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

by Jim Frederick

  Kunk served in 1991’s Operation Desert Storm and deployed to Haiti and Kosovo before participating in OIF1 as the operations officer and then the executive officer of the 101st’s 2-502nd Infantry Regiment. Coming back home, he completed a master’s degree in human resources from Webster University and learned that when the 101st went back to Iraq, he would be commanding First Strike.

  Kunk assumed command of the 1-502nd on March 16, 2005. Due to his enlisted service, he was, at forty-seven, several years older than the average battalion commander. At six foot five, 230 pounds, and possessing a thunderous basso profundo, he is almost always the dominant presence in the room. His large, shiny, hairless dome earned him the unit-appropriate nickname of “the Bald Eagle.” Tough, uncompromising, even bullheaded, he distinguished himself in previous assignments by being a good organizer and planner, with a fine attention to detail. He had a small battery of Army clichés—“doing the harder right over the easier wrong,” the importance of “engaged leadership,” and how he always tried to “teach, coach, mentor”—that he repeated endlessly.

  Rare for a light infantry battalion commander, Kunk did not have a Ranger Tab. The aura and the importance of the small black-and-yellow Ranger patch in the Army hierarchy of hooah is difficult to overstate. Worn on the top of the left sleeve, it may look inconspicuous, but it has talismanic properties. It signifies the wearer has graduated from Ranger School, one of world’s most grueling leadership courses. Less than 40 percent of the men who start the course graduate. Sixty-one days long (if completed without having to repeat a section), it focuses on small-unit combat tactics (everyone is stripped of rank, and everyone takes turns leading), through harsh conditions in mountain, swamp, and forest settings. Instructors design scenarios to induce maximum stress and confusion, and students go weeks with severe sleep deprivation and caloric restriction. It is common for already fit men to lose thirty to forty pounds, and almost every graduate has at least one story about hunger-and exhaustion-induced hallucinations he experienced.

  For virtually every other branch of the Army, the Ranger Tab is an elite trophy. For infantry units, however, and especially light infantry units, it is almost a requirement for officers and senior NCOs. Graduates of Ranger School, like graduates of West Point, have a strong subculture within the Army (though the Ranger club is open to enlisted men). When one soldier meets another, the top left shoulder is the second thing he looks at after rank. And for those in infantry leadership positions without one, not having a Ranger Tab is a constant source of insecurity, a noteworthy deficiency no matter how sterling the résumé otherwise. It is certainly possible to rise to general without the tab, but if a tab-less officer falters in his career, you can be guaranteed to hear someone say, with a tinge of pity: “Well, you know, he isn’t a Ranger.”

  Kunk’s mission was daunting. Like Ebel, he was also replacing a beloved commander, Lieutenant Colonel Del Hall, and he had only six and a half months to continue the training of 700 men spread across six companies—a headquarters company, three rifle companies (Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie), a weapons company (Delta), and a support company (Echo)—for their next deployment without a clear idea of where in Iraq they would be headed or what their mission would be.

  As the battalion worked that summer, Kunk’s leadership roster slowly took shape. The battalion’s executive officer and second in command was thirty-seven-year-old Major Fred Wintrich. The son of an infantry officer, Wintrich had flunked out of West Point because of bad math and science grades, but he was committed to an Army career. He received his commission in 1991 after finishing a history degree at North Georgia College. Behind his back, several junior officers referred to Wintrich, with affection, as “Fast Freddie,” due to his animated speaking style and wild gesticulations.

  First Strike’s operations officer and third in command was Major James “Rob” Salome. Bald and built like a bulldog, with a serious, almost dour demeanor, the thirty-three-year-old West Point grad was, both temperamentally and physically, an almost perfect inverse of the gangly, gregarious Wintrich. Complementing each other well, they soon developed a close working relationship.

  One of the hallmarks of the modern U.S. Army is that every officer leadership position, from platoon leader and company commander all the way through brigade commander and division commander, has a parallel and complementary noncommissioned officer (NCO). Commanders are accountable for mission planning, executive decision-making, and the ultimate responsibility for everything the unit does or fails to do. Senior NCOs are responsible for helping to ensure the timely and accurate execution of the commander’s orders, the care and welfare of the men, the specific tasking of personnel, and advising the commander of the enlisted man’s view of things. Kunk’s senior NCO was Command Sergeant Major Anthony Edwards, a native of Sanford, North Carolina, who had enlisted as an infantryman in 1980. He was known to be stern and serious about the basics, and he was also somewhat aloof, cultivating few close friends or acquaintances within the battalion.

  Rounding out the rest of Kunk’s leadership team were the company commanders and first sergeants of the 1-502nd’s three rifle companies, weapons company, logistics company, and headquarters and headquarters company (HHC). Commanding HHC was Captain Shawn Umbrell, a former Army airborne medic who had returned as an officer upon his graduation from the University of Toledo in 1999. He had become commander of First Strike’s Charlie Company in June 2004 and badly wanted to retain that position long enough to take his men into battle. To his great disappointment, that would not happen. When the HHC command slot came up in May 2005, Umbrell was, as is common for the senior company commander in a battalion, obliged to take it. HHCs may not be as hooah as infantry companies, but with nine different platoons performing functions varying from scouts and medics to supply and communications, they are bigger, more logistically intensive operations. Still, he was disappointed. Umbrell, who possesses a naturally sunny disposition and gentle manner, resolved to make the best of the situation, not to moan about the 135 men he left but to serve the 230 he now had the best that he could.

  Thirty-six-year-old Captain Bill Dougherty was a flinty-eyed former infantry sergeant from Philadelphia who had served with a Ranger battalion in Afghanistan and with the 502nd Infantry Regiment during OIF1 before replacing Umbrell as Charlie’s company commander in May 2005. One of Umbrell’s primary pieces of advice when he handed over the reins was, “Dennis Largent is always right.” Dennis Largent was Charlie’s first sergeant, the company’s senior enlisted soldier and right-hand man to the company commander. The son of a retired lieutenant colonel, Largent was a buzz-cutted, blunt-nosed giant. Charlie Company (nicknamed “the Cobras”) had an intense esprit de corps, one of the most pronounced that many had ever seen in their entire Army careers.

  Much of that Charlie pride flowed from and centered on Largent, who had been first sergeant since before the invasion. Soldiers loved Largent and they loved being in the company. He could be strict and impossibly tough on his soldiers. But there was something strange about the way Largent yelled. Even when he was jet-engine loud, Dougherty said, he was never abusive or cruel. “There was still just so much love there,” Dougherty explained. “He could be dishing out the most royal ass chewing ever, but it was always clear that he was not hating on the soldier, he was trying to teach him. And there was a little bit of humor there all the time too.”

  There was a lot of humor in Charlie. Since they were the Cobras, they had adopted the logo of COBRA, the shadowy international badguy organization from G.I. Joe cartoons. They plastered that snake logo on everything: unauthorized unit patches, flags, T-shirts, anything they could think of. The stencil started popping up on so many flat surfaces that the line between logo and graffiti was thin.

  The company also had a tribe of garden gnomes that had become mascots. Years before, a group of drunken soldiers had stolen several garden gnomes from a trailer park and, as a prank, hidden them in places that Largent would find them for weeks to
come. There was a gnome in the company refrigerator, a gnome in the latrine, a gnome in every third locker. Largent turned this into a team-building opportunity. He would call the whole company into formation every time he found a gnome and pretend to be furious. The gnomes became the company’s good-luck charms. Each squad was issued a gnome. Soldiers gave them names and affixed Cobra patches to their shoulders, and the company took them, these heavy stone gnomes, on deployments. It became a rule: The newest private was responsible for carrying that squad’s gnome in his rucksack wherever they went.

  The Cobras had come to refer to themselves as “the People’s Army.” Once, in garrison, the legend goes, Charlie was assigned to do some sort of community service activity like helping with a blood drive or a park cleanup project. The men were complaining, because that was definitely not something they thought soldiers should be doing. Largent was having none of this, and he launched into a long, impassioned tirade that was simultaneously tongue in cheek yet also deadly serious about how the whole reason the Army exists is to protect and serve the American people, and soldiers should consider it an honor to help with a blood drive or anything else society asks them to do.

  “The Army is not a democracy,” he thundered, “but we defend democracy with our lives! We are not the President’s Army! We are not the Secretary of Defense’s Army! Or any of the Generals’ Army! We are the People’s Army!” The soldiers hooted and hollered. They loved it—and suddenly they were excited and enthusiastic to go help with the blood drive.

  From there, the People’s Army took on a life of its own. Charlie Company was the People’s Army, they told anyone and everyone. Over time, this moniker would become a source of great annoyance to the battalion’s leadership, who thought the phrase sounded more than a little communist, and a lot like the battle cry of 1st Battalion secessionists. On several occasions Kunk told Largent to knock off the People’s Army stuff and start promoting First Strike as his soldiers’ primary rallying point. Largent replied that he didn’t really think he should do that. Cracking down on the People’s Army would only drive it underground, he said, and fuel its popularity, turning it into a true middle finger pointed at the battalion, rather than a funny little differentiator.

  As the battalion geared up for deployment and trained throughout the summer, many of the company commanders and first sergeants determined that Kunk was not going to be the easiest boss to get along with. They knew Kunk had a reputation for being demanding and having a volcanic temper. Those characteristics were nothing special in the Army. “Demanding” and “short-fused” could, in fact, describe more commanders than not. Kunk, they realized, however, was something different. Only a few days after he took command in the spring of 2005, the whole battalion headed to the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) at Fort Polk, Louisiana, where light infantry units undergo two-week, immersive “in the box” war-game exercises.

  In hindsight, some point to the JRTC stint as a harbinger of everything that would go wrong in Iraq, both with Bravo’s 1st Platoon and at the battalion level. On the first day of the simulation, 1st Platoon made a spectacular tactical error, and the JRTC’s “enemy force” captured nineteen of their soldiers. Immediately, 1st Battalion’s company commanders focused on how to rescue their men as soon as possible. So they were dismayed when they heard the brief from Kunk, that he was ordering surveillance and recon of the enemy for the next twenty-four hours. Kunk had formulated a complete plan for the next day without any input from his commanders, except to go around the room seeking affirmation that this was the right way to go. After awkward silences and halfhearted assent, Umbrell spoke up first.

  “I think this plan is fucked up,” he said. “We’ve got all these assets,” he said, incredulous. “We’ve got Bradleys, helicopters, several companies of men ready to go, and a short time window to this whole exercise. And we’re not going to go get our guys?” The rest of the commanders followed suit, saying that sitting around with men in enemy hands was a bad idea and they should start formulating a rescue now. Kunk ignored their protests and the surveillance plan remained in effect.

  “That was the first big fallout between him and all the company commanders,” said Alpha Company’s commander, Captain Jared Bordwell. Several company leaders said they learned something that day that would be reinforced repeatedly throughout the next year: Their input was not wanted, and when Kunk was challenged, one of two things would happen. Either he demolished dissenters with an angry tirade, or he would more quietly dig in his heels. But he would not consider an alternate point of view, modify his opinion, or change the plan.

  Bordwell had a particularly hard time with Kunk early on. Cocky and aggressive, he had taken command of Alpha Company in early 2005. Because he was always eager to take the next mission, his men dubbed him “Captain America.” Bordwell went afoul of Kunk immediately, however, because he had not learned to adjust his style to accommodate the new boss’s way of doing business. Bordwell had previously worked for a battalion commander who didn’t obsess over details. When he asked his captains what they were doing and they replied, “Training my men, sir,” that was all he wanted to hear. But Kunk was a demon for the minutiae: How many rifles do you have ready to go? How many of your night-vision devices need repairing? What percentage of your vehicles still need parts?

  At the time, Bordwell thought a company commander didn’t need this sort of information at the ready all the time. So when Kunk would ask Bordwell something like how many water cans his company had, Bordwell said not only did he not know, but he didn’t really need to know; that’s what his executive officer was for. This was not the kind of answer that made Kunk happy. In Kunk’s world, said his subordinates, only Kunk got to employ sarcasm, and he let Bordwell have it. “Looking back, I see the whole picture now,” Bordwell reflected, acknowledging that soldiers without water can’t fight and a company commander should, in fact, know how many cans he has at all times. “But it was the approach he took I initially struggled with.”

  That approach was belittlement. The officers had a name for it: the Kunk Gun. When it swung around your way, you ducked for cover. They also called being subjected to one of his tirades Getting Kunked. It wasn’t that Kunk had high standards, or yelled at them a lot, or was even mean, they said. The captains had been in the Army for six or more years. Some of the first sergeants had nearly twenty years’ experience. They had all worked for difficult, even mean, bosses. This was not that. Kunk treated his subordinates with nastiness and impatience they had never seen before, where correction and coaching turned into shouted, expletive-laden humiliation and disparagement. Kunk’s meetings became events to dread, more about him proving how little his underlings knew than in sharing information or solving problems. If subordinates didn’t have the correct response at the ready, Kunk would humiliate them, assail their qualifications to hold command, and even fire off the sanctum sanctorum of accusations—doubt their concern for the welfare of their own soldiers.

  Kunk dripped with contempt. By Army culture, superior officers may call subordinates by their first names. Some do so as an indication of familiarity or even affection. Kunk, with the venomous emphasis he applied to each name, wielded it as a weapon of disrespect. “Have you ever thought of that, Bill ?” “Do I have to do your job for you, John?” He routinely ridiculed subordinate commanders in front of their own men, and he was not above threatening lieutenants with violence, telling one that he would “beat his fucking ass” if he did not follow a recently delivered order. If anyone disagreed with him or ventured an alternative idea, he took that as a personal challenge, and he would sometimes end discussions by declaring, “Trump! I win, because I’m the battalion commander.”

  For the few months between the JRTC and deployment, the Kunk Gun was firmly fixed on Bordwell, and it was having an effect. If, initially, Bordwell’s first sergeant found his company commander a bit arrogant, though not unacceptably so, the daily drubbings by Kunk were making Bordwell indecisive and eroding
his confidence. The relationship continued to deteriorate. Once, Kunk became upset because Bordwell didn’t reply to some of his e-mails, but Bordwell had consciously not done so because the e-mails contained no questions, only information. Kunk interpreted the nonresponse as being ignored. Tensions came to a head: Kunk threatened to fire Bordwell, giving him another chance only after Bordwell filled out a self-analysis tool to evaluate his strengths and weaknesses and affirmed his desire to stay in command.

  It wasn’t just Bordwell, however. Kunk was hammering all the company commanders. The captains became timid decision-makers, avoided speaking in meetings or otherwise attracting attention, and generally steered clear of Kunk as much as they could. Several first sergeants, concerned that Kunk seemed bent on purposely embarrassing their commanders, banded together to have an intervention with Sergeant Major Edwards. You need to tell Colonel Kunk that he needs to cut it out, they told Edwards. He is undermining our commanders and they’re second-guessing everything they do. In combat, that can be deadly. Edwards told them that he would see what he could do, but they never heard back from him, and they never discerned a noticeable change in Kunk’s style.

  Later in the summer, Bravo and Charlie and much of the battalion staff went on another war-game exercise at the National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin, California. Again, there were problems and misunderstandings. First Sergeant Largent and Lieutenant Colonel Kunk got into a private conversation and, Largent thought at the time, they began talking confidentially, one old-timer to another. Largent thought, as the senior first sergeant in the battalion, he could give some honest feedback to Kunk that would be both off the record and taken to heart.

  “What do you think the problem is?” Kunk asked Largent.