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

  The Sunni groups did not limit their purges to locals. Toting AK-47s, they set up checkpoints on Highway 8, the major artery connecting Baghdad and the country’s south, seizing gas tankers and cargo trucks and killing anyone they suspected of attempting to get to the Shi’ite pilgrimage centers of Najaf and Karbala. Shi’ite clerics ditched their distinctive black turbans and robes as they passed by. Insurgent groups offered $1,000 bounties for every Shi’ite killed. Gunmen checked IDs, looking for distinctively Shi’ite names, or anything else that did not meet with their liking. They quizzed passersby in theology or praxis. If the examinee failed, he would be beaten and perhaps executed and mutilated, all on the street, in broad daylight, and then left there.

  Roads were littered with burned and bullet-ridden cars. Corpses festered and decayed on town streets. They became bloated, stinking, rotting masses of gooey flesh that dogs and rats fed on. Any semblance of policing stopped, because the police were frequently targets. And insurgents often impersonated the police, complete with looted squad cars and stolen uniforms.

  Average citizens were forced to make unbearable choices. Caught in a kind of lawlessness that had never happened under Saddam despite all of his many crimes, they frequently had to pick a side or face kidnapping, extortion, or murder. Those who could moved away, but there was no guarantee that the neighborhood of escape would not someday be engulfed by similar violence. The hatred for Americans that the average South Baghdad resident felt, for allowing all this to happen, for removing Saddam with no plan to fill the void, was deep. Some locals quivered with rage just talking about it. It was one thing for the Americans not to be able to provide water or electricity or jobs. But safety? The basic human dignity of knowing that someone will not shoot you down like a dog at any moment? That was unforgivable. Everyone feared for their safety every minute of every day, and most Iraqis hated America, and the American soldiers they saw, with an ardor that was difficult to articulate. Some of them gladly picked up weapons to fight the Americans, some actively helped the fighters in other ways. And even those who didn’t, even those who tried to stay away from conflict as much as possible, kept their mouths shut because speaking to the Americans about anything would earn them a visit from the death squads.

  The area was just as dangerous for foreigners as it was for locals. More so, in a way, because they were easier to spot. Some said the bounty for a foreigner was $2,000, others claimed it was $10,000. Six Spanish intelligence officers were shot dead in November 2003. In January 2004, two Iraqis working for CNN were killed while traveling near Mahmudiyah. Four months after that, a Polish TV crew was attacked in the same area and two Japanese journalists were shot dead. Some foreigners were freed, including two French journalists as well as Christian Science Monitor writer Jill Carroll. Others, including Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni, the IAI murdered.

  On October 3, 2004, the French newswire Agence France-Presse (AFP) was the first Western outlet to use the phrase “triangle of death,” in a story, fittingly, about the discovery of two decapitated bodies in Mahmudiyah. AFP used the phrase frequently after that, noting that the term was already common among locals. AFP capitalized the coinage within a few days and it caught on with the wider press. Within sixty days, the moniker had been used more than a thousand times in newspapers across the globe.

  When the U.S. Army fought to take the city of Fallujah a second time in early November 2004, thousands of fighters fell back into the Triangle of Death, making it the new heart of the insurgency. But a new American troop presence had arrived as well. As the United States accelerated the handover of sovereignty, securing enough stability to conduct credible nationwide elections became the military’s priority. The United States targeted dozens of lawless towns, charging units with making them safe enough to hold January elections. For many areas, including South Baghdad, it was the first persistent U.S. military presence there had ever been.

  In the fall of 2004, the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, a reserve group from Chicago, captured the Jurf al-Sukr Bridge, a major Euphrates crossing six miles southwest of Yusufiyah. They also set up the first U.S. bases in Mahmudiyah and Yusufiyah. A battalion commander with the 24th Marines told the UK’s Independent, “With Fallujah over, the action has moved here. This is now the most dangerous place in Iraq.” Indeed, on November 14, 120 insurgents made a full assault on the Marines’ platoon-sized patrol base, a school they had commandeered on the outskirts of Yusufiyah. The attack was bold and sophisticated and the battle lasted several hours. Most of the Marines were down to their last few bullets when reinforcements finally broke through with fresh supplies. By the end of the day, one Marine and some 40 insurgents were dead.

  Although the Marines attempted to establish a semblance of order, they were severely undermanned and underequipped. They lost ten men in six months and, during that time, the violence continued to escalate. Though boycotted by the Sunnis, the January 2005 elections did take place without any major incidents. The Marines decamped in February, replaced by the Army’s 2-70th Armor Regiment, which nominally controlled the area until June 2005, when, with two days’ notice, the 48th Infantry Brigade of the Georgia National Guard moved in. They closed up the Yusufiyah patrol base at the school and moved it to a potato-processing plant closer to the center of town.

  Throughout 2005, Shi’ite partisans mounted major counterattacks against the Sunni groups. Across the country, as the Iraqi Army and Iraqi police started to reconstitute themselves, they became overwhelmingly Shi’ite-dominated institutions. Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and the Badr Corps, another Shi’ite militia, infiltrated them both. The police, run by the Shi’ite-controlled Interior Ministry (headed, in fact, by a former high-ranking Badr Corps member), were particularly debased. In many regions, the local police forces turned into death squads themselves, killing Sunnis without restraint. Interior Ministry–sponsored violence was so widespread that in late March 2006, Iraqi television broadcast a remarkable announcement: “The Defense Ministry advises Iraqi citizens not to obey instructions from Interior Ministry personnel unless they are accompanied by coalition forces.” It was a constant point of uncertainty and frustration for American commanders working with the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army: you never knew where their first priorities lay. And average citizens? They were even harder to figure out.

  * During his February 2003 address to the United Nations outlining the United States’ case for war with Iraq, U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell erroneously identified Zarqawi as a key link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. In fact, Zarqawi’s ties to Al Qaeda at that time were thin and to Saddam they were nonexistent. Whether that assertion was the result of a purposeful misrepresentation or incompetent analysis is still being debated, but no link between Al Qaeda and Saddam has ever been proven.

  4

  Relief in Place, Transfer of Authority

  ON SEPTEMBER 29, 2005, at 10:00 p.m., much of 1st Battalion and the rest of 2nd Brigade left Fort Campbell, Kentucky, making a stop at Germany before arriving in Kuwait just after midnight on October 1. The bulk of the units settled in for a few weeks of last-minute training while advance parties began flying to Camp Striker, where Colonel Ebel and most of 2nd Brigade would make their headquarters. Striker was part of the Victory Base Complex, a massive U.S. military multicamp that surrounds most of Baghdad International Airport. Two and a half years into the war, Victory had become a city all its own, with hangar-sized cafeterias, fleets of SUVs, acres of air-conditioned housing trailers, and post exchanges that had Burger Kings, Subways, and Green Beans coffee shops, a fair approximation of Starbucks. Lieutenant Colonel Rob Haycock and his 2-502nd also set up its headquarters at Striker as its forces began to spread out to occupy the western half of the brigade’s sector. Simultaneously, the 1-502nd’s advance parties fanned out to their ultimate AOs to meet the 48th Brigade, check out their new homes, and gather intelligence before their handover. Over the next month, the 101st units would slowly add to their ranks while the 48th drew th
eirs down and transferred final authority of their battle spaces at the end of October.

  Lieutenant Colonel Kunk decided to split the battalion into three elements. The bulk of men, machines, and equipment would set up at FOB (Forward Operating Base) Mahmudiyah, a large former chicken-processing plant on Highway 8, which the military had renamed Route Jackson, about a mile north of the city itself. FOB Mahmudiyah became the home of battalion staff, Headquarters and Headquarters Company, Alpha Company, Delta Company, and Echo Company. Living conditions were spartan compared with those of Striker, but there was a bare minimum of support and supply amenities. The majority of the soldiers lived in five- to ten-man tents with wooden floors and air-conditioning that could bring temperatures down by 20 to 30 degrees during the summer. There were shower trailers and a chow hall serving hot meals. There was an eleven-person detachment from private contractor KBR on site with a carpenter, a plumber, a couple of supervisors, and several workers from India, Sri Lanka, and other developing countries who did maintenance and cleaning. Battalion headquarters moved into a giant three-story brick building, while the company commanders put their headquarters, staff living quarters, and other operations in the other existing structures around the site.

  Delta Company took the northern slice of the battalion’s area of operation, bounded by a highway the Army had renamed Route Tampa to the north and Mahmudiyah city limits to the south, while MiTT-depleted Alpha Company took charge of the central sector that included Mahmudiyah itself. Charlie Company moved south to Lutufiyah and occupied an old telephone switching station. Its territory covered Lutufiyah proper and the massive Al-Qaqaa State Establishment weapons depot. Bravo, meanwhile, headed to the town of Yusufiyah, and its terrain formed most of the 1-502nd’s western boundary.

  Kunk gave Charlie and Bravo the missions he judged to be the toughest because, at that time, he considered them his best companies, led by his best commanders. Both required setting up shop, in a favored Army phrase, “away from the flagpole” of battalion headquarters in the sectors where violence was the worst. This was a vote of confidence from Kunk, who was pleased with both companies’ performance at NTC, but particularly Bravo’s. Bravo, Kunk declared, “just did an absolutely phenomenal job. They showed the maturity, they showed the discipline, at the platoon and squad levels.”

  This was Bravo Company commander Captain John Goodwin’s third time in the Army. Skinny, almost gaunt, with hollow, deep-set eyes, Goodwin is originally from Solon, Ohio, a well-to-do suburb of Cleveland. He enlisted in 1986, troubleshooting radio systems for the Army’s signal corps. He got out in June 1990 but reenlisted two months later when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. He drove a Humvee during the United States’ hundred-hour push into Iraq, spent another three years in the service, got out in 1994, and moved to Pulaski, Wisconsin, with his wife and three daughters to work for a yacht builder. That career did not work out. “I don’t mind hard work,” he quipped, “but getting fiberglass embedded into your skin on a daily basis gets old quick.” He decided to get his bachelor’s degree and, upon graduation in 2000, become an officer in the National Guard. “We were looking to buy a house somewhere toward Madison,” he recalled. “I was going to maybe work for the state or something. I was thirty-two and still trying to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up.”

  Goodwin joined the Army this time by mistake. Rather than fill out a National Guard ROTC contract, he accidentally filled out an active-duty Army ROTC contract instead. As graduation approached, his ROTC adviser told him he was going on active duty immediately. Goodwin insisted there must be some mistake. Once he backtracked over what had happened, it took a while for the shock to wear off. His life had just been upended. Thoughts turned to his wife: he had promised her in 1994 that the second time was it. And now this. “I was dejected, we were making all these other plans,” he remembered. She took the jolt surprisingly well. “If that is what we have to do,” she told him, “then we will do it.”

  Goodwin served assignments at Fort Lewis, Washington, and Fort Benning, Georgia, but never got his Ranger Tab, washing out of the school in both 2000 and 2004. After getting promoted to captain, he arrived at Fort Campbell in June 2004 on the division staff and waited for a company command to open up. When he learned that command of Bravo Company (also called the “Bulldogs”) was coming vacant in the summer of 2005, however, he hesitated: “I knew that the division was getting ready to deploy in the fall. I struggled with it. I had to do some searching. But then it was like, yeah, I want it.”

  Typically when a new unit arrives in Iraq, there is a several-week handoff period, known as a “Relief in Place, Transfer of Authority” (RIP-TOA), with the unit they are relieving. The outgoing unit demonstrates, via “right-seat, left-seat rides,” how they have been doing business in the area, passing along lessons learned, contacts, and other inside knowledge. Many members of First Strike were astonished by what they found. They knew that Georgia’s 48th Infantry Brigade was having a tough deployment. Word was, this National Guard unit was out of their depth and getting shredded. Without enough troops to actively and routinely patrol the roads, they had become easy prey for large, deeply buried IEDs that took a long time to set but produced catastrophic casualties. The 48th lost four soldiers to a single device in late July and four more from the same platoon in another, almost identical blast just one week later. Within five months of their May arrival in theater, twenty-one soldiers from the 48th were dead. It was no secret they were being reassigned to a less risky base away from direct combat missions.

  Even so, First Strike’s advance parties were shocked at how degraded the unit was. It is a long and not-so-noble tradition in the military to ever so slightly knock the competence of the unit you are replacing, to say, “They are a good unit, and they did the best they could, but it was probably best we showed up when we did.” The put-downs are usually subtle, even artfully backhanded. That is not the case when many of the men of First Strike describe relieving the 48th.*

  Many soldiers from the 1-502nd concluded that the 48th had given up. They almost never left their FOBs. They did not patrol much, and when they did, they would speed around the area in their vehicles and head back as soon as possible. They did not make eye contact with the locals, they did not stop to talk to anyone. When heading to more remote areas, they would practice “recon by fire”—preemptively shooting everywhere to announce their position and scare off anyone in the vicinity. If they were hit by an IED, or even noticed a suspicious rustling in the weeds, they would lay a 360-degree perimeter of fire and get out of there as fast as possible. One 101st soldier told of the time a Guardsman asked him if he wanted to buy his night-vision goggles. Another said some men from the 48th told him how to find a brothel in town and which Iraqi Army soldiers would score him booze and drugs. The 48th men in the guard towers at FOB Mahmudiyah used multiple justifications for their frequent firings at civilians. People standing up in trucks got shot at. People walking too close to the FOB got shot at. People driving too slow—or too fast—got shot at.

  The living conditions on some of the 48th’s outer bases, meanwhile, had turned feral. While the battalion headquarters seemed to cling to bare-bones but still recognizably human wartime living, at FOB Yusufiyah the men of the 48th were living like animals. Rather than walk the hundred or so yards to a latrine, men would urinate into empty one-liter water bottles. When Bravo Company arrived at Yusufiyah, there were hundreds of cloudy, yellowing piss bottles thrown around in lockers, on top of buildings, or simply corralled into collections on the floor. Boxes of open food from care packages were strewn about, as were rat droppings and gnawed-away panels of cardboard. Feces and other waste clogged the gutters. Discarded food, including slabs of meat, was welded by heat and sand to the floor of the chow hall, while other provisions rotted in open freezers. The insides of the shower trailers were covered in thick green mold.

  In late October, the transfers of authority started nearing completion as the 48th decamped for Camp S
cania, a much quieter area forty miles to the south. But it is not as if the Black Heart Brigade had enjoyed anything like a honeymoon period. Even during the right-seat, left-seat rides, soldiers from the 101st were getting mortared, IED’d, or shot at every day. Every soldier has his first combat story, and it usually took place within a day or two of arriving in theater.

  First Strike’s intelligence officer was frustrated by the lack of information the 48th had on the area. Since they had not been patrolling very much, they had little idea who the local power brokers were or what the current status of the eternal tribal joustings was, and no clue about what was going on anywhere west of Yusufiyah. The 48th intelligence shop had done the best it could, but it comprised only two people and was poorly resourced. They had, for example, no signal intelligence system—the monitoring of telephones and other communications—whatsoever. First Battalion’s eight-man team started building a database of important people and places, times and severity of attacks, anything of interest, and interlinked it all. Within a month or two, analyses of the accumulated data started spitting out trends and probabilities of attacks.

  As the battalion started to settle in and Kunk focused on his mission to fight the insurgency and support the people, he began to realize just how difficult this was going to be. “There wasn’t much governance going on,” Kunk said. “There wasn’t any infrastructure. People wouldn’t come out when it got dark.” And what little governance there was could not be trusted. Mahmudiyah’s mayor was believed to be corrupt and an insurgent sympathizer. During the weeks the 48th was pulling out, U.S. forces caught him in a car full of weapons and arrested him. Trying to sort out who was who, Kunk embarked on a heavy schedule of meetings with local sheikhs, strongmen, and other claimants to various seats of power. It is a role he would play throughout the deployment.