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

  Careers were ruined. Reputations tarnished. Medals withheld. Friendships broken. Prodigious resentments have festered because many men feel that blame was unfairly pushed down to the lower ranks and not shared by a higher command they believe was also culpable.

  This is true. The events surrounding Bravo Company were so complex and intertwined that to lay all responsibility not for the crime, but for creating an atmosphere where the crime could occur, at the feet of the few and relatively powerless, is the very definition of scapegoating. And to assert that the battalion command climate was anything other than utterly dysfunctional, or to declare that the soldiers of 1st Platoon were, at any point in the deployment, being effectively managed and led, is simply a whitewash. The Army failed 1st Platoon time and time again.

  It bears emphasizing that given the strain inherent in the eight and a half straight years it has been at war, the United States Army today is among the most-tested and best-behaved fighting forces in history. Rape and murder have been by-products of warfare since the beginning of time. Soldiers today, however, suffer mightily under the burden of “the Greatest Generation” mythos and the sanitized Hollywood depictions of World War II. There is a persistent and unfortunate sentiment among modern warriors that they will never live up to the nobility and bravery of those who saw off fascism. But anyone with a better than glossed-over understanding of “the Good War” knows that even Allied troops committed war crimes such as killing prisoners and raping foreign women at a rate that could be charitably called not infrequent. (One expert estimates that U.S. forces alone may have committed more than 18,000 rapes in the European theater between 1942 and 1945.) It is thus a testament to the control and discipline now exercised by the Army how rarely crimes such as this are actually committed today, and how swiftly the Army moves to investigate them.

  The rules of conduct have changed remarkably rapidly, as has society’s tolerance for military malfeasance. Although most Vietnam War movies are works of fiction, it is fascinating how often misconduct or outright felonies figure in them, sometimes just as subplots or secondary narrative devices. In contrast, today’s soldiers are required to be nothing less than warrior monks. Frequenting whorehouses and drinking anytime not on duty (and sometimes when on duty) in a war zone used to be tolerated, if not condoned, by the Army until just a few decades ago. Today, young men are expected to fight for months on end with zero sexual release and almost no social recreation whatsoever. The two-cans-of-beer-a-day ration is long gone, and even the possession of pornography is expressly forbidden.

  This is as it must be, of course. The story of Steven Green proves that in today’s media and propaganda environment, even one private with a rifle can affect the course of a war and dramatically harm America’s image abroad. Only one out-of-control platoon needs just one Steven Green and a handful of coconspirators to significantly damage the gains that a nearly thousand-strong battalion worked hard to achieve. That is why the manner that every last private is managed, every minute of every day, warrants scrutiny.

  Despite battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Tom Kunk’s insistence that he and his chain of command practiced what he incessantly calls “engaged leadership,” facts demonstrate that he and his senior leaders were woefully out of touch with the realities on the ground. Despite numerous warnings, Kunk and his subordinates were either unable or unwilling to acknowledge how dire Steven Green’s mental state was specifically, or how impaired 1st Platoon was generally. Kunk instead belittled 1st Platoon’s incapacity, told them they were wallowing in self-pity, and blamed them and their platoon-level leadership for all their problems, which, in turn, exacerbated their feelings of isolation and persecution and contributed to their downward spiral.

  Bravo Company commander Captain John Goodwin made several explicit requests for more troops in late 2005 and early 2006. Kunk denied them all, arguing alternately that the company had enough men but was using them inefficiently or that there were simply no troops available. Whether Kunk, or his boss, or his boss’s boss could find combat power to spare is debatable. Many senior leaders say it was impossible, there were no surplus troops anywhere in theater, and they insist that an extra platoon or company cannot be generated out of thin air. Perhaps so, but when the three Bravo soldiers were captured on June 16, 2006, 8,000 soldiers were somehow mustered and flooded the area in less than seventy-two hours.

  As I have met and interviewed most of the soldiers and officers involved in the main arc of the events described in this book, they have become utterly, completely human in my eyes. As I have gotten to know them, it has been increasingly difficult to employ the comforting Hollywood dichotomies of good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains. I believe there were good leaders and bad leaders in this battalion, and I think the facts demonstrate who was who, but I also believe that bad leaders had good days and good leaders had bad days. While the story abounds in compelling personalities and colorful characters, they are, of course, not characters in any novelist’s sense. They are all, every last one of them, real people. And besides a few significant and felonious exceptions, they were all trying to do their best, making decisions on the fly and under fire, in unspeakably difficult and dangerous circumstances, for their men, their unit, and the mission.

  My greatest privilege of the past three years has been getting to know so many soldiers from Bravo and the rest of 1st Battalion. There are so many clichés about “supporting our troops” or calling every soldier who has ever donned a uniform a “hero” that it debases serious tribute to genuine warriors, and trivializes the terrible sacrifices that real frontline fighters make. It has been my solemn honor to have been allowed into these veterans’ lives and to hear their stories.

  They do not ask for anyone’s pity, but the troopers of 1st Platoon are not the same men they used to be. The majority of them are no longer in the Army. Some of them drink too much, some are in trouble with the law, some cannot hold a job, some get into frequent fistfights, some fly into storms of rage, some suffer from debilitating medical problems, and some are racked with depression, doubt, and despair. Most of them will cope and adjust, and work hard to make peace with what they have lived through, and ultimately they will be okay. But some of them will not.

  The trust these men have invested in me has been humbling, and in their trust I feel a massive responsibility. I believe they understood my goal when I described it to them, which is why they frequently sat with me for days on end going over every last detail, no matter how unsavory. The goal of this book is not to make soldiers look bad, but unlike many popular military histories, it does not attempt to gloss over the inherently brutal and dehumanizing institution of warfare, it does not edit out everything unflattering, let alone upsetting, and it does not seek to make soldiers or the Army look good as an unquestioned end unto itself. I have aimed, instead, to provide an unburnished look at how the soldiers of 1st Platoon and Bravo Company actually lived, fought, strived, and struggled during their 2005–2006 deployment to the Triangle of Death. This book is dedicated to them.

  PRELUDE

  March 12, 2006

  IN THE LENGTHENING shadows of an afternoon sun, the masked men in black hurried from the farmhouse in a commotion. They had not left any witnesses.

  About an hour later, Abu Muhammad heard a knock on his door. A balding, short, and hefty forty-nine-year-old with a salt-and-pepper mustache, Abu Muhammad had served fourteen years in the Iraqi Army and now worked for the Ministry of Health. Warily, he headed toward the window. You never knew who could be at the door. Everyone was tense since the invasion. Everyone was living in fear. To think people had originally welcomed the Americans, he often mused, welcomed the removal of Saddam! They never dreamed, never even considered, it would get worse after the dictator was gone, but it was so much worse now that people actually longed for Saddam—even the people who had hated him the most. Ever since the Americans came, there was no safety, there was no peace. Armed militias were roaming the countryside, both Sun
ni and Shi’ite, killing whomever they pleased. Bodies turned up every day.

  Everyone feared the Americans, too. The soldiers were massive and intimidating, their hulking frames made all the more fearsome with their equipment and rifles and dark glasses, their massive trucks carrying even bigger guns, and their thuggish, arrogant ways. They shoved and slapped the men around, sticking guns in their faces, accusing them all of being terrorists while herding the women into a separate room where who knows what they could do to them? The Americans said they were here to bring democracy and freedom, but they could not even provide the small amounts of electricity and water that Saddam did. They brought death and chaos instead.

  There was another knock. A good sign. A knock was better than the door getting kicked in. Looking out the window, Abu Muhammad thanked Allah—it was a man he knew, a neighbor of his cousin and her husband who lived not far away.

  “You must come, Abu Muhammad,” the man said, calling him by his nickname. “Abu” means “father of,” and many Iraqi men carry such sobriquets. “You must come. Something has happened at your cousin’s house, something terrible.”

  Abu Muhammad lived in a village just outside of Yusufiyah, about twenty miles south of Baghdad in the flatlands between the Tigris and the Euphrates. His cousin lived in an even smaller hamlet a mile away. Pulling his car onto the dirt driveway of his cousin’s modest, one-story house, Abu Muhammad saw his cousin’s boys, eleven-year-old Muhammad and nine-year-old Ahmed, outside. They had just returned home from school. There was smoke billowing out one window of the house. The boys were crying, inconsolable. They were screaming and wailing and blubbering; it was impossible to make sense of anything they said. Scared that danger lurked inside, Abu Muhammad circled the house, looking in the windows to ensure the scene was clear. In the house’s sole bedroom he saw what looked like three bodies lying on the floor. There were big pools of blood. In the living room, he saw another body. This one was on fire.

  “Stay here,” he told the boys, as he entered the front door. The first thing that hit him was the smell: Propane. Musty smoke. Cooked flesh. Agitated and afraid, he scurried around the house. He went to the kitchen to turn off the propane tank, giving the valve a few solid turns. Then he moved to the bedroom.

  Socked by dust storms and bleached by the sun, Iraq’s usual color palette is filled with browns, beiges, and duns, as if the whole country were a sepia photograph. But here, inside the Janabi house, was a riot of colors, alarming in their vibrancy, a Technicolor brilliance of violence, concentrated and otherworldly. Abu Muhammad had seen what the insurgent death squads could do, but he had never witnessed anything like this. Each body was a different sort of travesty. Qassim, the father, was facedown in the far corner of the bedroom, in a lake of his own burgundy blood. His shirt was brightly patterned, striped with white, orange, and brown. The front of his skull had been blasted off. Gore and large chunks of gray matter stippled the walls in a wide, V-shaped pattern. A large mound of Qassim’s brain, about the size of a fist, lay nearby on the intricately woven rug.

  Not far from Qassim was Hadeel, just six years old. Wearing a bright pink dress, she was beautiful, her face almost pristine like a death mask, except that she was covered in blood, liters of it. It was everywhere, matting her hair, soaking her dress, covering her face in a thin dried sheen. A bullet fired from behind—perhaps she had been running away from her assailant—had blown the back right quadrant of her skull apart. A piece of it was lying several feet away, covered in skin and hair. Her hair band had been thrown across the room by the whiplash of the impact. In her right hand, she was still clutching some plants she had just picked, a kind of wild sweet grass that Iraqi children frequently gather and eat for fun.

  Closest to the door was Fakhriah, the mother, wearing a black abaya and an emerald velveteen housedress embroidered with white flowers. She was lying on her back with her eyes wide open. Abu Muhammad thought his cousin might still be alive. He reached down to feel her pulse. Nothing. She was dead. He turned her over, and then he saw the hole. She had been shot in the back, but the rich, dark hues of her clothing obscured the full extent of her wound.

  Shaken, Abu Muhammad moved into the living room. There was Abeer, only fourteen years old. What they had done to her, it was unspeakable. Her body was still smoking; her entire upper torso had been scorched, much of it burnt down to ash. Her chest and face were gone, with only the tips of her fingers, sticking out from the purple scraps of her dress sleeves, recognizably human. The lower half of her body, however, was mostly intact. Her thin, spindly legs were spread and, rigid in death, still bent at the knees. She was naked from the waist down, her tights and underwear nearby.

  The stench was overpowering. Abu Muhammad ran to the kitchen and grabbed the only vessel he could see and came back to the living room. He dumped the teapot, including tea leaves, onto her, causing more smoke and a hiss. There was no running water in the house, so he hurried outside to the canal flowing nearby. He told the boys to stay where they were, plunged the teapot into the canal, and jogged back to the house to douse Abeer’s body. This was slow, but he didn’t know what else to do. He wasn’t thinking clearly enough to try to find a bucket and wouldn’t have known where to find one if he had been. It took five or six trips to the canal with the small vessel to put the fire out, until Abeer’s remains were wet and cold.

  “Come,” he said to the boys, “come with me.” Abu Muhammad got into his car with the boys and dropped them off at his home to stay with his wife. Then he drove to a nearby traffic control point known as TCP1 that was occupied by a dozen or so Iraqi Army (IA) soldiers and about the same number of U.S. soldiers. He found one of the Iraqis and told him that they needed to come because his cousin and her family, they had been murdered.

  “Yribe! Hey, Yribe!” Staff Sergeant Chaz Allen called. Allen was 1st Squad’s squad leader. Since 1st Platoon’s platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Jeff Fenlason, was in another part of Bravo Company’s area for much of the day, Allen was in charge of TCP1.

  “What?” said Sergeant Tony Yribe, who was one of Allen’s team leaders and one of 1st Platoon’s most formidable warriors. Six feet tall and 210 pounds, Yribe was broad-shouldered, heavily muscled, and square-jawed. Just twenty-two years old, he was on his second tour in Iraq, a grizzled veteran more than familiar with the dark realities of being a trained killer that they don’t show you in the movies and they don’t tell you about in basic training. He looked like an action hero and radiated a confidence that cannot be learned. To most of the younger guys in the platoon, he was practically a god.

  “The IAs got a guy saying some family was killed behind TCP2 or something,” Allen said. “They took a look and say there are definitely bodies down there. I need you to go check it out.”

  Just another day in Yusufiyah, Yribe mused. The rate at which Iraqis were killing each other was astonishing sometimes. Every day, pretty much, soldiers were fishing dead bodies out of canals, coming across them in shallow graves, or finding them dumped by the side of the road after midnight executions. Of all the reasons to hate this country and its people, this was just another one: their utter disregard for each other.

  As usual, Yribe noted, there were not enough men to mount a proper patrol. Ideally, they shouldn’t be maneuvering around here with anything less than a squad, about nine or ten men. But that almost never happened. If the soldiers here in the Triangle of Death followed the directives specifying the minimum number of men for whatever task was at hand, they’d simply never get anything done. Three-, four-, five-man patrols were common to the point of being standard. Yribe pointed out that there were not enough soldiers even for that bare minimum. Allen told him to grab a guy from here and pick up two more men on his way to the house from TCP2, which was about three-quarters of a mile southwest. Allen would radio ahead so they would be waiting.

  “And be sure to bring a camera,” Allen said. “Battalion is going to want pictures.”

  Yribe grabbed another so
ldier and an interpreter and headed out. It was getting to be late afternoon. First Platoon, Bravo Company and all of 1st Battalion of the 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division had been in theater for five and a half months. Five and a half more months to go. It felt like an eternity—with an eternity yet to come.

  Yribe arrived at TCP2 and Cortez and Spielman were ready to go, suited up in full body armor, helmets, and weapons. Third Squad’s leader, Staff Sergeant Eric Lauzier, was on leave for a month, so twenty-three-year-old Paul Cortez was acting squad leader, a job many in Bravo Company thought was beyond him. He wasn’t even a sergeant, which is usually a requirement for leading a squad. He had passed the promotion board, but he wouldn’t pin on his stripes for a few weeks, so he was technically a specialist promotable. A lot of Cortez’s peers and superiors in Bravo thought he was a punk who shouldn’t have been promoted at all. They found him immature, insecure, and a loudmouth, with a nasty streak to boot. He was probably the guy most desperate to prove he was as good a soldier and as tough a character as Yribe, but he wasn’t and he never would be.

  Cortez was in charge of a motley group of just six soldiers down at TCP2, some of whom had been on their own at this spartan, unfortified outpost for twelve days straight. They were pretty ragged and strung out. Twenty-three-year-old Specialist James Barker was next in seniority, a soldier renowned for being a smart aleck, mischief-maker, and master scrounge artist but also one of the platoon’s coolest, deadliest heads in combat, with an uncanny memory and spatial awareness. Private First Class Jesse Spielman and Private First Class Steven Green had arrived from different TCPs just a couple of days ago to augment Cortez’s understaffed position. Twenty-one-year-old Spielman was a quiet, unassuming trooper who generally just kept his head down and followed orders. But Green? Twenty-one-year-old Green was one of the weirdest men in the company. He was an okay soldier when he wanted to be, which wasn’t often, but the oddest thing about him was that he never stopped talking. And the stuff that came out of his mouth was some of the most outrageous, racist invective many of the men had ever heard, which is saying something, considering the perpetual locker-room atmosphere of raunchy jokes and racial and ethnic taunts that are just part of the vernacular in any Army combat unit. Green could discourse on any number of topics, but they usually involved hate in some way, including how Hitler should be admired, how “white culture” was under threat in multiethnic America, and how much he wanted to kill every last Iraqi on the planet. He would go on and on and on like this until somebody literally would have to order him to shut up. Two more newbie privates who’d arrived late to the deployment fresh out of basic training rounded out the TCP2 group.