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

by Charles W. Sasser

  Even normally adjusted soldiers could crack under the pressure, as the Crazy Legs incident proved. They sometimes thought they were damned either way, whether guilty or innocent.

  FIFTY

  In previous wars, “Go tell it to the chaplain” was the mantra served to disturbed or “shell-shocked” soldiers. Chaplains were counselors of choice for no matter what ailed the soldier psychologically or emotionally, whether a marital crisis back home or adjustment problems on the front. Psychiatrists to help soldiers deal with combat stress entered the military picture as early as the Vietnam War, but they were never in great numbers. The commencement of Iraqi Freedom in 2003 changed all that. The army began sending military mental-health teams to Iraq’s most intense combat zones to keep an eye on soldiers and pull them from their units for therapy.

  Almost immediately after PFC Stephen Green witnessed the shooting of his two friends at the roadblock and still three months before the rape-murders in Mahmudiyah, an Army Combat Stress Team found that he had “homicidal ideation” and diagnosed him as a homicidal threat. Reports said he was angry about the war and desperate to avenge the deaths of his comrades. Treatment consisted of a prescription for a mood-regulating drug and orders to get some sleep before returning to duty the next day.

  After his arrest, the army launched the most aggressive campaign in history to deal with hidden scars like Green’s and with soldiers suffering from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) that might cause them to flip out. Exposure over long periods of time to suicide bombers, roadside mines, and the constant threat of attack posed a unique challenge to the mental health of American soldiers.

  “When you’re in a combat theater dealing with enemy combatants who don’t abide by the laws of war and do acts of indecency, soldiers become stressed,” Army Brigadier General Donald Campbell told a Pentagon briefing. “They see their buddies getting blown up, and they could snap.”

  The Iraq War had so far produced more cases of PTSD than any conflict in decades. A study published by the New England Journal of Medicine estimated that one out of six of the more than 300,000 soldiers who had served in Iraq to date may have been struggling with PTSD. Fully 40 percent of the soldiers fighting in The Triangle of Death were treated at one time or another during their tours for mental and emotional anxiety.

  The aim of the “shrink campaign” was to treat soldiers as close to the front lines as possible.

  “Every time you evacuate the soldier further from where they work, your chances of getting that soldier back to full duty decrease,” explained Lieutenant Colonel Elizabeth Bowler, an army psychiatrist. “The closer we can treat to the front, the better our chances.”

  What they army was trying to avoid, she said, was “a whole generation of veterans sitting by the side of the road with a cardboard sign saying WILL WORK FOR FOOD.”

  Soldiers often resisted seeking psychological help because of the “loser” stigma attached to it. It seemed to the troops of Delta Company on Malibu Road that shrinks were always sniffing and snooping about, trying to “catch” them and send them up to Brigade to be checked out.

  FIFTY-ONE

  Signs of progress in The Triangle didn’t mean the war was over. There were lulls in the action, then hot spots again, the ebb and flow of a stubborn insurgency. Within Delta Company and within the platoons, things seemed to be breaking down. Every day GIs went down that damnable road and got blown up for doing a good job.

  Sergeant Rashid Reevers’ truck was hit three times by IEDs in a single day. He kept towing and switching trucks and getting blown up. “Lucky child” Sergeant John Herne, who had gone months without striking an IED, was hit twice in one week in front of the 109 Mosque.

  He wasn’t the only one to take it in the shorts at the mosque. Located at the beginning of the S-curves, it was a typical dome-shaped, sand-colored building with a big loudspeaker on top that played the muezzin calls for prayer five times a day while a vendor down the road sold dried goat heads. One afternoon as Second Platoon went roaring by, a freshly patched spot in the road caught Jonathan Watts’ attention. He yelled for driver Dean Fetheringill to slow down. Fetheringill hit his brakes, almost throwing Chiva Lares through the windshield.

  The truck stopped just in time to avoid being blown to Kingdom Come. A big IED erupted directly in front of the truck, bending its grill and front bumper. It would have been a lot worse but for Watts’ sharp eye and Fetheringill’s quick reflexes.

  Specialist Brandon Gray, the kid from Oklahoma who wanted to be a cop, was driving for First Platoon’s Sergeant James Connell when his vehicle struck a mine in the road that blew open his door and spurted blood from his ears. He maintained consciousness long enough to bring the truck to a stop without crashing it into the roadside ditch. When he regained awareness, it was 0400 the next morning and he was lying in the first aid station at Inchon being treated by a doctor helicoptered in from the Green Zone.

  An explosion right in front of Specialist Alex Jimenez’ truck burst a front tire. As the vehicle veered toward its flat, heavy machine guns opened up from the flat roofs of nearby houses. TC Sergeant Anthony Schober heard slugs ricocheting off Jimenez’ turret. Jimenez ducked.

  “Holy shit! That was close!”

  Then Jimenez popped up again. He had two or three spare cans of 7.62 ammo for his two-forty. He burned it up shooting at anything that moved within range, pinning down a bunch of Iraqis in their houses. Battalion QRF rounded them up and marched them to 152. IA and Brigade interrogators came down and hauled them away. Schober and Jimenez couldn’t care what happened to them. It would have suited them just fine if the IA had taken them out back, lined them up against the blast wall, and shot them. Enough of this shit already!

  Corporal Mayhem Menahem, second only to First Sergeant Galliano as the company’s “IED magnet,” was hit so many times that none of the other guys wanted to ride with him. The day of the “daisy chain” when Fletcher and Scribner threw their bodies over his proved the final straw. After that, every time he heard a crashing boom rippling through the air, whether he was wide awake or fast asleep, he jumped up automatically to throw on his body armor, grab his weapons, and rush off to defend the perimeter.

  He wasn’t particularly superstitious about being a magnet. It was just that he was scared to death all the time, particularly when he had to go out on the road. Like most good infantrymen, however, he tended to ignore his aches and pains and phobias. To admit to them and seek help was tantamount to admitting a weakness.

  His nerves finally got so bad that Lieutenant Tomasello and First Sergeant Galliano sent him to Brigade to see a shrink. The psychiatrist was a colonel sent down from the Green Zone by the Army Combat Stress Team. He reminded Mayhem of TV’s Doctor Phil.

  “How do you feel about your friends Sergeant Messer and Private Given dying?” the shrink asked in his best you’re-lying-on-a-couch manner.

  “How am I supposed to feel, sir? I don’t know how to feel. I go back and forth in my mind over and over again. It could have been me—or any of the other guys. I feel guilty about it, but I’m glad it wasn’t me if it had to be somebody.”

  “Are you afraid, Corporal?”

  “All the time, sir. I guess that’s why I’m here. I’ve started having nightmares, sir, like Messer had—that I’m going to be blown up and killed. I’ve been blown up so many times that my string’s got to run out sooner or later. Have I become a coward? What kind of person does that make me?”

  The doctor gave him a kindly pat on the shoulder. “It makes you normal, Corporal,” he said. “I’ve spoke with a lot of soldiers since we’ve been in Iraq. Some of them have long roads ahead. You’re struggling with what’s happening to you, and that is a struggle to retain your humanity. You’ve seen things no human should have to see, done things people shouldn’t have to do. Combat is contrary to all that we’ve been taught. It’s not a black and white world over here. Some of us move too far to the dark side. Corporal Menahem, I don’t believe you w
ill be one of them.”

  As treatment, the doctor prescribed “three hots and a cot”: burgers and fries, conversation in air conditioning, a movie, and a good night’s sleep in a real bed. It helped Mayhem forget the war. He was still afraid when he returned to Malibu Road, but at least he could sleep.

  Platoon leaders and sergeants were reminded that it was up to them to hold things together while the pressure continued to build.

  “Are your soldiers out of their fucking minds?” officers raged. “What the fuck are they thinking?”

  “We’ll fix it, sir.”

  “Unfuck them, or I’ll unfuck you.”

  The Joes tried. Anzak and Murphy and Chavez and some of the others sometimes got together with Brenda the blow-up to put on a little strip show, anything to pass the time and distract from where they were. Somebody might sneak in a jug of Iraqi black market rotgut. Everybody had a few shots, stuck dinar bills down Brenda’s panties and whooped it up. What it did mostly, however, was remind them of home and real girls.

  Guys like Sergeant Jeremy Miller, Specialist Joe Merchant, and Mayhem had all served previous combat tours in Iraq. They thought they had done their share and would be discharged and allowed to go home. Stop-Loss extended them in the army and sent them back to Iraq one more time. It was harder on them in many ways than on first-timers. They had already survived one tour. Now, they had to survive another one. Double jeopardy.

  One morning, Second Platoon prepared for a mission over toward JSB and the Russian power plant. Lieutenant Dudish issued the OpOrder before breakfast. The sun was up, it was a warm day for January, the flies were not biting, there had been no incidents the previous night, and everything appeared all quiet along the Euphrates. However, a murmur of discontent started over breakfast when somebody bitched about rubber eggs and refused to eat. Several other Joes tossed their plates in a gesture of solidarity that had nothing to do with Cookie Urbina and his kitchen. Eating or not eating, unlike the IEDs along Malibu, was something over which the soldiers had control.

  Sergeants John Herne and Nate Brooks were in an intense discussion with Miller, Merchant, and a couple of other guys out where the trucks were lining up in front of 152 when Sergeant Montgomery exited the old barbershop with his rifle slung over one shoulder and carrying his nitch by its strap. Lieutenant Dudish was still inside taking care of a last-minute commo problem.

  “They won’t get in the trucks,” Sergeant Herne said, indicating Miller and the others.

  Montgomery’s drill sergeant hackles bristled. “What do you mean, they won’t get in the trucks?”

  “They say they’re not going back out.”

  Miller had been behaving edgy lately, nervous, chain-smoking, and not sleeping much. Montgomery got in his face. Miller was senior man of the “revolt” and therefore its leader.

  “Get your ass in that truck,” Montgomery ordered.

  “Sergeant, I’m tired of this shit,” Miller said. “We’re getting hit all the time while we have to grin and bear it. We’ve all had enough. It feels like we’re taking crazy pills. So I quit. I’m walking back to Yusufiyah and going home.”

  He threw his rifle down, turned abruptly and started toward the compound gate that opened onto Malibu Road. An American soldier alone wouldn’t make it three hundred meters before some sneaky asshole nailed him. Merchant and the others looked uncomfortable, but they remained in-place.

  “Sergeant Miller, I’m giving you a direct order. Get back here now or face charges.”

  Miller kept walking. It seemed he was desperate enough not to give a damn what happened to him.

  “Sergeant Miller, this will land you in Leavenworth. You still have a chance to reconsider. Either way, I’m going to stop you before you get to the gate.”

  The previous year, two soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division had hijacked an Iraqi and his personally owned vehicle and ordered him to drive them to Kuwait. They were stopped, given a summary court martial, and sentenced to serve long terms in the federal prison at Fort Leavenworth. It had been a big joke among the Joes all over Iraq.

  Miller hesitated. Reluctantly, he turned around and came back.

  That was his last day in The Triangle of Death. Company shipped him off to Brigade to see a shrink. Montgomery never learned what happened to him, whether he was punished for mutiny or whether he was diagnosed with PTSD and sent back to the States upon the recommendation of the Army Combat Stress Team.

  The soldiers behind on Malibu Road laughed. Hell, PTSD for them was normal.

  FIFTY-TWO

  The inability to suppress the insurgency in Iraq prompted President George W. Bush to revise the war’s strategy. On 20 January 2007, he held a press conference to announce “the Surge.” Another 30,000 troops in five brigade combat teams would be infused into the nearly 140,000 already in-country. He named General David Petraeus to command the Multi-National Force.

  Petraeus, along with his executive officer, Colonel Peter Mansoor, and General Ray Odierno, the new commanding general of Multi-National Corps—Iraq, had published Army Field Manual 3-24 the previous month outlining their new philosophy for counterinsurgency operations in Iraq. Although Petraeus was the primary architect of the new strategy, a number of combat military commanders had gradually come to realize that what they were doing was not working and was not going to work in a war unlike any ever fought by the United States. No one would get hurt if the Americans remained forted up in their major bases. Nothing would be accomplished, either.

  Petraeus based his new approach upon Vietnam-era programs such as General Creighton Abrams’ PROVN (Provincial Reconstruction of Vietnam) Report. Abrams advocated spreading U.S. platoons into villages and communities to work with local residents in “community policing” designed to pacify immediate regions while developing allegiances and collecting intelligence that would help the wider prosecution of the war. As Mansoor noted, “We needed infantry in patrol bases spread among the population. A military force must live with the people it would defend.”

  In Petraeus’ opinion, securing the population was the key to effective counterinsurgency. He penned a detailed explanation of his “clear-hold-build” philosophy that he circulated among all troops in the war zone.

  “Improving [the] security of Iraq’s population is the overriding objective of our strategy,” he wrote. “Accomplishing the mission requires carrying out complex military operations and convincing the Iraqi people that we will not just ‘clear’ their neighborhoods of enemy, we will also stay and help ‘hold’ the neighborhoods so that the ‘build’ phase can go forward.”

  Rather than undertaking large sweeps, small units would push out into communities to establish security stations and combat outposts that allowed them to live and fight among the population. Determined to minimize harm to civilians, he asked that commanders consider one simple question before they approved any operation: Would it take more bad guys off the streets than it created by the way it was conducted?

  At the same time, the Surge called for pounding hell out of the enemy.

  “The reality is that there is a hard-core minority who cannot be won over by any reasonable effort; they can only be incapacitated,” Petraeus noted. “We have a pretty clear message. If you shoot at us, we will do our damnedest to kill you . . . and if you live in a neighborhood and you know there are bad people and you don’t want Americans to return fire, endangering your families, you need to turn in the bad guys . . . It’s great to be nice, but we’ve found that if you let up for one second against the bad guys, they’re right back at your throats.”

  The larger point of the Surge was to create a breathing space in the violence during which political reconstruction and rebuilding efforts could take place.

  The Surge validated operations already being conducted by Colonel Mike Kershaw and his battalion commanders like Lieutenant Colonel Mike Infanti in The Triangle of Death. It also provided a common blueprint for the conduct of the war rather than leaving it to the discretio
n of individual commanders. Everyone would now be working together toward a common goal.

  It would have been easy for Petraeus to say this is how you’re going to fight, this is what you’re going to do, then step back out of the picture and let the outfits root hog or die. That was not what he did. Not only were more troops sent into battle, but he also spread them out and got the entire country to fighting. He made sure BCTs had everything they needed to fight with.

  Whereas 4th Battalion had previously been chronically short of certain supplies, it never lacked for wire, ammo, food, water, or anything else from then on. Infanti asked for hand-cranked washing machines so his soldiers could wash their uniforms. He got them.

  Iraq’s year of torment began to change with the Surge. Maybe Colonel Infanti hadn’t reached that turning point of his yet. But he thought he could see it just around the bend.

  FIFTY-THREE

  Winter in Iraq arrived late that year and departed early. With a laugh, the jolly big workhorse of First Platoon, Joe Anzak, called it “The Winter of Our Discontent.” Most of the rains were over for the year. Biting flies were back again in force. Foliage along the fertile Euphrates looked fresher and greener in the spring sunshine. Temperatures were reaching triple digits by the end of March, and people were once more taking to their open roofs to sleep. Even with the war, the normal cycle of life in the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley continued the way it had since the beginning of time in the Garden of Eden.

  The Joes on Malibu Road thought they detected some decrease in violence after the start of General Petraeus’ Surge. Their outfits seemed as chronically undermanned as ever, what with only twenty or so men available to a platoon at any one time when there should have been thirty or more. But they kept hearing about an infusion of new brigades, none of which, as far as they knew, had reached The Triangle of Death. And they kept hearing about how they were winning, and how more and more of the Iraqi police, military, and political classes were stepping up to the plate to take a swing at the insurgents. There weren’t any home runs yet, but the soldiers were more optimistic when Colonel Infanti assured them they were reaching a turning point.