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

by Charles W. Sasser

  Colonel Infanti agreed with a statement made by British Prime Minister Tony Blair: “One thing is for sure: the extremists have faith in our weakness just as they have faith in their own religious fanaticism. And the weaker we are, the more they will come after us.”

  Plenty of bad guys were still hanging around in The Triangle plotting and scheming. As part of an aggressive strategy, Colonel Infanti’s 4th Battalion cut them no slack. Companies and platoons were always out hunting.

  Delta Company troops poured out of their trucks and stretched into a line across a neglected field where scrawny weeds spurted up after the last rain. Curfews kept most Iraqis indoors after nightfall, all except those attached to the insurgency. There had been a lot of after-midnight activity in this region lately. Delta Company decided to conduct a nighttime sweep to see what it could jump up.

  Troops began to walk forward, weapons at the ready. They passed around a local cemetery in pitch darkness, the only sound coming from the electricity-producing generator in a nearby house. In a more built-up community, dogs barking from every house and alley marked their progress. If it weren’t for the dogs, nobody would know they were coming. Now, everyone knew.

  “Keep alert,” sergeants cautioned. “If you don’t keep your eyes open, you’re as good as dead.”

  Without a night vision device, a hajji walking along a narrow road failed to see the soldiers until they were almost upon him. He ditched a bag he was carrying and bolted.

  “Catch that motherfucker!”

  A couple of soldiers took off after him in what would have been a futile effort, laden as they were with armor and equipment, except the guy hit a fence in the darkness that shot him back into the road like an arrow from a bow. The soldiers tackled him. The bag he discarded contained thousands of Iraqi dinars.

  “That’s a shitpot full of loot.”

  The guy was barefooted and clad in baggy pants and a filthy t-shirt. He sat silent and unmoving on the ground with his head hanging and his hands flex-cuffed behind him. He looked like he was scared shitless. Someone offered him a cigarette. He sat smoking silently, eyes downcast. Not making a sound.

  An IA interrogation team arrived. Everybody figured the guy was a courier delivering cash or else he had just been paid a bounty for planting an IED or taking shots at Americans. The IAs threw him face down on the road. He began to shake violently. He thought they were going to put a bullet through his head. After all, that was what he would have done had their roles been reversed.

  Delta continued to sweep, crossing into a farmer’s backfield to gather around a mound of freshly turned earth next to a shallow irrigation channel. Excavating it, soldiers removed several plastic sacks containing AK-47 ammunition. They approached the nearest house and brought the man to the mound.

  “Where did this come from?” an Intel officer asked the farmer.

  “I don’t know. Maybe my neighbor, who has a hate for me.”

  “You have a dog. This is almost in your back yard.”

  “Maybe the dog was sleeping.”

  “I think you’re lying. Cuff him.”

  The IA added him to the courier and the sweep moved on. At each house, a squad circled, looking, before banging on the door to enter and search for weapons. Soldiers calmly and politely searched houses from which Jihadists might have launched actions to kill or maim Americans just days before, demonstrating restraint that would have astonished anyone not familiar with the American soldier. Some of the young GIs felt guilty and conflicted about the casual rifling through private residences.

  Each household was allowed one AK-47 and one magazine of rounds. Anything more than that was confiscated and the owner arrested, depending on how much more. Iraqi families stood nervously, fidgeting, looking at each other.

  Battle-weary, hard-core and hard-bitten, often cynical, and certainly capable of violence when necessary, the American soldier nonetheless possessed a basic decency that was the main reason the U.S. military was succeeding in the same kind of war at which the Soviet Red Army had failed in Afghanistan. The GI might not be perfect, but he managed to largely avoid graft, cruelty, revenge-seeking, and advantage-taking under difficult circumstances that provided both opportunity and temptation.

  Officers asked the women and children about water, electricity, and sewer service.

  “No water. No sewer. Electricity come on sometimes at night.”

  The Iraqis had been completely dependent upon government for the past thirty-five years to take care of their needs, solve their problems, and dictate every decision. As a result, they never learned to take charge of their own lives. They expected Americans to come in and take up where Saddam left off, a dependency culture comparable to the welfare enclaves in many inner cities in the United States.

  Delta Company moved on.

  A lone streetlight down at the end of an alley provided the only illumination. Three young hajji males were gathered around a rusty four-door compact. They spotted the Americans too late to flee. When asked to produce IDs and questioned about what they were doing out after curfew, one of them repeated, “Bee-bee. Bee-bee.”

  “Baby?”

  “Yes. Yes. Bee-bee. Wife he have bee-bee. I can go to hospital. Car she not start.”

  “You speak English.”

  The man pinched his fingers together. “A few.”

  “Don’t lie to me. You speak more than a few.”

  The men were too hyper to be entirely innocent. In the trunk of the old car were two howitzer rounds, each pre-rigged with detonation cord and prepped with fuses to be employed as IEDs. The IAs added them to their retinue of captives. It was turning out to be a remarkable night. And it wasn’t over yet.

  There were times when the troops needed to be open and friendly, other times when necessity prescribed the destruction or detention of the enemy and those who sheltered or protected him. A psychological struggle was underway, with the Iraqi people as the prize. On the one side were American forces who demonstrated remarkable gentleness and forbearance. On the other side, the remnants of Saddam’s regime reinforced by foreign Jihadists using fear and terror to further their goals. The trick to operating in such a delicate, schizophrenic climate was in determining what was required by any particular situation, whether open and friendly or suspicious and prepared for destruction.

  Several men had built a small fire in an alley, around which they gathered with a number of boys to visit and play dominoes. It was after curfew, but the little congregation appeared harmless, just hanging out. The Americans were invited to have chai tea and naan bread just for passing through and keeping things safe. It would have been rude to refuse. As strange as it seemed, a representation of GIs sat down in the fire-lit alley with a group of strangers in the middle of a war to share tea.

  Some of the Joes kicked a soccer ball a few times with the boys before a platoon leader advised the Iraqis they should go home. They were violating curfew.

  “Lieutenant?” a soldier said.

  He had investigated a pile of old blankets bundled up against a nearby wall. Wrapped inside the blankets was paraphernalia that included steel pipes cut to length for use as improvised mortar-firing tubes and a pile of al-Qaeda literature with titles such as What is al-Qaeda?; Why Osama bin Laden Went to Afghanistan; The Glorious Explosions in America; Why God Chooses Martyrs . . .

  Scars from the ongoing war were everywhere—on the road with its holes, craters, and patched-up places from IEDs; on a house smeared with graffiti and forlorn with blown-out widows and piled-up trash; on the face of an old man sitting outside staring at it and looking as though he remembered other times. It was Colonel Infanti’s hope that, with enough pressure, there would be fewer weapons in the hands of guerrillas, less money for them to spend on recruiting and insurgency, and not so many old men with that heartbreaking look on their faces.

  There were encouraging signs the more it became clear that the 10th Mountain was not going to cut and run. Locals got to know some of the soldiers a
nd greeted them with smiles, waves, friendly faces, and shouted greetings rather than turning away with stone-cold faces. More children crowded around and asked for anything and everything they could think of, especially treats, and not so many of them hurled stones at the trucks when they passed by.

  At a market, a middle-aged man sidled up to Sergeant Montgomery and cautiously observed in poor but practiced English how the presence of the Americans was making him and his family feel safer. Farmers near where Sergeant Messer and PFC Given were killed cleared some of the surrounding fields of reeds and growth to make it harder for insurgents to hide there. People in one village established a democratic town council to make the community more livable by instigating “beautification” projects to clean up the trash. A sheikh with a small militia used it to enforce curfew.

  American soldiers did their part. They were active and visible in the villages distributing food, school supplies, building materials, and other goods. Wherever some of the soldiers like Sergeant James Connell went, they were recognized for their kindness and their affection for children. Kids followed them like they were Pied Pipers. “Polar Bears! Polar Bears!” they chorused.

  Company and platoon medics made a point of taking into the field with them little things to make the people’s lives more comfortable—lotion for a child’s dry skin; painkillers for a woman in the terminal stages of cancer; antibiotics for a farmer’s infection.

  A little boy of about seven, dirty and unshorn with eyes darker than the Euphrates River, tapped an American soldier on the arm.

  “Mister, what is your name?” he asked in surprisingly good English.

  “Brandon Gray,” the soldier said.

  “It is nice to meet you, Brandon Gray,” the boy replied. “My name is Qassim. I hope you will stay.”

  FORTY-NINE

  It required about six months for an outfit in combat to reach its peak. Efficiency and morale started to go downhill after that. Soldiers complained about why they were in Iraq and wondered when they would be allowed to go home. Conditions were even more frustrating because of the nature of the war and its rules of engagement. It sometimes seemed they were fighting merely to avoid losing, fighting for the sake of fighting rather than trying to win and go home. No wonder the Joes were schizophrenic. Making nicey-nice one moment, kill or be killed the next; laughing children here, around the next bend in the road a sniper waiting; deliver some schoolbooks, find the pages later tamped into the end of a 155mm homemade explosive to hold the powder in.

  Tempers sometimes flared. Soldiers’ anger and resentment built up as casualties mounted.

  Some of the senior NCOs and officers in Delta Company got wind of a conspiracy by soldiers to assassinate Crazy Legs. Although the cripple had been rendered virtually impotent, was even an asset in a rather curious way as defined by Sergeant Montgomery, his mere continuing presence was a thorn in the side, an insult. At first, he proved to be a source of amusement and entertainment as Joes made a game of devising schemes to get rid of the most conspicuous spy in their midst. Apparently, however, a few of the soldiers had turned the game serious.

  NCOs nipped the conspiracy at the roots before it had a chance to get out of hand. Afterwards, Joes received little impromptu lectures on how you couldn’t frag somebody simply because you knew him to be the enemy. GIs had ROEs, the enemy didn’t. Besides, U.S. soldiers could be charged with “war crimes.” It seemed that certain politicians and the antiwar crowd back home, while clamoring their support for the troops, were all too eager to second-guess soldiers from the comfort of their safe air-conditioned offices with a warm cup of coffee in one hand, an intern’s ass in the other, and no fear whatsoever of getting killed in the next ten minutes. With this bunch, who to many soldiers seemed to constitute almost a second enemy front behind lines, even righteous combat could be considered a war crime; an assassination would most certainly bring down their ire like the wrath of God.

  The Haditha incident seemed to prove to the soldier in Iraq that he would automatically be presumed guilty until proven innocent.

  In 2005, a roadside IED hit a U.S. Marine convoy in the little town of Haditha, wounding several Marines and killing a humvee driver, Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, twenty. Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich and his men cleared several nearby houses from which they received hostile fire. Unfortunately, unarmed civilians were sometimes slain in the heat of combat. Insurgents often claimed “victims” were both unarmed and civilians, whether that was the case or not; it produced good psychological warfare and even better press. Sergeant Wuterich, three other enlisted men, and four officers were later charged in the killing of twenty-four Iraqis.

  Whether they were guilty or not (they were later exonerated) wasn’t the initial issue. The baying began even before the Marine Corps completed its investigation. Antiwar politicians and an unfriendly press convicted the Marines in advance. Newspapers began comparing Haditha to My Lai in Vietnam. Congressmen from the House floor commenced howling about how Haditha was “worse than Abu Ghraib”; the Marines had committed war crimes “in cold blood.”

  “I will not excuse murder and that’s what happened . . . ,” U.S. Representative John Murtha proclaimed. “I hear one (of the victims) was even in English asking for mercy . . . We cannot allow something like this to fester . . . We’ve already lost the direction of this war . . . These kinds of things have to be brought out immediately, because if these Marines get away with it, other Marines might think it’s okay . . .”

  To the Joes in The Triangle of Death, fighting a war unlike any other in U.S. history, the episode illustrated how they would be thrown to the hyenas if it would score a political point. It sometimes seemed the American GI had as much to fear from his own country as from IEDs and bullets.

  Not that atrocities weren’t committed, in Iraq as in every other war. In July 2006, one month before the 2nd BCT arrived in Iraq to take over The Triangle of Death AO, five soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division were charged with murdering an entire family in Mahmudiyah, including a five-year-old girl, and raping a fifteen-year-old. The news was hot in the Iraqi streets, sowing distrust and suspicion among citizens and making it more difficult than ever to win them over. It also provided insurgents a justification for their resistance.

  The 10th Mountain Division had a lot to overcome. A single outrage painted everyone subsequently with the same brush. Colonel Infanti and his staff constantly reminded officers and noncoms that nothing like this must ever happen in 4th Battalion.

  It appeared the 101st Division in The Triangle had reached the same breaking point that now threatened the 10th Mountain. Bravo Company 1/502nd (1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry) of the 101st was being worn ragged by shadowy insurgents who seldom engaged in face-to-face combat. Instead, sniper fire, IEDs, and RPG attacks occurred almost daily, claiming at least one Screaming Eagle soldier every week. Bravo Company alone suffered eight KIAs.

  PFC Steven D. Green witnessed two of these casualties. He and five other airborne soldiers were manning a checkpoint when an Iraqi civilian approached them. The troops knew him because of his status as an informant. He greeted the soldiers warmly, then suddenly pulled a pistol and shot two of them at point-blank range. Green was never entirely “right” afterwards.

  Three months later, in March 2006, Green’s platoon manned another checkpoint in Mahmudiyah, through which pretty 15-year-old Abeer Hamza had to pass almost daily. She complained to her mother that U.S. soldiers were hitting on her, making suggestive remarks. Her mother Fakhriyah was afraid the soldiers would come for her.

  “The Americans would not do such a thing,” a neighbor reassured her.

  Steven Green was a bony-faced twenty-year-old from Texas, a cocky loner who had been allowed to enlist in the army despite a petty criminal record and a history of drug, alcohol, and emotional problems. On the afternoon of 12 March 2006, after drinking bootleg Iraqi whiskey, Green rounded up some buddies and talked up the idea of raping Abeer, who lived about 300 meters from th
e checkpoint.

  Green, Sergeant Paul Cortez, Specialist James P. Barker, PFC Jesse V. Spielman, and PFC Bryan L. Howard set out, in Green’s words, “to kill and hurt a lot of Iraqis.” At Abeer’s house, they herded her father, mother and five-year-old sister into one bedroom and forced Abeer into another. Green shot the father in the head several times with a legally owned AK-47 found in the house. Then he riddled the mother and her five-year-old daughter with gunfire, killing them instantly.

  He came out of the room and proudly announced to his buddies, “I just killed them. All are dead.”

  In the other bedroom, Green and two of the soldiers ripped off Abeer’s clothing and took turns raping her. Afterwards, Green shot her two or three times with the AK-47, threw a blanket over her body, then set the house afire in a crude effort to cover up the crime. He returned to the checkpoint, buried his blood-drenched clothing, and swore everyone to secrecy.

  Eventually the secret leaked out, and the five soldiers were arrested and charged.

  “I came over here because I wanted to kill people,” Green admitted with casual indifference. “The truth is, it wasn’t all I thought it was cracked up to be. I thought killing somebody would be a life-changing experience. And then I did it, and it was like ‘All right, whatever . . .’ Over here, killing people is like squashing an ant. I mean, you kill somebody and it’s like, ‘All right, let’s go get some pizza.’ ”

  Green’s crimes (for which he was later convicted) constituted the most horrific instance of criminal behavior by American troops during the four-year-old war, a worst-case scenario of mentally and emotionally unfit soldiers slipping through the army’s pre-enlistment screening to end up on the killing fields in Iraq where their maladjustments might be triggered under stress.