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

by Jim Frederick

  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.

  “Jesus, just go outside,” Yribe told Cortez. What a pussy, 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 Godforsaken 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 can’t handle this, he thought, that says a lot about him.

  Yribe and Cortez had always been friends—their girlfriends were sisters, in fact—but Yribe wasn’t 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 shit-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 couldn’t hack it.

  Yribe took photos from every angle, so that higher headquarters could put together a “storyboard,” a PowerPoint slide that described and illustrated 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 shell casings that were scattered about and dropped them into plastic bags. Every time Cortez had composed himself enough to come back in, he’d be able to last only a minute or two before he’d 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 corpse’s 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 girl’s 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 shell.

  That’s odd, Yribe thought, Iraqis don’t really use shotguns.

  SUMMER 2005

  1

  “We’ve Got to Get South Baghdad Under Control”

  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 Hussein’s 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 1991’s 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 Assistance (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 war’s planners had envisioned and that there was no decapitated but functioning government to hand power to, ORHA’s 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 “Jerry” Bremer to head the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), ORHA’s successor. After the stillbirth of ORHA, Bremer arrived with a desire to show early, decisive change. Unfortunately, his first two bold strokes—made over the objections of Garner, the CIA’s Baghdad station chief, military commanders, and without the full blessing of the Bush administration—were disastrous. First, Bremer barred from government employment anyone who had held any position of consequence in Saddam’s 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 work—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 visionary—even missionary—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 “Green Zone.” Due to the CPA’s 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 Bremer’s August 2003 pledge that “About 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.”

  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 Iraqis’ 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 Shi’ites, 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 Shi’ites into the fold, to the Sunni Arabs, this was the world upside down.

  Sunnis had been the ruling class 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 s
uspected: It wasn’t just Saddam or even the Baathists the Americans had come to punish. They aimed to demolish Sunni hegemony outright. The Shi’ites, 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 CPA’s ineptitude failed to provide virtually anything of value to Iraqis besides the removal of Saddam, an insurgency started flowering immediately. The large but sparsely 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 Saddam’s 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 carcasses. 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 personnel—some true Saddamists, others with no real allegiance to the defunct regime but humiliated over their loss of status and privilege—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 States’ biggest and most lingering headaches was the surprising rise of Muqtada al-Sadr to become the most prominent voice of Shi’ite dissent to the American occupation. Until the invasion, al-Sadr was the undistinguished and politically insignificant thirty-year-old youngest son of a popular Shi’ite religious leader assassinated in 1999 by Saddam’s 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 Shi’ite parties, which appealed to the middle and upper classes, al-Sadr’s movement spoke to the poor, angry, alienated Shi’ite underclass whose pent-up rage was uncorked with the toppling of Saddam. And he had no time for America’s expectations of gratitude. Al-Sadr’s 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 couldn’t. 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 Shi’ite populace.

  Despite his righteous mantle, however, al-Sadr was not above inciting or exploiting violence for more-nefarious purposes or material gains. Far from it. The line between a legitimate populist movement and a gigantic, theocratic organized-crime and terror ring was a thin one. What began as a ragtag crew of exceedingly violent al-Sadr followers grew into a committed, if unruly, militia called the Mahdi Army that numbered in the thousands. Al-Sadr’s network of outposts served as Mahdi Army garrisons, armories, and torture centers where militia members carried out reprisal killings, flying court trials, and pure criminal thuggery. The U.S. Army and Marines clashed directly with the Mahdi Army several times, and although they always delivered a severe tactical drubbing, al-Sadr emerged from every such conflict the strategic victor. He was more powerful than ever, a hero to millions and a major player on the national stage. For years to come, al-Sadr would remain a dangerous and unpredictable irritant to the United States.

  The first response of the Bush administration and senior military leaders was to ascribe the violence to the death rattles of Saddam loyalists, denying, in Rumsfeld’s words, that “anything like a guerrilla war or an organized resistance” was happening. In a persistent analytical misread, senior U.S. officials seemed unable to comprehend that there could be millions of Iraqis who considered themselves die-hard nationalists and patriots while also despising Saddam. Well into 2007, the Army called the insurgents AIFs, for “anti-Iraqi forces,” even though most non–Al Qaeda insurgent groups saw themselves as fiercely pro-Iraq but also anti–United States and, thus, against any government propped up by the United States.

  As Washington lived in denial, the insurgency strengthened. In August 2003, for example, suicide bombers killed at least 180 people in a few weeks, and yet the United States declared victory whenever a major milestone was achieved, as when Saddam Hussein was captured in December 2003, or whenever the number of attacks dipped for more than a week or two.

  Unfortunately, all lulls in violence proved transitory. And without enough troops, as increasing numbers of soldiers continued dying from these frustrating IEDs, many commanders on the ground panicked. Rough tactics became common. Leaders approved interrogation techniques that grew increasingly brutal. Without clearly formulated counterinsurgency theory or doctrine, the Army began using an array of techniques that were counterproductive. Units conducted huge sweeps of entire towns, hauling virtually every male over the age of ten into custody when only a tiny fraction of them were of any intelligence value.

  As frontline commanders became increasingly desperate, the White House and senior military leaders remained bafflingly insouciant about the situation. When CENTCOM (Central Command) commander General Tommy Franks, who had planned and led the invasion, retired in July 2003, a new position was created to oversee all military units in Iraq. That job was not handed to another four-star general but to the most junior three-star general in the Army, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez. Without enough experience or resources, Sanchez and his staff were all but guaranteed to fail.

  In his memoir, Sanchez sounds overwhelmed by his role, with no real idea of what was happening around him, and no clear vision of what he was trying to accomplish. The specter of Abu Ghraib, the notorious Saddam-era prison that the U.S. military had turned into a hellhouse of torture themselves by late 2003, hangs over his tenure and his book. He seems dimly aware that something foul was going on in the prison—“I had received some worrisome reports from the field that prisoners were being treated too harshly,” he writes—but he never seriously investigated. During this period, torture became more common across Iraq, not just at Abu Ghraib. One Human Rights Watch report detailed the systematic, daily abuse of detainees by members of the 82nd Airborne Division stationed near Fallujah in September 2003.

  Many in the government and military downplayed the Abu Ghraib scandal as the actions of a few poorly trained reservists unprepared for the rigors of war, but even the most elite operatives in the U.S. military employed torture as standard practice. Another Human Rights Watch report described the 2003–2004 torture tactics of Task Force 121, a group of special operations forces units including Delta Force and SEAL Team Six.

  For many Americans, the illusion that the Iraq War just might be going okay for the United States finally fell away on March 31, 2004, when four American private contractors ran into an insurgent ambush in Fallujah. A mob of locals dragged the bodies from their cars; burned, mutilated, and dismembered the corpses; and hung some of them from the support spans of a bridge. President Bush ordered the U.S. military to strike back with overwhelming force (against the objection of a Marine general who argued that this was exactly the overreaction the insurgents were hoping for). The military hit the city with 2,500 Marines and assorted armor groups on April 6. Arab television aired brutal and bloody images, broadcasting claims that hundreds of civilians were being killed. The backlash was enormous. Fightin
g erupted in several cities across Iraq. Sunni and Shi’ite militias actually united for a time against the common American enemy. The administration ordered Marine commanders, indignant at Washington’s flip-flopping, to halt the attack three days after it began.

  Even without the Fallujah debacle, Bremer’s days as viceroy were numbered. In October 2003, Bremer had been summoned to Washington, where Rumsfeld and other members of the Bush administration told him to abandon his grand plans of an extended occupation and transfer sovereignty to the Iraqis as soon as possible. Ultimately, Bremer handed control of the country to Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi in a virtually secret ceremony on June 28, 2004, two days ahead of schedule. After Bremer’s and General Sanchez’s exit, John Negroponte, former ambassador to the United Nations, took over as ambassador to Iraq and four-star general George Casey became the head of U.S. military forces on the ground.