon in the end times?”

  Chaplain Bryan looked up somberly and shrugged. “We may be in the right place at the right time,” he said.

  “Or in the wrong place at the right time.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Command Sergeant Major (CSM) Alexander Jimenez, the highest-ranking NCO in 4th Battalion, was the enlisted equivalent of Lieutenant Colonel Infanti. He was a dark, solidly built Hispanic of forty-five with a professional bearing and a son and daughter back home, both of whom were in their twenties. Although he knew most of the more than eight hundred men in the battalion by sight and last name, knew all of their names on rosters and manning tables, he seldom got to know any of them well. There were three men in the battalion other than those occupying staff positions who stood out in his mind above others, each for a different reason.

  It was obvious why the first should be Specialist Alexander Jimenez, the gunner in Delta Company’s First Platoon. They shared the exact same name, even though they were not related. Both were career soldiers from similar working-class backgrounds. Their mothers even bore the same name: Maria.

  Specialist Jimenez had a reputation for being a good machine gunner, a hard-charging soldier, and the only non-Arabian soldier in the battalion who spoke Arabic. Down in Delta, he took a great deal of good-natured ribbing about his “daddy,” all of which he laughed off with his enormous sense of humor.

  “Jimenez,” CSM Jimenez once said to him, “I’m proud to lend you my name. Don’t sully it.”

  The second soldier was a skinny little private named Harold Fields, who was only seventeen years old when he deployed to Iraq. U.S. law forbade any soldier under the age of eighteen from combat theater assignments. Fields somehow slipped through the cracks and wasn’t discovered until he reached Baghdad. The CSM had to send him back to Fort Drum, even though his birthday was only a month away. Fields begged to stay.

  “Sergeant Major, don’t you understand? My outfit needs me. They’re the only family I’ve ever really had.”

  “I have no choice, son. We’ll send for you next month as soon as you turn eighteen.”

  “Promise, Sergeant Major?”

  These kids were amazing people. They were asked to do things most civilians would never do. Not only that, they pleaded to be allowed to do them. The sergeant major kept his word and brought the private back to Iraq. Fields was now back with Bravo Company. Jimenez hoped he never regretted his decision. He would blame himself should anything happen to the kid.

  The third man was Sergeant First Class James D. Connell from the same Tennessee hills that produced World War I’s Sergeant Alvin York. Connell, the divorced father of three and, at forty, beginning to bald and build a thicker waist, had enlisted in the army in 1989 and spent much of his subsequent military career serving as a paratrooper with the 75th Ranger Division and the 101st Airborne Division. He received orders to the 10th Mountain in July 2004 and deployed with the 2nd BCT as assistant operations sergeant in Colonel Infanti’s TOC.

  CSM Jimenez knew Connell well, since they worked together almost daily. Connell chafed at the inaction of his desk job.

  “I need to talk to you, Sergeant Major,” Connell would say in his soft voice. “Working up here in staff, you get pulled away from the troops. I want to be assigned back to the field. I’d like to have a platoon.”

  The CSM kept putting him off, not because he thought Connell wasn’t up to it but instead because he thought the senior sergeant might not be tough enough for day-to-day combat. Paradoxically enough, for an Airborne Ranger type whose job it was, in the words of the Joes, to break things and kill people, Connell was a gentle, compassionate man who honestly tried to see the better side of everyone and everything. From the perspective of many hardcore career infantrymen, this kind of mindset connoted a weakness. CSM Jimenez thought Connell might be better suited for Civil Affairs where he could actually employ his philosophy in helping Iraqi people rather than killing Iraqi insurgents.

  Still, the man deserved a chance, had earned it. It was another decision CSM Jimenez hoped he never lived to regret.

  “Sergeant Connell,” he finally promised, “you’ll be considered the next time a field opening comes up.”

  Delta Company’s First Platoon needed a new platoon sergeant after an IED injured Platoon Sergeant Charles Burke and he had to be evacuated for recovery.

  “You still want the job?” CSM Jimenez asked Connell.

  “You bet.”

  In such ways are decisions made that alter lives and change the course of individual histories.

  “I’ll deliver a big howdy for you to your ‘son’ in first Platoon,” Sergeant Connell joked, meaning Specialist Jimenez.

  CSM Jimenez looked at him. “All those boys are my sons,” he said.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Sergeant Ronnie Montgomery remembered well the chain of events that led him and many other soldiers like him to Iraq. In September 2001, Bravo/502nd (Bravo Com
pany, 502nd Infantry) of the 101st Airborne Division was running patrols in another far-flung trouble spot of the world, interdicting weapons and drug smugglers down by Chicken Lake in the crossing point between Kosovo and Macedonia. It was tough and dangerous work, with the occasional firefight and a few artillery or mortar duels. One night while Montgomery and his platoon hid in the woods to catch a few well-needed winks of sleep, a barrage of artillery rounds sought them out, almost jarring him out of his sleeping bag.

  The next morning, Bravo Company’s CO got on the horn to inform his platoons that terrorists had flown hijacked airliners into New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The loss of civilian lives was expected to top three thousand, perhaps as many as ten thousand. President George W. Bush had declared war on terrorism.

  “The terrorists have been at war with us for ten years,” a GI grumbled. “It’s about time we went to war with them.”

  That was five years ago. Some of the guys in Second Platoon, like Jared Isbell, Chiva Lares, and Nathan Given, were only thirteen or fourteen years old when it happened and the War on Terror began. Now they were fighting it; Given had lost his life in it.

  First came the Afghanistan campaign to destroy the Taliban and the terrorist training camps. Montgomery had missed out on that. But he knew he was going to war when he received PCS (permanent change of station) to the 10th Mountain Division, the most deployed outfit in the army. The U.S. had some unfinished business with Saddam Hussein and his support of terrorists.

  Kosovo had been a piece of cake, a walk in the park, compared to The Triangle of Death. Although Delta Company had occupied its positions on Malibu Road for only four months or so, it seemed like forever since the 101st Airborne sergeant predicted that Polar Bear soldiers would never safely drive Malibu. Well, they were driving Malibu. Maybe not safely, but they were driving it. What’s more, Delta Company had established battle positions the length of the road—and was holding them. Montgomery supposed that counted as progress toward Colonel Infanti’s “turning point.”

  While the deaths of Messer and Given were not the first KIAs the 2nd BCT suffered, they were the first in Delta Company. The mental picture of Messer lying in the field with his legs blown off and Given with the blood all sucked out of his body would stay with Sergeant Montgomery for the rest of his life. Sure, guys had been blown up before all along the road and a few even shot by snipers, but Messer and Given seemed to jolt the soldiers into a new realization that the war had jacked up another level.

  Each day, they still underwent the necessary routines of briefings, inspections, and rehearsals before they donned their heavy body armor, helmets, weapons, night-vision devices, rucks, and other implementa of modern warfare and moved out to do a job on the treacherous devil road where each and every one had a price on his head. Their faces reflected how they thought the odds were against them.

  “We’re dead. We’re never going home.”

  “Yeah, but at least you’ll die with your buddies.”

  “We’ll deal with it,” Sergeant Montgomery said. “We’re all in the same shitty situation together. There’s nothing we can do about it. We’re soldiers and we’re getting paid to clear this road.”

  It was up to leaders to project an image of confidence and optimism. They must not show disillusionment with the American mission. Whenever the men voiced their doubts, Montgomery staunchly defended the war and all its intricacies, waving his right hand in a shaking motion at shoulder level in the Iraqi gesture for “What the fuck you talking about?”

  The soldiers of Second Platoon gradually reached a turning point of their own. Montgomery sensed a new, harder, more dangerous mood starting to develop to replace the fatalism that had infected the platoon since the day of the deaths in the field. The guys became anxious, angry, itching for payback. They weren’t going to take this shit any longer.

  “They’re mindfucking us,” they protested. “We need to start mindfucking them.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Malibu Road remained a lawless environment in spite of Delta Company’s every effort to tame it. Since it sometimes took Rapid Road Repair crews days to get out and patch up holes in the roads left by IEDs, Joes charged with the additional duty of standing static crater watches became even more vulnerable to attention by local insurgents. Sergeant Montgomery looked at the watch as an engraved invitation to be attacked. Sitting in one place too long, especially at night, was like the tethered goat in the movie Jurassic Park waiting for T-Rex to come eat him. Sooner or later, the goat got eaten.

  Prior to his enlisting in the army, Montgomery worked as a laborer with a concrete company where he learned how to mix cement and knead in steel rebar to make the mixture stronger—and, therefore, in the case of Malibu Road, more difficult for insurgents to dig down into it to plant their devices. He offered to speed up the road repair effort by taking over a share of it to limit the time his men spent as bait. Engineers agreed to provide the necessary materials to repair the blast holes if Montgomery’s soldiers wanted to do the work themselves. It was worth a try.

  Second Platoon’s first and, as it turned out, last endeavor in road-building was the daunting task of filling in a five-feet-deep pit left in the blind S-curve south of Inchon. The platoon’s “motor pool” of four humvees arrayed themselves in a perimeter on the road around the hole. Some of the guys pulled security in the hummers while the rest mixed and poured cement from utility trailers pulled onto the worksite. They found it a satisfying break from the daily grind of getting blown up. Their greatest handicap was working beneath the hot desert sun garbed out in all their battle rattle. Uniforms and faces were soon soaked in sweat, to which adhered a patina of gray concrete dust that lent the soldiers the appearance of a gathering of ghosts moving about on the road.

  It was backbreaking work. Montgomery designated a long-abandoned mud hovel by the side of the road as a safe house in which his men could remove their suffocating armor for brief rest periods. After one break, he looked at his watch, drew a last puff from his cigarette, stomped out the butt on the bare dirt floor, and shrugged back into his gear.

  “Time to get back to work, people.”

  “War’s hell,” Sergeant Herne said. “At least you Joes are learning a trade.”

  Lieutenant Dudish and Montgomery were removing lengths of steel rebar from one of the trailers when something caused the sergeant to suddenly pause and look around. The sun was high and bright, a couple of kids were herding sheep across a distant field, and there was the somnolent hum of normal daily activity in the air. Nothing extraordinary at all. Then why had the thought passed through his head that, Oh, my God! We’re going to get shot!

  He looked up and down the road and saw soldiers in the turrets of their humvees. Steffan in the nearest vehicle caught him looking and gave a thumbs-up. Montgomery dismissed his sudden premonition as part of the hyper-awareness that Second Platoon had experienced after Messer and Given died.

  He turned to walk away from the trailer with an armload of steel. The thought struck him again—but it was too late to react. A sniper’s bullet whapped him in the upper chest with the force of a big guy like Joe Anzak slugging him with a ten-pound sledge hammer. The blow staggered him and knocked the wind from his lungs. He somehow managed to stay on his feet. Realizing he was hit, but not knowing how badly, he ran in a lumbering, staggering gait toward the cover of the nearest hummer.

  One of the guys on security heard the shot and spotted a muzzle flash from the window of a small house in a field about five hundred meters away. He opened fire with his .50-caliber and shouted the target location into his platoon band mike. Every soldier in the platoon able to reach his weapon in time opened up in a mad minute. Two-forties, .50-cals, SAWs, and M4s riddled the mud exterior of the house, nearly exploding it in a furious dust storm of hot lead and steel. Someone was yelling so loudly that his voice carried above the fierce rattle.

  “Motherfuckers! Motherfuckers!”

  Another soldier was ev
en laughing demonically. The guys were pissed. Pissed on and pissed off. Working off their rage and frustration. It was good for their morale to get a chance at some payback after what happened to their dead platoon mates.

  Montgomery was in such pain that he hardly dared breathe. He opened the door of the hummer in which Chiva Lares manned the turret and was hammering away with his .50-cal machine gun. He collapsed into the front seat. Lares glanced down and saw blood.

  “Holy shit! The Sarge is hit!”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Montgomery managed.

  “I’ll call Doc Bailey.”

  “Everybody—” He coughed, but there was no blood in it. Probably not a sucking chest wound then. “Everybody keep what you got,” he wheezed, “until we know what’s going on.”

  He hunkered down below window level to check himself out, shrugging out of his FLK to get to his shirt and armor. His Kevlar chest plate was shattered. He reached a hand underneath it and it came back bloody. He took some deep breaths to double check whether the bullet had penetrated his lungs. It hurt like hell, but there was no lung congestion so far.

  When he got down to bare skin, he saw that his chest was bloody and turning black and bruised from the collar bone down to the bottom of his rib cage. He felt for an entrance wound and found where a piece of the broken vest had gouged out a superficial but bloody laceration just below his heart. The slug that did it was still lodged in the Kevlar. But for the vest, he would have been a goner sure. He could have almost wept from relief.

  “Sarge? Sarge?”

  “I’m good to go, Chiva.”

  Lieutenant Dudish ran by. “Ronnie?”

  “I’m all right, L.T.”

  Dudish kept going. Montgomery lay back on the seat and closed his eyes. His head was spinning. He heard the lieutenant restoring order. “Cease fire! Cease fire!”