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

  Casey arrived with a new initiative to attack the insurgency directly. Casey’s campaign plan dictated that the Army concentrate first on controlling the capital, then attempt to close off the Syrian border, then battle for such insurgent safe-haven cities as Kirkuk and Mosul as well as Hit, Ramadi, Fallujah, and Mahmudiyah, which are strung along the Euphrates Valley between Syria and Baghdad. The idea was to clear and hold territory rather than simply fight and withdraw, as happened with the first battle of Fallujah.

  Troop numbers, however, made this strategy untenable. U.S. troops did the clearing, but there weren’t enough soldiers to occupy recently purged areas. Iraqi forces were supposed to do the holding, but there were even fewer of them who were competent. A counterinsurgency rule of thumb holds that 20 soldiers per 1,000 civilians are necessary to run an orderly postwar reconstruction. At their peaks, NATO operations in both Bosnia and Kosovo exceeded that ratio. Iraq’s population of 25 million people suggested that an occupation force 500,000 strong would be needed. During the planning for the war, however, Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz insisted that lighter, faster, and technologically advanced troops could not only conquer a country like Iraq with little more than 100,000 men but also hold it with even fewer. When Army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” would be needed to occupy Iraq, he was publicly ridiculed by both Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Shinseki retired four months later, one year ahead of schedule.

  The public pillorying of Shinseki stifled any dissent about troop levels from anyone in or out of uniform for years afterward. The subject was so taboo that Bremer waited until he had just sixty days left in country to ask Rumsfeld, via a secret personal courier, for another division or two. Whenever top Army commanders were asked if they had everything they needed, they always said yes. Not until late 2006 did anyone with real authority advocate increasing troop levels as a way of making American soldiers, and Iraqi civilians, substantially safer.

  In late 2005, Casey received the result of a study he had commissioned. Successful counterinsurgencies, the report said, emphasize intelligence rather than force, focus on the safety of the people, shut down insurgent safe havens, and train competent security services. On nearly every count, the U.S. effort was failing. In 2005, the number of insurgent attacks climbed from 26,500 to 34,000. And yet, amid all of this, Casey unrelentingly, consistently, adamantly pushed for fewer troops in Iraq. His plans to reduce the number of combat brigades in country from fifteen in 2005 to five or six by the end of 2007 remained on the drawing board well into late 2006.

  This was the environment in which Colonel Todd Ebel was leading his brigade to battle. The 101st Airborne’s 2nd Brigade is the designated descendant of the 502nd Infantry Regiment, one of the most storied units in one of the Army’s most legendary divisions. The 101st, along with the 82nd Airborne Division, pioneered large-scale, deep-strike paratroop warfare during World War II. Its exploits in the European theater, including the D-Day invasion of Normandy, Operation Market Garden, and the Battle of the Bulge, are almost mythical. Its screaming eagle shoulder patch is one of the most recognized military identifiers in the world. In Vietnam, the 101st continued its tradition as one of the Army’s premier frontline forces. (Not knowing what a bald eagle is, the Vietcong were said to be terrified of the men who wore a chicken patch on their arms. They supposedly avoided the “Rooster Men” whenever possible.) During that conflict, the division overhauled its primary focus. Following the pioneering efforts of the 1st Cavalry Division, the 101st became one of the Army’s first “Airmobile” units, dropping soldiers into battle not from planes thousands of feet in the sky but from helicopters briefly touching down on, or hovering just above, enemy territory. By 1974, the 101st had dispensed with the increasingly tenuous notion that it was a paratrooper unit and focused exclusively on this new martial art now called “Air Assault.” After Vietnam, the 101st supported humanitarian relief efforts in Rwanda and Somalia, and supplied peacekeepers to Bosnia, Haiti, and Kosovo. Elements of the 101st were among the first to deploy for Operation Desert Storm and see combat in the post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan. Today, the 20,000 men and women of the 101st, which is headquartered at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, constitute a special troops battalion and seven brigades: four infantry, two aviation, and a support brigade.

  The 101st was called into action again for the 2003 invasion of Iraq under its then commanding general, Major General David Petraeus. The 101st was one of the war’s primary attack forces, accompanying the 3rd Infantry Division from the south in the thrust to Baghdad. After the fall of the capital, the 101st moved north to stabilize Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city. With no guidance from the CPA, military commanders were left to pursue their own postwar reconstruction missions, to varying degrees of success. Petraeus would become the breakout leader of the war, mounting what is widely hailed as the best ad hoc rebuilding and counterinsurgency campaigns in the country.

  Books such as Band of Brothers (and the ten-part HBO miniseries based on it), which followed a single company of soldiers from their pre-Normandy training all the way through World War II’s end, cemented the 101st Airborne’s reputation in the public’s consciousness as some of history’s greatest warriors. One of Band of Brothers’s indubitable strengths is its pinpoint focus on a small unit of men, Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. But that strength created a significant side effect that rankles those with a broader view. “The funny thing about that book,” opined 101st Airborne historian Captain James Page, “is that you could come away from it with the idea that Easy Company was almost like a commando unit accomplishing things no one else was, when, in truth, there was a company to their left, a company to their right, and thirty-five other rifle companies just from the 101st alone doing the exact same things they were doing all war long.” Indeed, the glory was not restricted to Easy Company, or even the 506th. The 502nd Infantry Regiment (nicknamed “the Five-o-deuce,” or just “the Deuce”) played a crucial role in each of the division’s major World War II campaigns, and was home to the division’s only two Congressional Medal of Honor recipients for the whole war.

  Although not technically the same, “2nd Brigade” and “502nd Infantry Regiment” are, today, effectively synonyms. Except in rare cases, regiments are an obsolete organizational unit in the U.S. Army, but to preserve a sense of history, tradition, and esprit de corps, certain groupings of battalions carry on the names of particularly illustrious regiments. This continuum is entirely bogus, since so few Army units have been continuously active since their inceptions. The 101st itself, for example, has disbanded and reactivated no fewer than four times since World War II. When a new Army battle group is created, it often simply assumes the colors, crest, and regalia of some illustrious yet dormant unit from the past, even if it is based in a wildly different location or carries a vastly different purpose. Presto, instant history. And yet, this system of perpetuating noble lineages works: soldiers do not take much prodding to adopt a sense of pride and custodianship in the purported legacy and history of their unit. Modern warriors clearly long for a link between themselves and heroes of old.

  Ebel had much to live up to, not just compared with the heroes of old but even his immediate predecessor. During the invasion, which the Army has come to call Operation Iraqi Freedom 1 (OIF1), Colonel Joseph Anderson commanded 2nd Brigade, which is also known as “Strike Brigade.” He was a beloved and respected commander who had led his troops with impressive effectiveness and would shortly be promoted to brigadier general. As a quasi-official 101st history of OIF1 put it, “Second Brigade, simply put, was the MVP of the 101st during the push to Baghdad.”

  The son of a lieutenant colonel who served in Vietnam and a West Point grad, Ebel was promoted early to both major and colonel. Though not particularly tall, he has the lean build of the basketball player he once was, and the intellectual demeanor surprisingly com
mon among senior Army officers, more in the mold of brainy Petraeus than brawny Franks. Subordinates occasionally derisively referred to Ebel as “The Professor.” Along his rise, he had once declined the command of a brigade for family reasons, but after serving with General Petraeus in Iraq in 2004 training the new Iraqi Army, he returned to tell his wife that since their kids were older and moving on to college now, he thought the time was right. She obliged, and for Ebel the 101st’s 2nd Brigade was his first choice.

  Ebel took command just as Strike Brigade was, as part of the broader Army “transformation,” expanding from three infantry battalions to six diverse battalions. Now called a brigade combat team (BCT), 2nd BCT comprised two infantry battalions, an artillery battalion, a support battalion, a reconnaissance battalion, and a special troops battalion (which includes headquarters, intelligence, engineers, and communications companies). The BCT concept was designed to make brigades more independent of their divisions and thus better suited to the rapid deployment necessary for the “small wars” commonly believed to be the threats of the future.

  While 2nd Brigade was now a much larger entity, its headlining assets were still unquestionably its infantry battalions, known as the 1-502nd (“First Strike”) and the 2-502nd (“Strike Force”). As part of the Army transformation, the 101st Airborne Division was also in the process of creating its fourth infantry brigade from scratch, which required seeding it with officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) from the other three brigades. Ebel would ultimately deploy with 90 percent of his allotted total staffing strength, but only 65 percent of a full complement of officers. In his infantry-focused brigade, for example, he had no infantry-qualified captains and only one infantry major on his headquarters staff.

  Second Brigade as a whole is also less formally known as the “Black Heart Brigade” or simply the “Black Hearts” for the distinctive two-inch patch they wear on each side of their helmets. The Black Hearts name and the helmet marker tie indirectly back to World War II. During large-scale training exercises, as thousands of paratroopers scattered over drop areas, developing efficient ways for battalions to reconstitute themselves became a serious issue. One easy fix was visual: Each of the 101st’s regiments adopted a suit from a deck of cards and stenciled it in white paint on the side of their helmets. As soldiers darted around open battlefields, they could identify close comrades quickly and without even speaking. The 327th wore clubs; the 501st, diamonds; the 506th, spades; and the 502nd, hearts. Although the practice fell out of favor after the Vietnam era, the convention was revived with gusto in 2001. But due to the muted-color imperatives and cloth helmet covers of modern uniforms, the insignia today are not white-paint stencils but black stitched patches. Over time, the 502nd thus added a new nickname to its collection.

  Knowing that the 101st would deploy to Iraq sometime in the fall of 2005, Ebel trained his men the best he could considering, frustratingly, he did not know exactly where they were going. In the early summer he had the suspicion they would assume responsibility for convoy security along the main supply route from Kuwait all the way to Turkey, but he knew that was subject to change. And it did. In late August, the Multi-National Corps–Iraq commander called Ebel to tell him he had a new mission for him. There was a National Guard unit, the 48th Infantry Brigade out of Georgia, in South Baghdad, the vast, flat expanse south of the city spanning the stretch between the Tigris and the Euphrates, and, the general made clear, they were just not getting the job done.

  “We’ve got to get South Baghdad under control,” he told Ebel. Typically, a commander gets five to six months’ notice to recon an area, talk to the leaders he will relieve, and modify training regimens. Ebel got less than six weeks.

  After visiting the 48th in Iraq in late summer, he returned to tell his battalion commanders, “It is not going to be an easy road. They are not even sure of what they have in the area. It just feels bad. We can expect a real fight.”

  2

  The Kunk Gun

  AS PART OF GENERAL CASEY’S larger strategy to reclaim the Euphrates Valley, part of 2nd Brigade’s mission would be to hold the region that had recently been dubbed the “Triangle of Death” for its relentless insurgent and sectarian violence, both against Americans and Iraqi-on-Iraqi. For the past three years, the area had been very lightly occupied by American forces, with no unit staying more than six months. Insurgents thrived wherever Americans were absent, and the area had become a deeply entrenched home base for a variety of insurgent groups, criminal gangs, and violent religious partisans. Insurgent organizations, including Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), enjoyed virtually unfettered transit from the Syrian border down the Euphrates River corridor, from Fallujah through to Yusufiyah or Mahmudiyah and up into Baghdad. Between the rivers and the roads, terrorists had multiple paths into the city and ample staging locations to stash weapons, build bombs, house fighters, and plan attacks. Ebel’s mission would be to deny insurgents access to Baghdad throughout his area of operation (AO) and, as his units’ intelligence increased, to uproot and destroy insurgent safe havens.

  Simultaneously, however, he was tasked with helping to train the 4th Brigade, 6th Division of the Iraqi Army (IA) so that they, ultimately, could ensure the stability of the region. These two broad goals would sometimes be at odds with one another. Rooting out insurgent hotbeds was the most immediate, life-or-death priority. But training the IA was what, in the long term, would allow the United States to leave Iraq.

  The spearheads putting pressure on this terrorist stronghold would naturally be Ebel’s two infantry battalions—First Strike, led by Lieutenant Colonel Tom Kunk, and Strike Force, led by Lieutenant Colonel Rob Haycock. But how to array them? Ebel decided it all came down to the personalities of his commanders. The eastern half of 2nd Brigade’s territory was urban, featuring the towns of Mahmudiyah, Yusufiyah, and Lutufiyah. As such, it required a leader who could navigate the complex political and ethnic power struggles playing out not just at the end of gun barrels but in council meetings, tribal gatherings, and other ostensibly civil occasions. It required a lot of glad-handing and negotiations with sheikhs and other powerful men of the area whose loyalties were constantly shifting and always suspect. The western sector was far more rural, with smaller hamlets dotting wide swaths of agricultural land and isolated farmhouses, making it an ideal hiding locale for native insurgents, foreign Al Qaeda, and other sorts who didn’t want to be found.

  “Tom’s more engaging,” said Ebel. “He’s more capable of communicating with others, in one sense. Rob was distinctly focused on fighting. Tom would be able, in my mind, to exercise restraint and go work with local officials. I sensed I needed Tom in the area where the population centers were.”

  When Tom Kunk first joined the Army, he never intended it to be his career. Growing up in Springfield, Ohio, he’d only enlisted in the Army in 1983 to earn some money for college. His branch was personnel administration. But he found he had a knack for Army life. He started taking college classes at night, completed his degree from the University of Maryland, and became an officer in 1988. He had also switched to infantry because if this was going to be his vocation, he figured, he wanted to be where the action was.

  The competition for status between U.S. Army units is extreme, and the hierarchies of prestige between divisions are byzantine, with nuanced rivalries about which branches (or subsets of branches) are the most “hooah.” (“Hooah” is the all-purpose word for anything that embodies the Army’s most gung-ho ideals. Typically used as an adjective—“That is hooah” or “He is hooah”—it is also frequently, to the point of self-parody, used as a salutation, interjection, or alternative to the words “yes” and “okay.”) Not surprisingly, the closer one gets to danger, and the more elite the unit, the greater the status. At the very pinnacle are the U.S. government’s “black” or “gray” military and paramilitary units such as Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, the CIA, and the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team.

  On the next rung of the status hierarchy a
re the elite units of the conventional Army, such as the 75th Ranger Regiment and Special Forces (“the Green Berets”). After that come the combat arms branches (infantry, armor, artillery, and attack aviation). Within this stratum, the ground units consider themselves tougher than the pilots, whom they resent for the undeniable glamour of flight, tease for being glorified taxi drivers, and constantly claim are too risk averse. Infantrymen, meanwhile, believe they are superior to artillery specialists and tankers because they fight at much closer quarters, usually within eyesight of the enemy.

  Within infantry, there are still more substrata. Most infantry divisions today are mechanized, meaning they rely on Bradley Fighting Vehicles and other armored ground transportation to carry men into battle. But the light infantry divisions—the 101st Airborne, the 82nd Airborne, and the 10th Mountain—see themselves as the pure essence of ground combat: once they are dropped into enemy territory, they are on their own.

  Beyond combat arms is the vast rest of the Army, which has virtually no status in the eyes of the war fighters. If combat arms soldiers pay the rear echelon branches any respect, it is only because support troops are necessary to make sure that they, the main event, get what they need. But the hooah status of quartermasters, chaplains, or the finance corps? Please, says the trigger-puller. If you want to serve your country, those branches might be for you. But so might the Post Office. If you want to fight for your country, the only job to have is in combat arms, and the only job in combat arms, says the light infantryman, is in light infantry.