A Journal for Jordan

by Dana Canedy

  Still, as I thought about the future that morning, I could not see very far—only as far as his funeral and the long, harsh winter so suddenly upon us.

  Fifteen

  Dear Jordan,

  It’s time I told you how your father died. This has been the most painful thing I have ever written, and it will likely be the most difficult thing you will ever read. But I believe I owe you the most precise account I can provide ofthat dreadful day.

  It must surely have been God’s design that Charles fell in love with a journalist, for in order to reconstruct your father’s final day, I have drawn on all the skills I learned in nearly twenty years of reporting. Never did I think they would be put to such use. Sometimes I cried myself to sleep after interviewing people who provided graphic details of the scene. As wrenching as the work was, though, I could not let go until I knew the truth.

  I began by talking to nearly a dozen of your father’s soldiers, often in late-night phone calls when they were off work and you were asleep. I interviewed men who were with your father on his last convoy and the medic who treated him at the scene. I spoke to his company, battalion, and brigade commanders, to his “battle buddy,” and to the wife of a soldier who died with him. I also spoke to the doctor who was on duty at the hospital in Baghdad when Charles arrived the day he died and to the officer who formally identified his body and watched as a chaplain administered Last Rites. I pored over sworn statements from soldiers who were in the vicinity of the blast that day, commanders’ memorandums, and summaries of battalion operations reports. I steeped myself in army literature on fighting insurgents and guarding against IEDs. I also conducted more than a dozen interviews with a spokesman for army personnel who works at the Pentagon, Major Nathan Banks. He reviewed your father’s case and was able to fill in crucial details, verify information, and give me a larger picture of how the military operates and what happened the day your father died. Here is what I can tell you:

  On Saturday, October 14, 2006, at 0946 hours Baghdad time, your father and his six-vehicle convoy rolled out of the forward operating base, traveling south before crossing the Euphrates River and turning north on Route Patty toward the Island. They were on a routine supply mission, delivering food, water, ammunition, batteries, and other necessities to about sixty of his troops who had been conducting surveillances and raids from the Island. The convoy included a forward and rear tank, two mobile infantry carriers outfitted with weapons, one Humvee, and a supply truck capable of carrying five tons of rations.

  At 1038 hours, the convoy passed through the town of Jurf as Sakhr, where Iraqis were doing their morning shopping. A few of the soldiers noticed a date shop that seemed open but strangely empty of merchants and customers, but no one was troubled enough to halt the formation. The convoy was about two miles from the Island, just past that date shop, when insurgents detonated a large IED, using a trip wire that ran through the trees. The IED ripped through the bottom of a vehicle in the middle of the formation, the Humvee, which burst into flames. One soldier, Sergeant William Record, was critically burned on his face and arms. Specialist Timothy Lauer, Staff Sergeant Joseph Kane, and First Sergeant Charles King were killed. On the official reports, your father was pronounced dead at 1039 hours.

  These are the bare facts, at least according to the military, but over the past year I have learned so much more.

  Not long after the explosion that killed your father, a sniper team that had just arrived noticed two civilian men fleeing in the direction of a nearby shack, but the suspects escaped. Then, suddenly, a white minivan was driving toward them and ignoring hand and arm signals and warnings shouted in both Arabic and English for the driver to halt. The snipers fired a warning shot into the air and then several shots into the van’s engine block, but the vehicle continued forward. They sprayed it with rounds from their M14 rifles until it stopped. When two men attempted to flee the vehicle, the snipers shot and killed them. They then noticed more passengers, including a man alternately peeking over the dashboard and ducking beneath it. The soldiers fired additional rounds into the vehicle. When they finally approached, they found that man and four women inside. There were no weapons or explosives.

  One of the women was five months pregnant; she was alive but had been shot in the abdomen. The soldiers immediately sought medical help, but I have not been able to determine her fate. The thought of her baby dying from a gunshot wound before he or she ever took a breath haunts me. The child would now be about a year old.

  Some of your father’s comrades consoled themselves in the days after he died by spreading word that “we got ‘em.” During a memorial service the Dealers held in Iraq, Lt. Col. Patrick Dona-hoe, the battalion commander, told his men that, while the enemy had struck a despicable blow, “we must remember that on the fourteenth, not only our men died, but we shot and killed the two we know to be responsible.”

  I asked Donahoe recently how he could have been sure. His answer was unsettling.

  “I am not really sure, to be honest,” he said. “We did engage a car that day and a couple of folks were killed there. I think we want to believe that they were involved, but we had no real, hard direct evidence.”

  The men and their passengers in that van may well have been insurgents fleeing with their families, or they might simply have been confused civilians who panicked when they came upon the Americans.

  What Donahoe did not say is that the killings were convenient on a number of levels. They provided closure, militarily. And they gave the Dealers, especially the Carnivores, a place to direct their anger.

  A military inquest found that the snipers were justified in taking the actions they did. I do not disagree with that conclusion. The snipers, as far as I can tell, did not kill those people out of revenge, and had given the Iraqis several opportunities to stop and get out of their van before firing upon it.

  What I am not so comfortable with is celebrating those deaths as vindication for your father’s.

  About two weeks after Charles’s death, I received a letter of condolence from Donahoe, who wrote: “The powerful explosive ripped through the bottom of the vehicle he was riding in, killing him, we believe, immediately…. We now go forward from this place on the Euphrates River with heavy hearts. We press on with the mission here.”

  The army’s formal position, made clear in the letter, was that Charles had died instantly. At the time I accepted it. Most people, I assume, accept the military’s official account of their soldier’s death. But as I learned, the military often sanitizes the truth. And saying a soldier died instantly when the facts tell another story is only the beginning of the official spin.

  In a little-known office in Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, more than two dozen military employees and civilian contract workers go through every item of a dead soldier’s belongings, looking for anything sensitive or scandalous. The workers read the soldiers’ letters and e-mail messages. They listen to their music and watch their DVDs. They review the contents of their cameras and video recorders. They literally go through soldiers’ dirty laundry.

  The scrubbing, as the examination is called, is primarily done to identify and confiscate classified information or sensitive material in a soldier’s possession. If the scrubbers do their jobs properly, families will never see photographs of dead or bloodied prisoners, or maps pinpointing secret military facilities.

  But there is another reason for it.

  The military regards sanitizing a soldier’s belongings as a last act of protecting one of its own. So, in consultation with a soldier’s battle buddies, military representatives take it upon themselves to change the story those items sometimes tell. They will tear a suicide note out of a soldier’s diary. They will destroy sexually explicit letters from a girlfriend so that a wife never sees them. They will clean blood off clothing before returning it to a father. They will send a mangled wedding band to a jeweler in order to return it to a grieving spouse in pristine condition.

  These facts, dis
closed to me by a high-ranking military official who believes in this system, turned my world upside down. I trusted Charles and had no desire to see his dirty laundry, in any sense. But now I was determined to find out the truth about his death.

  In the official version, he did not survive the blast, had never felt the excruciating pain of his bones crumbling like crackers. In my mind, Charles had gone from an earthly world to a heavenly one with little or no transition. I could accept that. But after talking to his troops, I no longer believe that is what happened.

  I interviewed Corporal Jason Imhoff several times, beginning about six months after Charlie Company returned to Fort Hood. His account of that day was radically different. When the convoy departed from the FOB that morning, Imhoff was the gunner on the lead tank, tasked with spotting IEDs.

  “Me and my tank commander got pretty good at finding roadside bombs before they killed anyone,” Imhoff told me. “My main job was to look through my sights and keep scanning to make sure everything was in order.”

  He then interrupted his account. “I still feel like it’s personally my fault,” he said. “I feel like I let him down.”

  But there were extenuating circumstances. There had been a rainstorm early that morning and the wet road concealed the fresh dirt that had been packed over the hole in which the bomb was hidden. The triggerman was well out of sight: several soldiers followed the wire that was used to detonate the explosive to his position on a dirt mound in a nearby canal.

  In any case, I assured Imhoff that Charles would not want him to blame himself for not detecting the IED. My words did not have much effect. But he went on.

  “I was scanning the road and we were almost at the Island. Then our tank commander started saying, ‘IED, IED.’“

  Soldiers and civilians for miles around recognized the all-too-familiar boom. Like a period at the end of a sentence, it was a sound that stopped all conversation. Except at the scene.

  “We started firing machine guns. There were lots of weeds in the area where bad guys could hide,” Imhoff said. “It was very chaotic on the radios. They were sending information about who was hurt. I tried to talk to the tank in the rear and they said they were going to pick up casualties and take them to the landing zone for the MEDEVAC.”

  Word eventually came that Charles’s vehicle was the one that had been hit.

  “They finally gave his battle roster number, which is a sequence of letters and numbers, and we knew who it was,” Imhoff said. “I cried.”

  The attack was one of the worst the soldiers had seen. Back at the FOB, Charles’s roommate Tony noticed the commotion. Someone told him Charlie Company had been hit. Was Top King on the convoy? he asked. No one would answer, so he rushed to the scene in search of his friend. He could not believe what he saw.

  “Let me tell you, when I seen that Humvee, I knew,” Tony said.

  The explosive had detonated under the middle of the vehicle, sending it six to eight feet in the air and blowing off the doors as well as the massive gun turret, which is the size of a small Volkswagen and movable only by crane. The blast created a crater that was six feet deep by ten feet wide. It ejected all four occupants.

  It was likely by design that the insurgents had detonated the bomb at the center of the formation. They had been in battle with the Americans long enough to know that the senior officer never rides in back, which in U.S. military culture would be tantamount to trailing soldiers—like a coward—in combat. They knew, too, that the leader’s vehicle is typically in the middle of a convoy. That position provides the best “situational awareness” of the battlefield—the optimal view of what is happening in front of and behind the ranking soldier.

  “I don’t know if anyone has told you this,” Imhoff said, then paused as if waiting for a sign from me to continue. I told him to go on. “After the explosion, he was alive and he was talking.”

  He said Charles was in shock and grunting, but that even as he lay dying he was thinking of his men. “He asked about the other soldiers,” Imhoff said.

  I tried unsuccessfully to swat away a selfish thought. “Do you think he thought about us, too?” I asked the corporal. It was not a reporter’s question, of course. It had no answer. It was a widow’s inquiry, and it was unfair of me to ask.

  Imhoff assured me that, if it were at all possible to have such thoughts at a moment like that, my soldier surely did. What else was he to say?

  If Imhoff was correct, not only had Charles been alive after he was struck, he had been able to speak. If he could speak, he could feel. He might have felt the pain of his organs having ruptured. He might have struggled to breathe. He might have wondered in his delirium why I was not there with him. In any case, it was not the mercifully swift death I had imagined.

  I paced our apartment and tried to process what Imhoff had said. I sobbed. I had nightmares for weeks, in which I and the people I loved were under attack. Bullets whizzed past my head. One time I was on aplane being shot down by terrorists. Each time I awoke from one of these dreams, I bolted upright, breathing rapidly and sometimes clutching my chest. But I had to continue with my reporting.

  As you slept one winter night in early 2007,1 called Sgt. Adam Martinez, who was in the last tank in the convoy that day. He was the first person to reach Charles at the scene.

  “I saw the Humvee doing a 360, like spinning around in flames,” Martinez told me. “I saw the driver, Sergeant Record, sitting on the ground burning and screaming in flames.” (Despite severe burns, Record survived.)

  “First Sergeant King was already out of the Humvee, standing straight up in the middle of the road,” Martinez said. Charles stood for about thirty seconds, according to Martinez, then fell forward and landed facedown.

  “I ran to the Humvee first. I wanted to make sure no one was in there burning. Then I ran back around and said ‘First Sergeant, can you hear me?’“ He said Charles groaned. Martinez asked again if Charles could hear him and told him to grunt if he understood. Charles groaned again.

  “Rounds were popping off and I was trying to get him out of there and he wouldn’t move. At that point I grabbed him and pulled as hard as I could. I guess what you call the adrenaline kicked in. I kept dragging and pulling him until we got to a ditch that had better cover and concealment for us.”

  Charles looked him in the eyes, Martinez said. My heart hurt as he spoke.

  “I noticed bleeding from his mouth and nose, and the corners of his eyes were bloodshot. So I started first aid, but there was nothing I could really do for him. He took a deep breath and sighed. Doc got there at that time and took over. I got back in my tank because I needed to pull up to cover the guys from the rounds cooking off and shooting over our heads.”

  Martinez had broken protocol and disregarded what Charles had taught him about not entering a “kill zone” until it was safe to do so. It was Martinez, in fact, who helped me to understand how soldiers could set aside their instincts for self-preservation to save a comrade—as thousands of them, men and women, are doing without acclaim in Iraq and Afghanistan, even as I type these words.

  “It’s something you don’t think about,” he said of his actions the day he rushed into danger to tend to my Charles. “I wasn’t going to leave our guys out there.”

  I was not sure I could listen to any more tales of how my man had died, but there was one more person I needed to talk to: Specialist Harold “Doc” Garcia, the medic who had treated Charles after the explosion.

  Doc had been in the second vehicle in your father’s convoy that day. By the time he reached Charles, he told me, he could not find a heartbeat. “There was nothing, no pulse,” Doc said. “Bullets were flying and I was like ‘shit, man,’ you know?” Despite the danger from the gunfire, and the likelihood that Charles had already died, Doc administered CPR.

  “I gave him a breath and went and gave him compressions, but as soon as I pressed down I could tell his chest cavity was kind of crushed. I knew he’d passed away,” he said.
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  Like Martinez, however, Doc broke protocol because he was not ready to give up on saving his Top.

  “After we knew he passed away we actually treated him like there was hope because we couldn’t believe it,” Doc said. The men put him on a stretcher and put an IV line in his arm, he told me.

  “We were going down the road with him on top of the tank and it was unbelievable what we did. You never ride outside because of the threat of another bomb. We just wanted to get him to the bird,” he said, referring to the MEDEVAC helicopter, “so we pulled some crazy stuff like that.”

  Doc said Charles would have done the same for any of them. “He would never leave nobody,” he said. “I know first sergeants that would never lead the missions, would never leave the FOB. He was the best damn first sergeant I’ve ever seen.”

  The men of Charlie Company were devastated by Charles’s death, none more than Sergeant Shoan Mohammed. “I was supposed to go on the convoy First Sergeant King went on,” he told me. “Thatwas supposed to be me in that vehicle.”

  Charles had told Mohammed that he could remain at the base to take care of paperwork.

  “I didn’t believe it was true,” Mohammed said quietly. “First Sergeant King was a big man and a strong man. Nobody ever thought any harm would ever come to him. He was the rock of our company. You can’t replace someone like the first sergeant. We didn’t know how to exactly cope.”

  Mohammed told me that even some of the officers fell to their knees and wept in the hours after Charles died. Other soldiers could not eat or sleep.

  “I think we were silent for a few days before we could really speak about it,” Mohammed said. “Then the commander pulled us together. We had our ceremony as we did for the other comrades who had fallen. As we did our salutes and tribute to him it finally started sinking in, but what helped us most was when we did our prayer vigil for First Sergeant King and expressed what he meant to us.”