Black Hearts Part 1

Black Hearts.

Jim Frederick.

FOREWORD.

IN LATE SEPTEMBER 2008, CBSas 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 talkeda"neither, conspicuously, was wearing a helmeta"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 countryas 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 magazineas 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 b.o.o.by-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 soldiersa 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 whoad 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 Armyas 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 a.s.signed to defend one of the soldiers accused of the rape-murders, and he implored me to look into Bravo Company, aif not for the sake of my client,a he said, athen for the sake of the other guys in Bravo.a 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 a.s.sessment. aAmerica has no idea what is going on with this war,a he said. aIam only twenty miles away, and most of the people on Victory have no idea how b.l.o.o.d.y the fight is down there. What that company is going through, it would turn your hair white.a 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 doc.u.ments through the Freedom of Information Act. Embedded with the Army in mid-2008, I traveled throughout 1st Battalionas 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 cla.s.sified reports and investigations. I interviewed scores more servicemen, crisscrossing the United States several times, and ultimately broadened my scope even further to encompa.s.s not just Bravo but, for context, the rest of 1st Battalion.

The story of 1st Platoonas 2005a"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-Sadras 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 encompa.s.sed 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 Shiaites, 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 a.s.signed to root out insurgent strongholds, promote social and munic.i.p.al 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 pa.s.sive and active a.s.sistance to the terrorists. This confusion flowed from the Pentagon, through the battalionas chain of command, all the way down to the soldiers. The 1-502nd arrived when Americaas 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 sh.e.l.led 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 battalionas 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 Bravoas 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 doesnat get any starker: aHow do you reseed a company with almost all of its top leadership while in a combat zone? That was the task.a By the end of the deployment, 51 of Bravoas 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 Qa.s.sim 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 eraa"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, aNo 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 happens all the time in the Army, and if March 12 hadnat happened, you wouldnat be here now, years later, in my living room, dredging it all up again.a This is undoubtedly true, but there is a circularity to this logic: aIf something exceptional hadnat taken place, you wouldnat find it exceptional.a When the final variables clicked into placea"an unsupervised foursome of men drunk and in a murderous mood on the afternoon of March 12a"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 peopleas 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 b.u.t.t 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 Bravoas 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 personas 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.

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 a.s.sert 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 athe Greatest Generationa 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 n.o.bility and bravery of those who saw off fascism. But anyone with a better than glossed-over understanding of athe Good Wara 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 societyas 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, todayas soldiers are required to be nothing less than warrior monks. Frequenting wh.o.r.ehouses 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 s.e.xual release and almost no social recreation whatsoever. The two-cans-of-beer-a-day ration is long gone, and even the possession of p.o.r.nography is expressly forbidden.

This is as it must be, of course. The story of Steven Green proves that in todayas media and propaganda environment, even one private with a rifle can affect the course of a war and dramatically harm Americaas 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 Kunkas insistence that he and his chain of command practiced what he incessantly calls aengaged leadership,a 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 Greenas mental state was specifically, or how impaired 1st Platoon was generally. Kunk instead belittled 1st Platoonas 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 bossas 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 novelistas 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 clichs about asupporting our troopsa or calling every soldier who has ever donned a uniform a aheroa 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 veteransa lives and to hear their stories.

They do not ask for anyoneas 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 ma.s.sive 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 inst.i.tution 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 2005a"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 Saddama"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 Sunni and Shiaite, killing whomever they pleased. Bodies turned up every day.

Everyone feared the Americans, too. The soldiers were ma.s.sive and intimidating, their hulking frames made all the more fearsome with their equipment and rifles and dark gla.s.ses, their ma.s.sive 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 Allaha"it was a man he knew, a neighbor of his cousin and her husband who lived not far away.

aYou must come, Abu Muhammad,a the man said, calling him by his nickname. aAbua means afather of,a and many Iraqi men carry such sobriquets. aYou must come. Something has happened at your cousinas house, something terrible.a 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 cousinas modest, one-story house, Abu Muhammad saw his cousinas 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 houseas 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.

aStay here,a 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, Iraqas 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. Qa.s.sim, 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 Qa.s.simas brain, about the size of a fist, lay nearby on the intricately woven rug.

Not far from Qa.s.sim 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 behinda"perhaps she had been running away from her a.s.sailanta"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 gra.s.s 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 ca.n.a.l flowing nearby. He told the boys to stay where they were, plunged the teapot into the ca.n.a.l, and jogged back to the house to douse Abeeras body. This was slow, but he didnat know what else to do. He wasnat thinking clearly enough to try to find a bucket and wouldnat have known where to find one if he had been. It took five or six trips to the ca.n.a.l with the small vessel to put the fire out, until Abeeras remains were wet and cold.

aCome,a he said to the boys, acome with me.a 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.

aYribe! Hey, Yribe!a Staff Sergeant Chaz Allen called. Allen was 1st Squadas squad leader. Since 1st Platoonas platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Cla.s.s Jeff Fenlason, was in another part of Bravo Companyas area for much of the day, Allen was in charge of TCP1.

aWhat?a said Sergeant Tony Yribe, who was one of Allenas team leaders and one of 1st Platoonas 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 donat show you in the movies and they donat 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 G.o.d.

aThe IAs got a guy saying some family was killed behind TCP2 or something,a Allen said. aThey took a look and say there are definitely bodies down there. I need you to go check it out.a 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 ca.n.a.ls, 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 shouldnat 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, theyad 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.

aAnd be sure to bring a camera,a Allen said. aBattalion is going to want pictures.a Yribe grabbed another soldier 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 eternitya"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 Squadas 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 wasnat even a sergeant, which is usually a requirement for leading a squad. He had pa.s.sed the promotion board, but he wouldnat pin on his stripes for a few weeks, so he was technically a specialist promotable. A lot of Cortezas peers and superiors in Bravo thought he was a punk who shouldnat 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 wasnat 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 platoonas coolest, deadliest heads in combat, with an uncanny memory and spatial awareness. Private First Cla.s.s Jesse Spielman and Private First Cla.s.s Steven Green had arrived from different TCPs just a couple of days ago to augment Cortezas understaffed position. Twenty-one-year-old Spielman was a quiet, una.s.suming 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 wasnat 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 awhite culturea 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 whoad arrived late to the deployment fresh out of basic training rounded out the TCP2 group.

Yribe picked up Cortez and Spielman and the five-man patrol walked the quarter mile to the house. Some Iraqi Army soldiers were already there. They had surrounded the house but were waiting outside for the Americans to show up. Yribe and the three U.S. soldiers cleared the five-room house in textbook infantry fashion just in case some insurgents were lying in ambush. Once they determined the house was safe, they started surveying the scene.

It was grisly. Yribe started taking pictures and directed the other soldiers to look for evidence. Some Iraqi medics arrived to collect the bodies. As the men milled around trying to make sense of what they were seeing, Cortez started dry heaving. He looked green and pale and was drenched with sweat. He hacked and convulsed.

aJesus, just go outside,a Yribe told Cortez. What a p.u.s.s.y, Yribe thought as he looked around. This was some vile carnage, he reflected, but frankly, it was far from the worst he had ever seen in this G.o.dforsaken country. Given the level of savagery he had watched Iraqis unleash on other Iraqis, the number of tortured, mutilated, executed bodies he had seen, the corpses bloated and stinking, human parts so traumatized by metal and heat that they had liquefied, or been ripped to shreds, nothing really shocked him anymore. And if Cortez canat handle this, he thought, that says a lot about him.

Yribe and Cortez had always been friendsa"their girlfriends were sisters, in facta"but Yribe wasnat sure how much he really respected him. Cortez had been a Bradley Fighting Vehicle driver with the 4th Infantry Division during the initial invasion in 2003, and he transferred to the 101st Airborne, a somewhat more prestigious division, because he wanted to be even closer to the action. Yribe had always teased him about that, being a driver. Everybody knows that they only put the s.h.i.t-bags, the fat kids, and the cowards behind the wheel, he would tell Cortez. He had always been kidding, but maybe, Yribe thought now, maybe it was true. Maybe Cortez just couldnat hack it.

Yribe took photos from every angle, so that higher headquarters could put together a astoryboard,a a PowerPoint slide that described and ill.u.s.trated major events in a one-page format for briefings and archiving. They made sketches of the house, noting where the bodies were lying. They emptied the pockets of the adults, looking for IDs, keys, or other identifiers. They picked up some AK-47 sh.e.l.l casings that were scattered about and dropped them into plastic bags. Every time Cortez had composed himself enough to come back in, head be able to last only a minute or two before head have to rush out gagging all over again. To get a full range of photos, Yribe told the other two soldiers to move the bodies around. They flipped some of the victims from front to back or vice versa to get shots of every corpseas face and wounds. Through the two or three hours it took to survey the house, Cortez was effectively useless, but Spielman, on the other hand, was cool and efficient, rolling over and moving whatever body Yribe told him to. The burned girlas remains were so disgusting, however, and there was so little of what could be called a body left, that they just left her where she was. The Iraqi medics had trouble getting her rigid, spread legs into a body bag.

As one of the men moved one of the many mattresses that were thrown about the bedroom floor, something small and green skittered across the ground. It was a spent shotgun sh.e.l.l.

Thatas odd, Yribe thought, Iraqis donat really use shotguns.

SUMMER 2005.

1.

aWeave Got to Get South Baghdad Under Controla

WHEN COLONEL TODD EBEL took command of the 2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division in the summer of 2004, he knew he had little more than a year to get 3,400 men and women ready for a war that was becoming more complicated and dangerous every day. And by the fall of 2005, as the brigade approached deployment, the war was in its direst state yet.

The deterioration of Iraq since the April 9, 2003, toppling of Saddam Husseinas regime had been precipitous and unrelenting. The invasion itself was a stunning success, when 170,000 U.S. and British troops (less than one-third the number who fought in 1991as Operation Desert Storm) sprinted from Kuwait to Baghdad in twenty-one days, with just 169 killed in action.

After the initial euphoria wore off, however, nothing went according to plan because there was, quite simply, no plan. The first American transition team, formed just weeks before the invasion started and led by retired U.S. Army lieutenant general Jay Garner, was doomed before it could begin. With minimal staffing and funding, Garner proclaimed the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian a.s.sistance (ORHA) an agent of rapid power transfer back to the Iraqis, just as the White House said it intended. But when it became apparent that postinvasion Iraq was far more chaotic than the waras planners had envisioned and that there was no decapitated but functioning government to hand power to, ORHAas reason for existing vanished. On April 24, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called Garner, who had made it to Baghdad only three days earlier, to tell him that he, and ORHA, were being replaced.

The White House appointed veteran diplomat L. Paul aJerrya Bremer to head the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), ORHAas successor. After the stillbirth of ORHA, Bremer arrived with a desire to show early, decisive change. Unfortunately, his first two bold strokesa"made over the objections of Garner, the CIAas Baghdad station chief, military commanders, and without the full blessing of the Bush administrationa"were disastrous. First, Bremer barred from government employment anyone who had held any position of consequence in Saddamas Baath Party. Under Saddam, party membership was common among public-service employees, whether they were true believers or not. By firing down to these levels, the United States jettisoned the midlevel doctors, bureaucrats, and engineers who actually provided essential public services to the people on a daily basis. Six days later, against even more opposition, Bremer dissolved the entire Iraqi military and national police force. In one week, he had thrown between 500,000 and 900,000 people, the majority of them armed and now humiliated men, out of worka"on top of the already 40 percent of Iraqi adults estimated to be jobless.

The people who worked at the CPA, from Bremer on down, arrived with a kind of visionarya"even missionarya"idealism unsuited to the realities on the ground. For many, being Bush administration loyalists, rather than having experience in diplomacy or reconstruction, was their only qualification. Huge percentages of them never left the walled center of Baghdad known as the aGreen Zone.a Due to the CPAas weak administrative and financial controls, corruption and graft became rife among American and Iraqi contractors working with the organization. Of the $12 billion disbursed by the CPA in just over a year, $9 billion remains unaccounted for. The CPA failed, repeatedly, to deliver on its promises, including Bremeras August 2003 pledge that aAbout one year from now, for the first time in history, every Iraqi in every city, town, and village will have as much electricity as he or she can use and will have it twenty-four hours a day, every single day.a Bremer and the CPA dramatically mishandled the complexities of the Iraqi ethnic, political, and social climate as well. Conducting himself with the imperiousness of a viceroy, Bremer confirmed most Iraqisa suspicions that the United States had arrived not as a liberator but as a conqueror bent on a lengthy occupation. He created an Interim Governing Council (IGC) and divided its twenty-five seats along demographic lines, with fourteen spots going to Shiaites, five to Sunni Kurds, and four to Sunni Arabs. One seat went to a Christian and one to a Turkmen. While the Americans saw this as a simple matter of logic and fairness, and focused on the fact that they were bringing disenfranchised groups such as the Kurds and the Shiaites into the fold, to the Sunni Arabs, this was the world upside down.

Sunnis had been the ruling cla.s.s since the British cobbled the country together from three provinces of the Ottoman Empire, a continuation of the privileged status they had enjoyed under that regime, and for centuries before that. For the Americans, who talked a lot about democracy, to overturn the power structure so radically by diktat struck many Sunnis as hypocritical, vindictive, and proof of what they had always suspected: It wasnat just Saddam or even the Baathists the Americans had come to punish. They aimed to demolish Sunni hegemony outright. The Shiaites, meanwhile, reveled in the realization that for only the second time in modern history (the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran was the first), they were going to rule a country.

While the Bush administration and the CPAas inept.i.tude failed to provide virtually anything of value to Iraqis besides the removal of Saddam, an insurgency started flowering immediately. The large but spa.r.s.ely populated Sunni-dominated western province of Anbar, where the city of Fallujah is located, was an early hot point. The insular tribes, whose sheikhs control ancient smuggling routes, had a reputation for fundamentalism and xenophobia even in Saddamas time. They extended the United States the least goodwill, and let it run dry the fastest. These burgeoning insurgents effectively employed hit-and-run shootings, but they were particularly fond of mortar attacks and especially IEDs (improvised explosive devices), homemade bombs planted under the road or disguised on the surface in bags, debris, or even animal carca.s.ses. IEDs were the perfect terrorist weapon: they were cheap, lethal, and terrifying because they were so hard to spot or counteract.

Armed attacks on U.S. forces started as early as May 2003 and spread throughout that summer. The groups were small and disorganized at first but slowly added to their ranks and refined their tactics. Their motives were various. Some insurgents were religious, some were nationalists, some were simply opportunistic criminals. Disgruntled military personnela"some true Saddamists, others with no real allegiance to the defunct regime but humiliated over their loss of status and privilegea"became increasingly active. Although the majority of the people did not actively support the insurgencies, armed groups drew recruits from every economic stratum. And those who did fight enjoyed the tacit approval of huge percentages of the population.

The insurgency was not limited to Sunnis, however. Among the United Statesa biggest and most lingering headaches was the surprising rise of Muqtada al-Sadr to become the most prominent voice of Shiaite dissent to the American occupation. Until the invasion, al-Sadr was the undistinguished and politically insignificant thirty-year-old youngest son of a popular Shiaite religious leader a.s.sa.s.sinated in 1999 by Saddamas security forces. Immediately after the invasion, however, he seized his moment. Because of his lineage, he could mobilize millions of faithful with a single speech. Unlike some other Shiaite parties, which appealed to the middle and upper cla.s.ses, al-Sadras movement spoke to the poor, angry, alienated Shiaite undercla.s.s whose pent-up rage was uncorked with the toppling of Saddam. And he had no time for Americaas expectations of grat.i.tude. Al-Sadras Friday sermons became increasingly virulent about the failings of the CPA.

Al-Sadr bolstered his power by running a kind of parallel government to provide the public services that the Iraqi state or the CPA simply couldnat. He opened offices in cities and towns throughout the country, which served as community outreach centers, food banks, and water depots. They offered protection, infrastructure essentials, and dignity to a battered Shiaite populace.