Open Chains

by D. F. Bailey

  Then with a turn of the page, everything changed. The impressionistic sketches switched to graphic descriptions. The narrative became frontline journalism, where the author captures vital data and actions, precise quotations, head-counts. In total there were only five diary entries pertinent to the mass executions and serial murders. But the details were riveting. The first was dated February 7, 2004. The location read, Mosul / Baghdad.

  ※

  Yesterday, around 2100 hours we’d disarmed fifteen prisoners, most of them wearing Iraqi soldiers uniforms. But some not. We called air transport and once the Chinook helicopter touched down it took us maybe twenty minutes to secure the prisoners and load them into the chopper. That meant zap-strapping their wrists behind their backs and one-by-one easing them onto the deck through the rear loading ramp. Once we had them inside, Tony Turino and I had to get them to squat down on the deck floor in two lines. There were fifteen of them, so that meant two rows, one eight men long, the other seven.

  Deacon Brodie, the 31st Airborne Assault Captain was on board for the mission that night. Famous for being a stickler, Brodie checked the zap straps on each of the prisoners before he ok’ed liftoff. He called them hajjis, which wasn’t true since most of these men wore standard Iraq army uniforms.

  By the time the chopper cleared the dust, it was well past 2200 hours. The sky was overcast and the pilot, Dick VanHeussen — Dutch — had no light to navigate by. The following day, he told me that we were flying at about 200 meters altitude when he saw two flashes skim past the chopper. He figured they were shoulder-fired RPGs. One arced left, one to the right. Both near misses. Then the heavy gun fire hit us. Just as he was climbing for more altitude, I heard at least twenty pings as the ordnance penetrated the fuselage.

  That must have been when the co-pilot, Molson, took a hit through his throat. Dutch said Molson never got out a word. His Adam’s apple was torn away and he just slumped forward, strapped into the co-pilot’s chair. That’s when Captain Brodie climbed into the cockpit. Five minutes later, the horror show began.

  That next afternoon, Dutch also told me the fuel tanks had been punctured by the ground fire. He’d told Brodie that they’d have to touch down, unload the POWs, keep them under guard and wait for relief from another chopper.

  “What if we reduce the payload?” Brodie asked.

  Dutch wasn't sure what that meant, but he told Brodie we’d need to ditch about half the load to make any difference.

  Brodie didn’t wait for another word. We were all still huddled in the loading deck when we saw him stumble out of the cockpit and make his way along the deck to the loading ramp. He secured a line to his waist and tugged a pair of gloves over his hands. He grabbed Sinclair by the sleeve, dragged him to the ramp lock to help him. Once the ramp jawed open, the noise from the chopper was unbelievable, but that didn’t stop Brodie. Just the opposite.

  The look on his face when he approached the first man next to the door showed something I'd never seen before. A mix of determination and hatred. Or maybe it was the sort of anger you get when you confront a mission you’ve been putting off for a long time. Now that the time had come to accept it, the job twisted your jaw to one side and you know you have to push ahead and damn the consequences.

  Brodie pulled the first man by his elbow and yanked him up to his feet. The look of surprise on the soldier’s face is what I remember. A mix of bewilderment and maybe disbelief as Brodie pushed him along the deck. Then Brodie paused, right there on the lip of the open ramp. He took a minute, maybe more, to stare into the prisoner’s eyes. It was as though he had to reassure them both that what was about to happen had been planned a long time ago. Foretold. That’s what the hajjis believed, Brodie once said. They believed that “everything is written.” By that he meant a specific fate is assigned to each one of us. And as he grabbed the shirt of the man in front of him, I could see the look on Brodie. An expression that said he was here now, in this place and time, to dispatch the fate that awaited every fighter captured that day.

  Then he pushed the first man out the open door into the ink of night. Into the screaming noise of the chopper’s blades whirling above us. One-by-one, he dragged the other fourteen soldiers to the door and pitched them to their deaths on the desert below. Some of them put up a struggle, grappling on the deck floor, swinging their feet as if they might be able to trip Brodie as he hauled them to the doorway. Others offered no resistance at all. Maybe some of them, you could see their look of surrender, just wanted it over and done with.

  As the executions continued, I looked at Turino and Chernovski, Rousseau, Cottrell — but all the men sat there just like me. Frozen in place, watching the horror play out as if it was on TV. There was nothing you could do to stop the show, no way to change the channel or even turn the whole goddamn thing off. No, it went on until the last Iraqi POW had been thrown to his death. Tossed out like bags of trash.

  When it was over you could see the exhaustion on Brodie's face. The sweat poured from his forehead over his eyebrows. Somehow he’d torn the sleeve on his shirt. When it was finished he put the ramp door back into the closed position and locked it tight. He uncinched the cable from his waist. Then he turned to us, tugging the gloves from each hand. His mouth turned with a strange smile that exposed his bottom teeth.

  For the first time in my life, I knew I’d seen the face of a living, breathing monster.

  ※

  February 8, 2004.

  This afternoon Dutch told me that Captain Brodie ordered him to write up the damage report on the chopper the night we’d touched down.

  As soon as the Chinook was secured on the pad at BIA and the co-pilot’s body had been strapped to a stretcher and wheeled to the waiting ambulance, Brodie pulled VanHeussen aside.

  “Listen, Dutch, I want you to measure the remaining fuel supply. Not the maintenance crew. You. Got that?”

  “That would be irregular, sir.”

  “I know it’s irregular, that’s why I’m making it an order. I want you to take a measure of the current fuel supply and record it in the flight log. Also take detailed photos of any damage to the fuel supply lines and tanks. Then report back to me when you’ve made the fuel calculation and damage assessments. Understood?”

  “Yessir.” Dutch gave Brodie a curt salute and wheeled back toward the chopper.

  Twenty minutes later, Dutch found Captain Brodie in the officers mess drinking coffee.

  “Just under half a gallon left, sir,” he said. He went on to suggest they’d missed a close call. He clicked on the series of images he’d captured on the camera and passed them to Brodie. “You can see there, and right here, where the tank’s been shot through seven times.”

  “What about the reserve tank?”

  “That was the reserve. We were flying on reserve the last half hour. The main tank completely bled out.”

  Brodie considered this. “What would’ve happened if we hadn't jettisoned the extra weight?”

  A puzzled look crossed Dutch’s face. “Sir?”

  “After we got shot up. If we didn’t drop the ballast?”

  Dutch shrugged as if the answer was obvious. “Forced landing. In the middle of God-knows-where.”

  Brodie smiled at that. Dutch said that as far as Brodie was concerned, the entire country of Iraq was the epicenter of the stone age. “All right. Good job. Write your report based on everything you've just told me. Download those images and include them on the first page. When you wrap up, bring the report to me before you sign it off. Can you get it to me by 0900?”

  Dutch said that was a stretch. He was pressed for time as it was, and exhausted by the night’s action.

  “I’d have to skip tonight’s mission debrief, sir.”

  “Then skip the debrief. This report’s a priority. I’ll handle the debrief for you.”

  Again Dutch told him that would be irregular but Brodie pressed him.

  “You got that?” he said.

  “Yessir.”

 
Then Dutch described a long rant that Brodie took up. A few of us had heard about his tirades and I’d personally caught the tail-end of one. Brodie said that given everything that went down that night, it was a successful mission. Sure, we had one dead and a CH-47 Chinook that required some repairs. But balance it against the fifteen hajjis dispatched to their just reward. Perhaps a tribe of virgins awaited them, Brodie mused to Dutch. He wondered how much longer the war could drag on. Given the fact that it was a battle of science against mass delusion, the war should have been won a month after the fall of Baghdad. Should have been. In his gut he knew what was missing. Since the defeat in the Vietnam War, America had gone soft. The country had lost the will to power. Now it was his job, Brodie's calling, to help restore our place in the world. To renew the American Century.

  To some it might seem like an impossible task, but Brodie knew that with enough like-minded people dedicated to the cause, Americans could achieve whatever they wanted. All he needed was two resources: opportunity and time. The first would emerge from his inner determination. The second was a gift of fate.

  “Do you think we can count on you?” Brodie asked.

  “To do what, sir?”

  “To dedicate yourself to the American cause.”

  “Already am, sir,” Dutch said and gave Brodie a final salute as he left the officer’s mess.

  ※

  Feb. 25th, 2004.

  Dutch VanHeussen is dead. Since I’d been deployed on a mission north of Kirkuk the day Dutch was killed, I could only piece together what happened from Kelly, Spasky, and Sinclair. The three of them had driven with Dutch into Al-Karkh. “Just out for a scenic drive in the Humvee,” Kelly claimed. They stopped in a local kafyh for some grilled chicken and tea and after listening to Kelly drone on about all his women back in Long Beach, Dutch waved his thumb and pinky in the air — hang loose style — and made his way to the latrine. Five minutes passed. Then ten. At that point, Sinclair went to look for Dutch. No sign of the guy. Not in the latrine, the back alley, or anywhere near the entrance to the building.

  “It was as if some aliens just beamed him up,” Sinclair told me.

  After another thirty minutes passed, the guys suspected the worst. They contacted the base. Had Dutch found his way back on his own? No sign of him. They checked in Dutch’s favorite hangouts. Nothing. When they reported to the unit lieutenant, the Military Police were brought in.

  Jeremiah Rickets, a sergeant in the local MP detail led the investigation. J.R., as everyone called him. Later that day J.R.’s report came in that Dutch had been found in a back alley about two kilometers from the kafyh in Al-Karkh. One shot to the back of his head. His wrists still bound with zap straps, his mouth sealed with duct tape. The murder sent a chill through everyone on the base. Everyone’s talking about it. Personally, I have to admit, it’s shaken me right down to my bones.

  Although VanHeussen was born in Iowa and didn’t speak a word of Dutch, the nickname brought a smile to his lips. That’s the way I think of him. Smiling. I hope he stays that way.

  ※

  March 18, 2004.

  Yesterday word came in that Alan Rousseau and Larry Cottrell were killed in action. An IED took them both out while they were driving from the base out to Abu Ghraib. Both good guys. The kind you hoped would make it through. Cottrell planned on getting his electrician’s ticket when he got back to Pittsburgh. Said he’d join up with his cousin’s contracting company. Rousseau didn’t seem to have a lot of plans, but you knew he’d be okay. Find a good place somewhere in this life. Well, not this time. Not ever.

  But the real trouble is that they’re two more dead from Brodie's CH-47 Chinook. Tony Turino’s gone bonkers about it. Just as he was about to talk to the lieutenant, we heard that Brodie himself nominated Cottrell and Rousseau for posthumous Distinguished Service Crosses when he heard they were killed in action. That knocked a plank out from under Tony, but he explained it away with the idea that Brodie is completely psycho. “Putting the two guys you murdered up for military crosses is the perfect psycho cover-up,” he said.

  Crazy as he is, I can’t say I disagree with Turino.

  ※

  April 10, 2004.

  More trouble brewing. John Sinclair — one of the men with Dutch the day he was shot, and one of the guys on the CH-47 — has gone missing. The fact that his disappearance is just a month after Rousseau and Cottrell died, is beginning to rattle everyone. The trouble with Sinclair’s case is all the unknowns. Was he abducted and shot like Dutch? Or simply gone AWOL? Who’d seen him last? No one seems able to put their finger on any details.

  Tonight, Tony Turino sat with me for a good hour recalling their last conversation. Apparently Sinclair couldn’t stop complaining about the fight in Iraq. Hated everything about it. The heat. The food. The poverty. The laughable search for weapons of mass destruction. “We’ve been duped, Sinclair said, and we’re dyin’ in a fuckin’ fake war.”

  Tony says he just laughed at that, but Sinclair tipped his head to one side as if to say, mark my words — this thing is going to kill us all. Tony says he remembers the conversation clear as a bell.

  After Sinclair failed to return to the base, after his bunk was turned over, all his possessions confiscated — at that point — Tony himself couldn’t stop talking about Sinclair's connection to Dutch, Cottrell and Rousseau. All of them on the same chopper when Brodie tossed the hajjis out the open door. Dutch had filed the flight report, Brodie had handled the mission debrief. And whatever Brodie told Command that night was anyone’s guess.

  The open chains linking one death after another to Captain Brodie is now getting longer and longer. I can see it clear as a bell. Brodie murdered all three of them. He’s both a mass murderer and serial killer. It’s making Tony Turino totally paranoid. And I’m getting close to losing it too.

  ※

  Finch set the diary aside and gazed out the window of his writing loft onto Alta Street. Kinsella’s so-called “open chains” of murders had grown much longer since his journal entry on April 10, 2004. Finch took out his pen and notepad and jotted down the series of murders in sequence:

  6 Feb. 2004 — 15 Iraq soldiers (some possibly civilians) executed by Capt. Deacon Brodie somewhere between Mosul and Baghdad. Witnessed by seven soldiers from 101st Combat Aviation Brigade: John Sinclair, Larry Cottrell, Alan Rousseau, Frank Chernovski, Joey Kinsella, Tony Turino, Michael Jahnke

  Feb. 25th, 2004, Al-Karkh — Dutch VanHeussen murdered

  March 18, 2004, Baghdad / Abu Graib — Larry Cottrell & Alan Rousseau, killed in action (roadside IED)

  April 10, 2004, Baghdad — John Sinclair, missing or AWOL

  Aug. 7, 2019, Detroit — Frank Chernovski, killed in mugging

  Oct. 22, 2019, outside Bakersfield — Joey Kinsella, died in motorcycle accident

  Nov. 3, 2019, Mayne Island — Tony Turino, murdered on Bennett Point

  He studied the list and considered adding one more name to the catalog: Nov 4, 2019, Mayne Island — Nine. Then he dismissed the idea, knowing that he should never make a written reference to the killer who’d tried to murder him and Eve the day after Tony Turino’s death. Add him, then add your own name to the list, he whispered to himself.

  He closed his eyes and let the bleak memory of the events of March 18, 2004, slip back into his mind. Depending on the day, the drive from Baghdad out to Abu Ghraib usually took about an hour in a Humvee. Although the route was patrolled daily, it had a reputation for its variety of hazards. The worst booby-trap you could face was from an improvised explosive device embedded in the corpse of a dead animal or an abandoned vehicle blocking the road. Or sometimes the IED was buried just under the road surface — invisible to all but the most wary eyes. Invariably, the IED was triggered by a cell phone from a fighter watching the traffic from an outpost just out of sight. Then, BOOM. In a flash, you’re either maimed for life or vaporized. The mutilated victims often claimed that death was the better option.

  Following t
he blast, two or three fighters descended on the target to finish off the survivors with AK-47s. The brilliance of these tactics lay in their simplicity. The IED attacks didn’t require many men, and only one of them needed the basic technical training to assemble and deploy the bomb. Each attack required very little money and very little risk. And every successful hit became a celebrated triumph that inspired similar attacks by new recruits.

  On the morning of March 18 Alan Rousseau and Larry Cottrell were added to the casualty list. They’d been assigned to accompany Captain Jeffries and Finch from the base in Baghdad out to Abu Ghraib. Finch was at the wheel when the IED blast rolled the Humvee upside down and onto its side. Jeffries was wounded, his arm severed by the Humvee door as it blew off. Finch had been thrown free through the open door, stunned but not injured. When the Iraqis descended on them, Finch heard the AK-47s firing from the far side of the vehicle. Rousseau was hit three times, Cottrell six. The brief skirmish gave Finch enough time to draw his Beretta M9 pistol. When the Iraqis rounded the front bumper of the overturned Humvee, Finch was ready. He fired two shots into each of them. Both men dropped where they stood.

  Finch tried to find a pulse on Rousseau and Cottrell. Nothing. Then he applied a tourniquet to the biceps above Jeffries’s stump. A shot of morphine brought the Captain’s moaning under control. Then Finch called the attack into the base in Abu. He knew a Medevac unit would be at his side within ten minutes. While he waited, he examined the two Iraqis lying side by side where he’d shot them. Neither wore an Iraqi Army uniform or bore any military insignia. They were dressed in the desert robes that everyone called hajjis. Then he noticed the watches. So strange, he thought. He leaned over and turned the arm on the first man. A Rolex Cosmograph Daytona was strapped to his wrist. The second man sported the same watch. Identical. Both enormously expensive, especially in the war-torn Middle East.