Black Hearts: One Platoon's Descent into Madness in Iraq's Triangle of Death Read online

  For my mother and father

  In Memory Of:

  America’s service members killed in action during the Iraq War, especially the men of 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment/2nd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division deployed to Mahmudiyah, Yusufiyah, and Lutufiyah, Iraq, 2005–2006.

  First Lieutenant Garrison Avery, 23, Lincoln, Nebraska

  Specialist David Babineau, 25, Springfield, Massachusetts

  Specialist Ethan Biggers, 22, Beavercreek, Ohio

  First Lieutenant Benjamin Britt, 24, Wheeler, Texas

  Specialist Marlon Bustamante, 25, Corona, New York

  Sergeant Kenith Casica, 32, Virginia Beach, Virginia

  Staff Sergeant Jason Fegler, 24, Virginia Beach, Virginia

  Sergeant Matthew Hunter, 31, Valley Grove, West Virginia

  Private First Class Brian Kubik, 20, Harker Heights, Texas

  Specialist William Lopez-Feliciano, 33, Quebradillas, Puerto Rico

  Private First Class Tyler MacKenzie, 20, Evans, Colorado

  Staff Sergeant Johnnie Mason, 32, Rio Vista, Texas

  Private First Class Kristian Menchaca, 23, San Marcos, Texas

  Specialist Joshua Munger, 22, Maysville, Missouri

  Staff Sergeant Travis Nelson, 41, Anniston, Alabama

  Specialist Anthony “Chad” Owens, 21, Conway, South Carolina

  Captain Blake Russell, 35, Fort Worth, Texas

  Specialist Benjamin Smith, 21, Hudson, Wisconsin

  Private First Class Thomas Tucker, 25, Madras, Oregon

  Private First Class Caesar Viglienzone, 21, Santa Rosa, California

  Specialist Andrew Waits, 23, Waterford, Michigan

  The innocent victims of the Iraq War, especially the Rashid al-Janabi family, Yusufiyah, Iraq. March 12, 2006.

  Qassim Hamzah Rashid al-Janabi

  Fakhriah Taha Mahsin Moussa al-Janabi

  Abeer Qassim Hamzah Rashid al-Janabi

  Hadeel Qassim Hamzah Rashid al-Janabi

  Compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say when we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful. In any case, good or bad, it reminds us that life is like a gladiators’ arena for the soul and so we can feel strengthened by those who endure, and feel awe and pity for those who do not.

  —Norman Mailer

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  PRELUDE: March 12, 2006

  SUMMER 2005

  1: “We’ve Got to Get South Baghdad Under Control”

  2: The Kunk Gun

  OCTOBER 2005

  3: “This Is Now the Most Dangerous Place in Iraq”

  4: Relief in Place, Transfer of Authority

  5: 1st Platoon at the JS Bridge

  6: Contact

  NOVEMBER 2005

  7: Route Sportster and Bradley Bridge

  8: Communication Breakdowns

  9: The Mean Squad

  10: “Soldiers Are Not Stupid”

  DECEMBER 2005

  11: Nelson and Casica

  12: “It Is Fucking Pointless”

  13: Britt and Lopez

  14: Leadership Shake-up

  JANUARY 2006

  15: Gallagher

  Photo Insert

  FEBRUARY 2006

  16: February 1

  17: Fenlason Arrives

  MARCH 2006

  18: Back to the TCPs

  19: The Mayor of Mullah Fayyad

  20: The Janabis

  21: Twenty-one Days

  APRIL-JUNE 2006

  22: “We Had Turned a Corner”

  23: The Alamo

  24: Dilemma and Discovery

  25: “Remember That Murder of That Iraqi Family?”

  JULY-SEPTEMBER 2006

  26: The Fight Goes On

  27: “This Was Life and Death Stuff”

  EPILOGUE: The Triangle of Death Today and Trials at Home

  POSTSCRIPT

  LIST OF CHARACTERS

  MILITARY UNITS AND RANKS

  ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  FOREWORD

  IN LATE SEPTEMBER 2008, CBS’s 60 Minutes aired a profile of U.S. Army general Ray Odierno, who, along with General David Petraeus, is credited with spearheading a new strategy that helped bring a dramatic decrease in violence to Iraq in 2007 and 2008. During that segment, he and correspondent Lesley Stahl walked around the marketplace of a town south of Baghdad called Mahmudiyah, one of the three corners of an area known as the Triangle of Death. As they walked and talked—neither, conspicuously, was wearing a helmet—Odierno told Stahl that the area was once occupied by just 1,000 U.S. soldiers, who coped with more than a hundred attacks against them and Iraqi civilians each week. Today, including Iraqi security forces, Odierno said, the region is patrolled by 30,000 men and experiences only two attacks per week. (That comparatively low level of violence held well into late 2009.)

  This book is about the soldiers deployed to that area back when the Triangle of Death lived up to its name, when it was arguably the country’s most dangerous region, at arguably its most dangerous time.

  I first became interested in 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division just after June 16, 2006. Working as Time magazine’s Tokyo bureau chief, I read a news report about three soldiers who had been overrun by insurgents at a remote checkpoint just southwest of Mahmudiyah. One trooper was dead on the scene and two were missing, presumed taken hostage. It was a gut-wrenching story, inviting horrible thoughts about what torture and desecration terrorists could inflict on captive soldiers. News of the search played out over the next few days, and on the 19th, the bodies were found, indeed mutilated, beheaded, burned, and booby-trapped with explosives.

  About two weeks after that, another story from Iraq caught my eye. Four U.S. soldiers had been implicated in the March 2006 rape of a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl, killing her, her parents, and her six-year-old sister. The crime was horrific and cold-blooded. The fourteen-year-old had been triply defiled: raped, murdered, and burned to a blackened char. The soldiers’ unit: 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. Because I followed both stories somewhat distractedly at first, it took a while for me to piece together that the accused were not just from the same company as the soldiers who’d been ambushed several weeks prior but from the very same platoon: 1st Platoon, Bravo Company.

  Two of the most notorious events from the war had flooded the headlines within days of each other, and they had happened within the same circle of approximately thirty-five men. What could possibly have been going on in that platoon? Were the two events related? As I was ruminating about such things, I got a call from Captain James Culp, a former infantry sergeant turned lawyer who was the Army’s senior defense counsel at Camp Victory in Baghdad. He was a source for a story I had worked on a couple years back and he had since become a friend.

  He phoned to tell me that he had been assigned to defend one of the soldiers accused of the rape-murders, and he implored me to look into Bravo Company, “if not for the sake of my client,” he said, “then for the sake of the other guys in Bravo.” He told me that he had been down to Mahmudiyah several times examining the crime scene and interviewing dozens of members of the company. He finished that first call with a chilling assessment. “America has no idea what is going on with this war,” he
said. “I’m only twenty miles away, and most of the people on Victory have no idea how bloody the fight is down there. What that company is going through, it would turn your hair white.”

  Intrigued by what Culp told me, I tracked the trials of the accused soldiers as they wended their way to court over the next three years, either attending in person or reading the court transcripts. I contacted several men from 1st Platoon, to see if they were willing to talk. Surprisingly, they were. Despondent over being judged for the actions of a criminal few in their midst, they were eager to share their stories. The tales they told were raw and harrowing. They described for me the devastating losses they had suffered (seven dead in their platoon alone), the nearly daily roadside bombs called IEDs (improvised explosive devices) they had experienced, the frequent firefights they had fought, their belief that the chain of command had abandoned them, and the medical and psychological problems they were coping with to this day.

  They were generous with their time, unvarnished in their honesty. They suggested I widen my scope, arguing that I could not properly understand the crime and the abduction if I did not understand their whole deployment, and I could not understand 1st Platoon if I did not understand 2nd and 3rd Platoons, who had labored under exactly the same conditions but who had come home with far fewer losses and their sense of brotherhood and accomplishment more intact. Check it out, they suggested, it might lead you someplace interesting about how the whole thing went down.

  I followed their advice, interviewing more soldiers from all of Bravo and requesting reams of documents through the Freedom of Information Act. Embedded with the Army in mid-2008, I traveled throughout 1st Battalion’s old area of operations in Iraq, speaking to as many locals as I could. I interviewed the immediate relatives of the murdered Iraqi family.

  Every opened door led to a new one. Most soldiers and officers I talked to offered to put me in touch with more. Some shared journals, letters and e-mails, photos, or classified reports and investigations. I interviewed scores more servicemen, crisscrossing the United States several times, and ultimately broadened my scope even further to encompass not just Bravo but, for context, the rest of 1st Battalion.

  The story of 1st Platoon’s 2005–2006 deployment to the Triangle of Death is both epic and tragic. It was an ill-starred tour, where nearly everything that could go wrong did, and a chain of events unfolded that seems inevitable and inexorable yet, in retrospect, also heartbreakingly preventable at literally dozens of junctures.

  To some degree, the travails of Bravo Company are a study of the tactical consequences that flow from a flawed strategy. Their tour was part of the final deployments before counterinsurgency theory and tactics took hold, before the surge of 2007, before the cease-fires initiated by Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army became more or less permanent, before the Sons of Iraq program that paid insurgents to stop fighting Americans and start taking responsibility for their own neighborhood safety.

  Virtually ignored by military planners before the summer of 2005, the 330-square-mile region south of Baghdad that encompassed the Triangle of Death had become one of the most restive hotbeds of insurgency in the country, a battleground of the incipient civil war between Sunnis and Shi’ites, as well as a way station for terrorists of every allegiance ferrying men, weapons, and money into the capital.

  With far fewer troops and resources than were necessary for the job, the 1-502nd Infantry Regiment was flung out there with orders, essentially, to save the day. A light infantry battalion of about 700 men, the 1-502nd was assigned to root out insurgent strongholds, promote social and municipal revival, and train the local Iraqi Army battalions into a competent fighting force.

  It was a mission easy to encapsulate, but depressingly difficult to achieve. There was no coherent strategy for how they were supposed to accomplish these feats. There was confusion about whether they should emphasize hunting and killing insurgents or winning the support of the people who were providing both passive and active assistance to the terrorists. This confusion flowed from the Pentagon, through the battalion’s chain of command, all the way down to the soldiers. The 1-502nd arrived when America’s prospects in the country were dim, and, despite some successes in certain areas, the situation was dispiritingly bleaker when they left, with insurgent attacks on the rise and the country threatening to come apart entirely.

  The Triangle of Death was a meat grinder, churning out daily doses of carnage. During their year-long deployment, soldiers from the battalion either found or got hit by nearly nine hundred roadside IEDs. They were shelled or mortared almost every day and took fire from rifles, machine guns, or rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) nearly every other day. Twenty-one men from the battalion were killed and scores more were wounded badly enough to be evacuated home.

  The gore was unrelenting, not just for soldiers but also for civilians. Including Iraqi locals, just one of the battalion’s three bases treated an average of three or four trauma cases each day. Every soldier has stories of getting hit by IEDs. Many could tell of getting hit by several IED explosions in one day. The unrelenting combat wore on their psychological health. More than 40 percent of the battalion were treated for mental or emotional anxiety while in country, and many have since been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury, or both.

  Bravo was particularly hard-hit. Within Bravo’s first ninety days in theater, all three of its platoon leaders, its first sergeant, a squad leader, and a team leader (in addition to several riflemen) had been wiped from the battlefield by death or injury. For 1st Battalion executive officer Major Fred Wintrich, the challenge doesn’t get any starker: “How do you reseed a company with almost all of its top leadership while in a combat zone? That was the task.” By the end of the deployment, 51 of Bravo’s approximately 135 soldiers had been killed, wounded, or moved to another unit.

  Human organizations are flawed because humans are flawed. Even with the best intentions, men make errors in judgment and initiate courses of action that are counterproductive to their self-interest or the completion of the mission. In a combat zone, ranks as low as staff sergeants make dozens of decisions every day, each with a direct impact on the potential safety and well-being of their men. A company commander or a battalion commander may make hundreds of such decisions a day. Fortunately, in complex environments, individual errors or even long chains of mistakes can often be corrected or they simply dissipate before they cause any adverse effect. Decisions from different people about the same goal either negate or reinforce each other, and, it is hoped, the preponderance of these heaped-together decisions pushes the task toward completion rather than failure. But sometimes, in the permutations of millions of decisions from thousands of actors converging on a battlefield over a period of weeks or even months, a singular combination comes together to unlock something abhorrent. These are what are known, in retrospect, as disasters waiting to happen.

  March 12, 2006, was one such disaster. Nothing can absolve James Barker, Paul Cortez, Steven Green, and Jesse Spielman from the personal responsibility that is theirs, and theirs alone, for the rape of Abeer Qassim Hamzah Rashid al-Janabi, her vicious murder, and the wanton destruction of her family. It is one of the most nefarious war crimes known to be perpetrated by U.S. soldiers in any era—singularly heinous not just for its savagery but also because it was so calculated, premeditated, and methodical. But leading up to that day, a litany of miscommunications, organizational snafus, lapses in leadership, and ignored warning signs up and down the chain of command all contributed to the creation of an environment where it was possible for such a crime to take place.

  I have sympathy for the many men of Bravo who simply want this episode to go away, who saw my inquiries as a continuation of a nightmare from which they have not been allowed to wake. Several times one or the other of them remarked to me, “No matter how screwed up the chain of command was, how strung out the men were, and how many risks the unit was taking, it was not so different from what happ
ens all the time in the Army, and if March 12 hadn’t happened, you wouldn’t be here now, years later, in my living room, dredging it all up again.” This is undoubtedly true, but there is a circularity to this logic: “If something exceptional hadn’t taken place, you wouldn’t find it exceptional.” When the final variables clicked into place—an unsupervised foursome of men drunk and in a murderous mood on the afternoon of March 12—the unexceptional became exceptional, and the exceptional became history.

  On several levels, the story of Bravo is timeless and could emerge from any war. It is about the heroic and horrible things that men do under the extreme stresses of combat. It is about men who fight despite their fear, who violently extinguish other people’s lives, who watch the best friends they will ever have die before their eyes, who make decisions under conditions that most people can barely conceive of, who butt heads with their superiors and their subordinates, and who love some of their closest comrades in arms as intensely as they do any blood relative.

  But Bravo’s story is also inseparable from the buildup to March 12, the crimes committed that afternoon, and their aftermath, which still reverberate today. It is a story about how fragile the values that the U.S. military, and all Americans, consider bedrock really are, how easily morals can be defiled, integrity abandoned, character undone.

  Not surprisingly, this deployment has produced deep, irreconcilable rifts between many of the men who served together. Especially within Bravo Company, and especially within 1st Platoon, the anger and bitterness that many of the men feel is difficult to overstate. When the abduction and the rape-murders became public in such close succession, the unit descended into a frenzy of finger-pointing. Seemingly everyone tried to pin a single, unified blame on a select few (and who was blamed depended on who was doing the blaming) while scrambling to absolve himself completely.

  I had thought that the Army way was for everyone to accept a small piece of the responsibility for any debacle truly too big to be of any one person’s making and spread the blame to all parties, which would not only make it easier for everyone to survive professionally but, perhaps more important, also make the fiasco something that the Army could study and learn from. But the ordeal generated so much bile and rancor for so many people that the Army seems more interested in forgetting about the tragedy entirely than in ensuring it never happens again.