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

by Charles W. Sasser

  An Iraqi farmer named Ali Abbas al-Fatlawi and some of his neighbors were looking for a lost goat on the outskirts of the little village of Musayyib a dozen miles or so south of FOB Inchon when they saw something large bobbing in the gentle current of the Euphrates River. Whatever it was had hung up in some reeds near the bank. Approaching it out of curiosity, they discovered the body of a big man clad in a U.S. military uniform.

  Using shepherd’s staffs, they pulled the partly decomposed corpse from the brown water. Two point-blank gunshot wounds punctured the face, with more gunshots visible in the left side of the abdomen. That the hands were not tied nor the eyes blindfolded, a common procedure found on executed men recovered in The Triangle, seemed to indicate that the man may have been fighting his captors when he had to be shot and tossed from a boat crossing the river. Al-Fatlawi notified the local Iraqi police.

  That afternoon, Captain John Gilbreath and First Platoon leader Lieutenant Springlace drove to Brigade at Mahmudiyah. A Graves Registration officer escorted them to a small room where a body lay on a table. He unzipped the bag to reveal the decomposing remains of what had once been a muscular young man. Not enough of the face remained to be sure, but Springlace recognized the distinctive tattoo on the man’s arm. He nodded, sighed deeply, and looked up.

  “It’s Joe Anzak,” he said. “Damn them all to hell.”

  SIXTY-FIVE

  Something astonishing began to happen in the month following the DUST-WUN incident, a remarkable change that the Joes on Malibu Road found hard to explain. Sure, they had started to make progress in winning the people away from the homicidal maniacs in their midst, but nothing like the sudden acceleration that occurred now. Not a single IED had ruined anyone’s day along the entire length of the road since 12 May.

  One afternoon, Lieutenant John Dudish and Sergeant Ronnie Montgomery dashed out of the Company TOC at Inchon to where Second Platoon was catching a breather smoking ’n joking around their trucks in the yard. Second was acting as Company QRF for the week.

  “Load ’em up. Move ’em out.”

  Some local farmers had spotted a group of Jihadists at a weapons cache along a drainage canal near Kharghouli. Far from remaining pacifist observers, the farmers had taken matters in their own hands and chased off the bad guys with scythes, farm tools, and legally owned AK-47s. When American soldiers arrived, the angry farmers were guarding the site and had spread a fluorescent marking cloth to alert U.S. helicopters that they were not hostile.

  The interpreter grinned. “They are—how do you say it?—fed up and pissed off.”

  The cache contained one of the largest repositories of enemy ordnance ever recovered in The Triangle: over 200 57mm rockets; fifteen 82mm rockets; eight 120mm rockets; bags of homemade explosives; and a 5.56 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW) that had been issued to Specialist Alex Jimenez before his capture. Although most of the rockets and mortars found were unsuitable for firing as intended, they made excellent IEDs.

  A few days later, Second Platoon was on its way by four-vehicle convoy from 152 to a rural village in the direction of al Taqa to check on a tip that a terrorist named Maloof might be hiding out there. That was something else that was changing: ordinary Iraqis were coming forward in increasing numbers to inform on insurgents.

  It was a true scorcher of a desert midday, when most Iraqis liked to find someplace cool to sleep off the heat. Almost no one was out and about. The convoy sped into the S-curve where the attack against the crater watch had occurred. By now, most of the wreckage had been removed. Little remained to mark the site other than a single crude wooden cross some of the Joes had tapped into the ground roadside.

  Not everyone, it seemed, was trying to escape the heat. Cruising out of the curve, the soldiers saw several locals chasing another man down the middle of the road. They were armed with sticks, switches, and clubs and were whaling hell out of their victim at every step. Wearing a dished turban, dirty gray robe over baggy trousers and combat boots, the guy was running as fast as he could with his head down and his shoulders bunched against the merciless beating he was receiving. Apparently, it was the Iraqi version of being tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail.

  Chiva Lares driving the lead vehicle keyed his mike. “L.T., you getting a load of this?”

  “Roger that,” Lieutenant Dudish responded. “Pull up. Let’s see what’s going on.”

  The American trucks broke up the ruckus. The victim kept going, bounding and leaping off the road and into a field without so much as casting a backwards glance. His sweating persecutors gathered around Dudish and Montgomery and an IA interpreter.

  “They say he is al-Qaeda and does not belong in this community,” the terp translated. “They are chasing him away.”

  Montgomery looked at Lieutenant Dudish. They looked at the hajji who was doing a credible impersonation of the Road Runner on his way out of the country as fast as he could go. Montgomery gave his platoon leader a sly grin before turning to the interpreter.

  “Tell them to carry on,” he said. The Americans climbed into their trucks and left.

  These days, a convoy could drive the length of Malibu Road without encountering anything more hazardous than an old IED scar on what, only a few short weeks ago, had been the most dangerous strip of highway in the world. Sammy Rhodes and Brandon Gray stood outside the two-story house at Inchon smoking cigarettes. The conversation turned to their missing comrades.

  “I can’t imagine what they must be going through if they’re still alive,” Rhodes said. “We can’t leave them behind, we just can’t.”

  They could see through the gate and past the concrete blast walls a length of the now-peaceful road that ran by. The two Joes went silent for a long time, contemplating the road and its history they had endured.

  “We paid for that road in blood,” Rhodes said.

  The United States had put up a $200,000 reward for information on the whereabouts of Fouty and Jimenez. That was a lot of money in Iraq, roughly equivalent to making the recipient a millionaire. However, the prospect of riches failed to account for the overwhelming swell of helpfulness in the local population after DUSTWUN. Ironically, it took a major incident and loss of life to bring about that change.

  Kidnapping the Americans may have been the worst mistake insurgents could have made in The Triangle of Death. Military presence in the AO became intense, forcing the bad guys to get out of Dodge and thereby provide a breathing spell for the population to cooperate with the U.S. to make sure the Jihadists stayed out. The true turning point in the war, Lieutenant Colonel Infanti believed, or at least in his battalion’s part of the war, began when his companies occupied their AOs and proved they were there to stay. DUSTWUN was the catalyst that capped off everything the Americans were trying to accomplish, the DUSTWUN search a test of how far the good Iraqis were willing to go to bring peace and stability to their country.

  So far, they seemed to be passing the test. In a savage tribal land of blood feuds and revenge pacts, many Iraqis were becoming infatuated with the American military not only for its fighting abilities but also for its patience and restraint in its ongoing efforts to help Iraq recover from decades of tyranny and terrorism. Until Operation Iraqi Freedom, the country had languished for almost six decades under a series of megalomaniac tyrants. Although the popular press back in the United States failed to acknowledge it, U.S. soldiers and the Surge were changing the country at a fundamental level.

  There was still shooting and dying, but nothing like it was before. Instead of sneaking around at night to provide a tip or scrap of information, many locals now discovered the courage to openly and boldly come forward. People were turning in weapons caches in tribal areas that had formerly been a tight-lipped source of IEDs and munitions for terrorist attacks. Thanks to informants, six suspects from the crater watch had been caught and were being held at a U.S. military prison near the Baghdad airport.

  The insurgents were losing friends fast. It was a real coup for the
Americans when Khalil, a sheikh leader at the 109 Mosque, offered his militia to patrol the Malibu Road area. Wearing reflective vests and carrying clubs and sticks, with which they presumably beat any stranger who didn’t belong in the community, they set up Concerned Citizens Checkpoints throughout The Triangle. Even the 1920s Revolutionary Brigade, which had opposed the American “invaders” in the beginning, now turned against the insurgents and became Concerned Citizens. Men who only weeks before were accepting al-Qaeda cash to plant IEDs or snipe at American soldiers now patrolled the roads and villages armed with clubs and wearing their badges of authority—reflective vests.

  At first, the Joes of Delta Company were still suspicious of their new allies, but they began to come around when the number of attacks against them fell to almost zero. Even Crazy Legs vanished, never to be seen again.

  “They aren’t insurgents anymore,” Corporal Mayhem quipped of their new friends. “They’re consurgents.”

  The name stuck.

  In spite of the metamorphosis, however, the search for Byron Fouty and Alex Jimenez continued to encounter a frustrating number of dead ends.

  On 4 June, a video smuggled out by the so-called Islamic State of Iraq found its way to a terrorist website and, naturally, to Al Jazeera TV. The eleven-minute tape showed armed, hooded men allegedly planning the pre-dawn strike against the crater watch. Following a display of sketches, maps, and schematics of the ambush came shots of the missing soldiers’ military-issued IDs, credit cards bearing their names, and a small golden cross thought to have belonged to Jimenez.

  The soldiers were not shown. An unidentified voice claimed that the two abducted GIs were dead. “Their end will be underground, Allah willing,” the voice said in a cold tone. “The bodies will not be returned to their families because you refused to deliver the bodies of our killed people.”

  No matter Lieutenant Colonel Infanti’s vow of “no soldier left behind,” many Joes in Delta began to fear they would have to do the unthinkable when their tour of duty ended after October: return home without two of their own.

  “I’m actually scared to go home,” lamented Specialist Shaun Gopaul, whose wife Caridad was as close to Jimenez’ wife as Gopaul and Jimenez were to each other. “How can I look her in the face? What am I supposed to say? I was just down the road when it happened.”

  At Lieutenant Colonel Infanti’s Battalion TOC in Yusufiyah, only ten miles from where the assault occurred, color photos of the two MIAs were tacked to a board at his desk. The edges of the pictures were starting to curl. Someone had scrawled an inscription at the top of Jimenez’ likeness: Never give up. We will find you. Keep fighting.

  SIXTY-SIX

  Roberta Infanti and all six children were waiting for Lieutenant Colonel Infanti when he stepped off the Freedom Bird in Virginia in June 2007 on a short leave home to attend his son’s high-school graduation. His nine-year-old daughter threw herself into his arms and hugged him so tightly he thought she would never let him go. He had departed Iraq with reluctance. The hunt for his two missing soldiers continued. In his pocket he carried casualty cards bearing their names.

  Major Mark Manns, his XO, could handle anything that came up during the CO’s short absence. The war in his AO had quieted down until crime and evil in The Triangle, it seemed, were no worse than a wild Saturday night in New York City or Detroit. In fact, he felt as safe these days driving down Malibu Road where he had been blown up and wounded only months ago as he would have felt walking alone at night in Times Square.

  He returned home to a nation even more divided and at war with itself than when the 2nd BCT had left on deployment the previous August. The next year was election year, in which Americans would choose a new President and quite probably a new direction. The campaigns for nomination were already loud, strident, partisan, and confrontational, in many ways more savage than the fighting in Iraq.

  A military officer owed it to his nation, to his commander-in-chief, and to his uniform to remain apolitical and outside the process, loyal to his country no matter what it demanded of him. That didn’t mean he wasn’t allowed to form personal opinions and to express them. Having a few days’ liberty to reflect on the “Big Picture” of what was happening to the United States of America while he was away left Infanti feeling discouraged and disgusted.

  Even discounting a terrorist connection, U.S. goals to remove a dangerous and murderous dictator from power and establish a base of freedom in the Middle East had been laudable ones. If these goals were met, history would record them as some of the world’s most notable accomplishments. The initial reaction to the war when it began in 2003 was immediate and positive. Middle Eastern dictators and strongmen warily watched and wondered how far the U.S. would go to create a free nation while they pondered their own fates if they continued to support Islamic terror against the West. Libya’s dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi suddenly announced he would end his nuclear program and establish closer diplomatic ties with the United States. The House of Saud broadened voting privileges in Saudi Arabia. Syria tried to break all ties with Iraqi insurgents. Even Iran stepped back to take a more cautious look at developments.

  Tragically, a certain amount of death and mutilation was the unavoidable cost of combat. Almost from the first day, pundits in the media began decrying the loss of life. Network newscasts flooded American living rooms with bombings and death, emphasizing U.S. failures and ignoring its successes, suggesting in the process that America was losing the war since its soldiers were taking hits. Politicians began calling for an exit strategy before the smoke had cleared from the initial blitz to Baghdad.

  Infanti knew from personal experience that America was winning in its effort to bring peace, economic liberty, and a freely elected representative government to Iraq. If the media and certain politicians hadn’t been so hell-bent on destroying President Bush’s administration, if they had truly got behind the nation in a non-partisan unity, chances were the war would have been over and won long before the 10th Mountain Division deployed to Iraq for the second time. The Arab world feared and respected a determined enemy.

  Islamic fascists watched and learned. It didn’t take them long to realize the U.S. was split, demoralized, less than determined, and as unlikely to stick this one out as it had in Vietnam or, for that matter, Somalia. They knew that if they could just maintain a steady stream of American soldier deaths while exploiting American misdeeds and atrocities, whether real or manufactured, the American people led by self-serving politicians and Western news outlets would eventually throw in the towel.

  “When people stand up for a political sound bite and say they support the troops but don’t support the war, I have questions,” Infanti responded to a news interview while he was home on leave. “Politicians are the ones that allowed what happened to go on. They’re the ones who authorized the President to go to war against Iraq. The question I would ask, not as a soldier, but as a citizen, is when did they change their minds? We’ve had 3,700 soldiers killed. Did they change their minds at 1,999, at 2,999? Or did they change their minds when a poll said the American people were losing support for the war. That’s the question I want to ask them: ‘Did you change your mind when a poll said you weren’t going to be re-elected?’ ”

  Would the next election encourage the Islamic radicals by revealing a lack of American resolve, a weakness to be exploited by those already planning their next terrorist attack on American soil? To cut and run at this crucial point, as so many political hacks were advocating if it would win them a few more votes, meant that everything American soldiers had achieved in Iraq would be thrown out like yesterday’s garbage. To have won the war, then abandoned it and the country’s people back to tyranny, was nothing more than a betrayal of sacrifices made by American soldiers like Chris Messer, Joe Given, Sergeant Connell, Courneya, Schober, Murphy, Fouty, Jimenez, Anzak, and all the others.

  Damn them! Damn the lily-livered politicians who would treat the lives of young soldiers as though they meant
nothing.

  The prospect of what the next election likely foretold broke Lieutenant Colonel Infanti’s heart, all the more so when he and his wife visited wounded and maimed soldiers from the 10th Mountain at Bethesda’s Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Here were young men who had given so much and were still willing to give in a cause they believed in. A twenty-year-old soldier who had lost most of one leg and part of his arm to an IED grinned at his former commander.

  “Sir, as soon as this arm gets better,” he said, “I’m ready to go back to work. I think I can operate a machine gun.”

  A sniper had shot another soldier in the leg, shattering it so that he could no longer straighten it. Units of the 2nd BCT had finally nailed the sniper, who was being paid 500,000 dinars a month, about $490, to take shots at American soldiers, with a bonus of another $490 for each hit.

  “It’s really a shame because he’s not getting any more money,” Infanti told the soldier. “He took three rounds in his chest from an Apache helicopter.”

  “Sir, what about our guys still missing from the 4/31st?”

  The greatest thing about American soldiers, Infanti once observed, “is that they will do whatever you ask them to do. They’ll go without food, without family, without a bed to sleep on other than the hard ground. They’ll shave out of a canteen cup and take a bath in a mud puddle. They’ll wear filthy clothes, get body sores, go without a break while they wait for the next bullet or the next explosion, waiting to die or waiting to get wounded, hoping that if they do get it their buddies won’t get it too. They always think of each other first before they think of themselves. If only the world were made up of more men like them.”

  All too soon, still limping, still in constant pain, Michael Infanti was on his way back to Iraq and his 4th Battalion. He had a job to finish. Two of his men were still missing.

  “I’m going to search until they kill me or they send me home,” he pledged. “That’s just the bottom line. And when I find them, I’m going to keep running down the guys who did it like they were dogs—until they kill me or send me home. The bad guys know I’m coming. And they’re going to put up a fight. And that’s okay.”