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

by Charles W. Sasser

  “Them motherfuckers living in their little shacks . . . They know who did it. We ought to burn every damn house and village along the river until somebody starts talking. I wouldn’t trade all them cocksuckers’ lives for one of our guys.”

  Most of the Iraqi captives rounded up were simple farmers trying to stay out of the way of both sides. Hear no evil, see no evil . . . Either that, or they pretended to be farmers. It was sometimes hard to ferret out the truth.

  “I was in my cucumber field when I heard a big explosion and shooting. I ran to my house because I was afraid I would be arrested if someone spotted me in the field. I’ve been arrested four times. The real attackers run off and innocent people like me get arrested.”

  “You were in your cucumber field at four in the morning?”

  SpecOps brought in a wounded man they caught hiding in a house. Hands cuffed behind his back, he was a scruffy-looking character in his early twenties with an even scruffier beard and a dished turban. Interrogators took him off into a room and spent hours with him. Word soon circulated that he may have participated in the attack.

  “Stand him up against a wall and shoot out his eyes,” Specialist Brandon Gray proposed.

  “That’s too easy,” Sammy Rhodes counter-suggested. “Basically, stake him out in the sun, pour gas on him, and light a match. Burn him the way he did our guys. Doesn’t the Koran and the Bible say an eye for an eye?”

  Civilians tended to think American soldiers had a switch that could turn their emotions on and off at will. It wasn’t that simple. It sometimes went beyond their ability to immediately back off and exercise restraint and maturity after some of their fellow soldiers had been killed or maimed. Specialist Shaun Gopaul, Jimenez’ best friend, was so angry and devastated that the chaplain and mental health counselors pulled him off the combat line before he did something he and everyone else would regret. Psychiatrists prescribed antidepressants and sleeping pills and sent him to a desk job at Battalion HQ.

  Hendrickson found himself working with a “search and clear” team, experiencing the gut-churning fear that comes with kicking in doors to confront whatever might be inside. Never knowing if the welcome would come from an armed fedayeen or a child huddling in fear with his mother. On the way out from Inchon, his caravan stopped to look over the wreckage at the ambush site.

  He sat in his humvee with some of the other Joes of First Platoon and looked silently out at the shadows of rapidly approaching nightfall and the burnt-out hulls where his fellow soldiers had died. During daylight, the land could be attractive, even idyllic. It must have been a little ghostly last night with the wind blowing.

  Another line of military vehicles with their lights blacked out whisked past without warning. A breeze blew the sounds of their engines the other way.

  SIXTY-TWO

  War mostly claimed the lives of young men and kids, who went out every day as they did on Malibu Road with the singular purpose of keeping faith with their buddies, of not letting them down in the face of danger or death. Of every war in which America has become embroiled, it can truthfully be said that soldiers rarely fight for God, country, and Mom’s apple pie. Rather, they fight for each other, for their buddies.

  Lieutenant Colonel Michael Infanti considered the toughest part of his job to be notifying a family that it had lost a son, husband, father, or brother in combat. A personal phone call was the least he could do, during which he strove to be reassuring, comforting, and complimentary in conveying his and, by extension, the army’s sincerest condolences and appreciation for the job the soldier performed. Each time he finished such a call, the lump in his throat was so big he could hardly talk. He limped outside his TOC at Yusufiyah with his bad back and, standing alone, lifted his head to the stars until he recovered.

  After the memorials, after the placement of boots and helmets and more photographs of the dead or missing on the walls, after Chaplain Jeff Bryan did what he could to ease the suffering, some of the “old hands” of First Platoon packed the gear of the dead and missing in boxes for shipment Stateside. The ritual was a somber one, with long-faced soldiers almost reverently handling shaving kits, wallets, photos, papers, books, letters, and other belongings before carefully placing them in boxes. New guys were not invited to participate. PFC Big Willy Hendrickson stood back and watched respectfully, feeling temporarily outcast. It was tough for a replacement to come into an outfit where bonds had already been formed. Many combat soldiers would not make new friends for fear of losing them as they had the old ones.

  It seemed to medic Specialist Michael Morse that, in the sudden deaths of so many, First Platoon was losing its spiritual cohesion, its soul. Practical jokesters and teasers like Alex Jimenez and Joe Anzak had kept morale high and the men laughing. Someone in the platoon deflated Brenda the Bitch and took her off and either buried her or, if rumors were correct, stuffed her in a wag bag and burned her. She was never seen again lounging around half-dressed on the old sofa at Inchon. The Joes simply weren’t in the mood for Saturday night dances or impromptu strip teases anymore after DUSTWUN.

  “If we could just move time back to last week,” Morse lamented.

  Everyone blamed the crater watches; sooner or later T-Rex was bound to have come for the tethered goat.

  During World War II, what family members waiting at home feared most was receiving the dreaded telegram, sometimes delivered by a local taxi company, followed by the Ladies Auxiliary. Before the war ended, the army adopted the practice of dispatching officers and NCOs to the home of the deceased to break the sad news. Which was most distressing, the taxi or grim soldiers arriving in a staff car, was difficult to measure.

  With Iraq, as with Vietnam and Korea, an officer attended the funeral of every soldier killed in action. His job was to oversee all the military aspects of the funeral service—pall bearers, military escort, Honor Guard, taps, firing of the 21-gun salute, folding and presentation of the flag to the next of kin . . . He comforted where he could and read tributes from the soldier’s buddies and commanders, those who knew him, who lived with him, loved him, and fought beside him. Voices from war-deployed units transcended distance and spoke with an eloquence no civil service could ever hope to match.

  PFC Daniel W. Courneya was nineteen years old when he died. His stepfather, Army Specialist David Thompson, also serving in Iraq, flew home for the funeral. During the previous Thanksgiving/Christmas holidays, Courneya had been granted leave to come home to Vermontville, Michigan, where he married his longtime girlfriend Jennifer in a civil ceremony. They had planned to have a “real” wedding after he returned from Iraq.

  Jennifer was a war bride and a war widow before she turned nineteen.

  On 14 May, Maple Valley High School’s public address system had announced Courneya’s death and asked for a moment of silence throughout the school. Students put together a memorial of photographs, posters, and plaques surrounding a portrait of the 2005 graduate. The school’s flag flew at half-mast until after his funeral.

  “I always called him ‘my bright eyes,’ ” said his grandmother. “He was my hero.”

  PFC Christopher E. Murphy was twenty-one. Memorial services were held in his school gymnasium at William Campbell High School near Lynchburg, Virginia, followed by a funeral ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. Mourners stood at attention under a blazing afternoon sun while Major General Michael Oates, commander of the 10th Mountain Division, presented a folded flag to Murphy’s mother. She looked toward the sky while a bugler played “Taps,” wiping tears from her eyes with one hand and clutching the flag with the other.

  “He was just one of those kids everyone enjoyed being around,” said James Rinella, his school’s assistant principal. “A very hardworking kid, a very humble kid.”

  Murphy was the most recent of 340 members of the military killed in Iraq to be buried at Arlington.

  Sergeant Anthony J. Schober was twenty-three. He would never own the ranch he dreamed about. Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons and
Nevada Congressman Dean Heller spoke at his service, held at the Vietnam War Memorial in Carson City. The local chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars vowed to erect a bench and a plaque bearing his name at the site.

  Congressman Heller read quotes posted by readers on the message board of the Nevada Appeal newspaper.

  “Rest easy, soldier . . .”

  “You are a hero and will forever walk with heroes . . .”

  “Anthony is not going to be forgotten . . .”

  The congressman presented a flag that had flown over the nation’s capitol to Schober’s father Edward. “I believe someday you will be together again,” he said.

  Sergeant First Class James D. Connell, forty, received a hero’s welcome upon his return to his small east Tennessee hometown of Lake City, where he had spent his leave a few weeks ago. A motorcade met him at the airport and escorted him home for the last time. Community members lined the street. Men, women, and children displaying tiny American flags stood at silent attention. The motorcade paused in front of his parents’ home for a moment of silence before proceeding to memorial ceremonies at the Air National Guard Base. The same motorcade escorted his body on to Arlington National Cemetery for burial.

  “We don’t want another soldier to come back like they did from Vietnam,” said Duane Romine, part of the escort for the Patriot Guard Riders. “We want them to come back with honor whether alive or deceased.”

  “I’m proud of my dad,” said Connell’s fourteen-year-old daughter Courtney, “because he didn’t really fight for himself, he fought for his country.”

  SIXTY-THREE

  The operation to recover the DUSTWUN men grew so massive that the soldiers of Delta Company, who had a personal stake in the outcome, felt they were little more than very small cogs in a big machine. They seldom saw the Big Picture. What they saw instead were raids and patrols, the daily grind of jumping across ditches and wading through muck in the difficult terrain searching for clues.

  Sammy Rhodes’ heart leaped when he came across a shred of camouflage caught on a bush. Disappointment followed when it turned out to be from the uniform of an IA who had passed through previously.

  Grim-faced troops drained a canal along the Euphrates after local villagers reported seeing body parts floating. Nothing.

  Second Platoon soldiers dug for the missing soldiers’ bodies along another stretch of river. Either their information was bad, or they weren’t in the right place.

  The search that initially centered around the Kharghouli area soon began to widen. Not a good sign. Night and day throughout The Triangle of Death, GIs operating on the best intelligence available launched scores of raids against the houses of potential witnesses and suspects, rounding up more than 250 people with suspected ties to the attack. Gradually, the effort began to pay off. It was like piecing together a complicated puzzle.

  Acting on a tip from a Shiite elder, Major Bob Griggs, Lieutenant Colonel Infanti’s operations officer, took a squad of Polar Bears into the unfriendly 109 Mosque on Malibu to snap mug shots of thirty-nine men there with their prayer rugs. One or two of them, the elder said, might have been involved. Local Iraqis helping in the case behind the scenes identified one of the pictures as a man named Al Jasma, whom they said might know the missing soldiers’ whereabouts. The guy took off before troops could arrest him. Raiders hit Al Jasma’s house from then on every time they thought he might have slipped back into the AO.

  Two apprehended suspects under harsh interrogation by Iraqi Army intelligence officers, who didn’t always play by Geneva rules, confessed to having taken part in the attack. They said the insurgents split into two groups afterwards. The ringleader took the kidnapped soldiers with his band of men to turn them over to al-Qaeda in Iraq, whose leadership demanded live U.S. soldiers be turned over for use as hostages and bargaining chips.

  U.S. forces stormed a storefront in Amiriyah, a Sunni stronghold with close tribal ties to Kharghouli, and captured nine more Iraqis suspected of some form of involvement in the attack. Under questioning, they confirmed information obtained by the IA intelligence officers. They believed one of the three captives was killed shortly after his capture, while the other two remained prisoner.

  On May 18, six days after the incident, General David Petraeus gave a press conference. “Somebody has given us the names of all the guys that participated in it and told us how they did it. We have to verify it, but it sounds spot-on. We’ve had all kinds of tips down there. We just tragically haven’t found any of the individuals. As of this morning, we thought there were at least two that were probably still alive. At one point of time there was a sense that one of them might have died, but again we just don’t know.”

  Not a day passed but that the men of Delta Company didn’t have their missing friends on their minds and on the day’s schedule. In spite of gains made in hunting down players, any trail that might have been left by Fouty, Jimenez, and Anzak grew colder day by day, leaving their platoon mates with faint hope that they were still alive.

  “We’re not going to stop what we’re doing,” declared Colonel Mike Kershaw, 2nd BCT’s commander. “We’re not going to stop searching. We’ll not leave any of our men behind.”

  A sentiment the White House echoed. “I’m confident that the military is doing everything it can to find the missing soldiers,” President George W. Bush said during a press conference. “We’re using all the intelligence and all the troops we can to find them. It’s a top priority of our people there in Iraq.”

  Anzak and Jimenez, with their senses of irreverent humor and propensity for wisecracks, would undoubtedly have had a few witty comments to make had they known the President of The United States was talking about them. Hey, Alex. You hear that? We are impo’tent.

  Bad guys started disappearing off Malibu Road, fleeing to a better climate, when they discovered the Americans knew who they were. Malibu Road had never been so safe. At the same time, insurgents in the Baghdad enclave initiated a Surge of their own in response to beefed-up, more aggressive ops by American troops.

  Jihadists disguised as Iraqi soldiers massacred fifteen men in a Kurdish Shiite village northeast of Baghdad. The next day, a Saturday, about fifty insurgents assaulted a U.S. FOB in the center of Baghdad, sparking a battle that left at least six militants dead. Later that same day, mortar shells rained down into the Green Zone, wounding one American soldier, when British Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived for talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

  Two American soldiers were killed and nine wounded in separate ambushes and IED attacks in the capital, apparently to counter the continuing search for the captured soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division. Two Iraqi journalists working for ABC News were also slain as they drove home from work, bringing the toll of journalists killed in the war to more than one hundred.

  Allahu Akbar— God is Great!

  Videotapes usually made their way to Al Jazeera TV within a day or so after any incident in which insurgents scored what they considered a victory, especially if it entailed hostages who could be executed for the edification of the world. So far, however, the silence coming from Jihadists had been deafening, perhaps due to the fact that couriers bearing the tapes hadn’t been able to slip through the cordon the Americans threw up around The Triangle. The only contact the insurgents attempted came via a brief message on a terrorist website.

  It said the ambush and abductions were in retaliation for the rape and murder of 15-year-old Abeer Hamza and the slaying of her parents and sister by rogue troops of the 101st Airborne in Mahmudiyah in March 2006.

  “What you are doing in searching for your soldiers will lead to nothing but exhaustion and headaches,” the message warned. “Your soldiers are in our hands. If you want their safety, do not look for them.”

  SIXTY-FOUR

  Unlike in previous wars, when hundreds of troops sometimes went missing from chaotic battlefields, only three U.S. soldiers were listed as missing in action in Iraq from the 1991 Gulf Wa
r through Operation Iraqi Freedom, up until the current DUSTWUN. The last U.S. soldier known to have been captured by the enemy was Sergeant Ahmed Qusai al-Taayie, an Iraqi-born GI from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who was snatched from the home of his Iraqi wife on 23 October 2006 while visiting her in Baghdad.

  Sergeant Keith Maupin of Batavia, Ohio, was abducted on 9 April 2004 after insurgents ambushed a fuel convoy. Two months later, tapes on Al Jazeera showed a hooded man in U.S. ACUs being shot. Purportedly, it was Maupin, although no body had ever been recovered.

  Maupin and al-Taayie remained listed as MIA, along with U.S. Navy pilot Michael Speicher, whose jet fighter was shot down during Operation Desert Storm sixteen years previously. The three soldiers from Delta Company had not yet formally been reclassified from DUSTWUN to MIA.

  The round-the-clock hunt for the Americans continued despite warnings from the Islamic State of Iraq, now claiming responsibility for the abductions, that the search, if pursued, could end only with the soldiers being executed. No one really believed anything the U.S. did would affect the soldiers’ fate one way or another. They were going to be publically executed sooner or later—unless they were rescued first.

  Nearly every day, Lieutenant Colonel Infanti and CSM Alex Jimenez went out into the field to check on progress. When night fell, the tall commander of 4/31st often could not sleep because of back pain and the weight of responsibility upon his shoulders. Lines of concern and pain etched into his rough countenance, he stood outside his shipping container and gazed up at the sky, as though seeking a brighter, more hopeful tomorrow.

  On 23 May, eleven days after the ambush on Malibu Road, the first confirmed news of the missing men reached 4/31st headquarters.