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

by Jim Frederick

  “Frankly, sir, you are being a dick,” Largent responded. “To the men, to the commanders, to everyone,” he said. “You are just angry all the time. You need to back off them a little bit.” Largent later reckoned this candor was a tremendous miscalculation. Kunk, Largent concluded, did not want an honest assessment, and the conversation was not a private consultation, because for as long as the two worked together from then on, Kunk would frequently, publicly declare, “Well, that’s because First Sergeant Largent thinks I’m a dick! Isn’t that right, First Sergeant? I’m just a dick, so what do I know?”

  As the senior company commander, Umbrell also felt a responsibility to try to be a mediator between Kunk and the captains. Once, before deployment, he tried to approach Kunk about his leadership style. He referenced a book about leadership that Colonel Ebel had assigned them to help him make his point. That book, The Servant, by James Hunter, uses the story of Jesus to demonstrate that leadership has nothing to do with ordering people around because you have more power than they do. True leadership, the book says, inspires people to follow you because you serve their psychological need for purpose, value, and direction. Told as a parable, there is even a drill sergeant character in the book who allows the author to tackle all the accusations that this thesis is just a bunch of feel-good mumbo-jumbo irrelevant to the tough realities of today’s corporations or armed services. One passage addresses the sergeant directly, saying, “The leader has a responsibility to hold people accountable. However, there are several ways to point out deficiencies while allowing people to keep their dignity.”

  In private one day, Umbrell said to Kunk, “The way that you’re talking to the company commanders right now is creating an environment where nobody wants to come talk to you. The book that Colonel Ebel is having us read, what that author says about leadership, you are doing the opposite.” The very next morning, Kunk showed up with photocopies of material he had pulled out of another leadership manual that talked about how there were several different but effective leadership styles, including the rigid authoritarian. “So that’s where we were,” Umbrell recalled. “He’s not changing. He’s not changing. That’s how it all started going bad for the command climate.”

  Kunk never had problems with his own staff to the degree he did with the companies. Majors Salome and Wintrich were not effusive in their praise of Kunk, but they eschewed direct criticism. “It’s not an isolated leadership style,” said Wintrich. “There’s not just one guy in the Army who will poke you in the chest and say, ‘You know what? You’re not doing a good enough job right now. You need to pick it up.’ It’s not always a pleasant leadership style to be around, but it does often achieve results.” Other subordinates not in charge of his line units, such as the medical captain and the intelligence captain, found him to be a praiseworthy, even inspiring leader. This is a discrepancy not lost on others. “For Tom Kunk, there were two types of people,” said First Lieutenant Brian Lohnes, who was leader of the battalion’s scout platoon and also worked in Major Salome’s operations office. “There were ‘his boys,’ and then there were ‘the other people.’ And if you were one of ‘the other people,’ it didn’t matter how great your performance was or what you did, he was going to punch you in the balls every chance that he had. Every time you sat down for a meeting, he was going to embarrass you.”

  Upon returning from NTC in August, the battalion staff finally got a full briefing on their mission. They were heading to the Triangle of Death. HHC commander Shawn Umbrell wrote in his diary, “6 SEP: Was briefed on battalion sector today. Looks like south of Baghdad, near Mahmudiyah. This is reportedly a rough area. We’ll be going on the offensive within 24 hours of taking the sector. The enemy will be in for a wake-up call. Our boys are ready. We’re prepared to take casualties, we know that’s the cost.”

  The assignment took Kunk by surprise, but he was nothing if not certain about his own abilities. “Ebel said it was the most complex fight, dealing with people, so multifaceted,” he recalled. “It was Iraqi security forces. It was building government. All the different ethnicities. The Sunnis, the Shi’ites. All those competing things. That’s why he chose the 1-502nd, because he felt that I had an incredible grasp for that.”

  Planning was hurried. “We started having daily intel meetings,” said one platoon sergeant. “It was an eye opener. We started realizing that it was time to get your game face on. I remember doing my brief to my men, saying, ‘Okay, you guys wanted to get into the shit, so guess what? Here it is.’” Most of the men had never heard of the towns they were heading to, and the information they were getting from the unit already there was scant. But they did the best they could. “Open-source information is better than classified information, that’s the big joke,” quipped one of the company executive officers. “We did our planning off of Google Earth.”

  In addition to occupying their AO, First Strike had to send soldiers to fulfill two other brigade-wide tasks. Kunk chose one platoon from Charlie to become an Iron Claw team—one of several IED-hunting platoons that roamed the brigade’s territory in massive, armored IED-detecting trucks with giant digging arms on the front, which inspired the teams’ name.

  Kunk was also required to provide 36 NCOs and officers to make a MiTT team. MiTT teams (military transition teams) were responsible for training Iraqi soldiers by living, working, and patrolling with Iraqi Army units around the clock. Kunk chose two dozen key leaders from Alpha Company to be the core of the MiTT team, shoring up the ranks with soldiers from the other companies. Bordwell interpreted this move as punishment for being Kunk’s most problematic commander. “I lost my first sergeant, all three rifle platoon leaders, two out of three rifle platoon sergeants, four senior staff sergeant squad leaders, and four team leaders,” Bordwell said. “They pulled the backbone out of my company.”

  As the wheels-up date approached, Umbrell made a final entry in his diary: “29 SEP: Said my good-byes today. One of the hardest things I have ever done. Jacob understands I will be gone for a long time. We all cried. I am happy to finally get started. I can start the countdown now for coming back. Soldiers are in high spirits. The whole outload has been smooth. I’m proud to be a part of all this. Very proud.”

  OCTOBER 2005

  3

  “This Is Now the Most Dangerous Place in Iraq”

  IN THE TWO and a half years since the toppling of Saddam’s regime, the rural outskirts of Baghdad known as South Baghdad had become one of the deadliest locales in the country. In one sense, this was an ignominious destiny for the cradle of civilization. It was here, in Mesopotamia, the land between two rivers, that the great Bronze Age empires of the Sumerians, the Babylonians, and the Hittites invented or solidified advances in farming, writing, astronomy, and mathematics. It was here that nameless poets assembled the legends of Gilgamesh, Hammurabi codified the first set of laws, and Nebuchadnezzar built his hanging gardens. For centuries, Babylon, the ruins of which are just fifty-five miles south of Baghdad and thirty-five miles from Mahmudiyah, would remain a leading city of the world, a place that, Herodotus wrote, “surpasses in splendor any city of the known world.”

  On the other hand, Mesopotamia has also been a perpetual battlefield since before history was recorded, one of the bloodiest and most frequently contested fault lines between the Eastern and Western worlds. An Arab Muslim bastion since the seventh century, when invaders from the south decisively wrested the region away from the Persians, the area also became the locus of the Sunni-Shi’ite schism that continues to this day. All of the major events associated with the split occurred within eighty miles to the south of modern-day Mahmudiyah.

  While Europe languished in the Dark Ages, the Sunni caliphate in Baghdad became the center of the greatest empire Islam ever produced until 1256, when the Mongols sacked the city. The seat of Sunni power moved to Istanbul, where the Ottoman Empire governed the region with a loose hand until the end of World War I, when Britain took control of three Ottoman governorships: Kurdish Mo
sul in the north, Sunni Baghdad in the middle, and Shi’ite Basra to the south. In 1920, amid widespread rebellion, the British handed sovereignty over the three provinces, now called Iraq, to a Sunni ally named Faisal from the Hashemite tribe. Monarchy was no aid to stability, however. Fifty-eight governments ruled Iraq between 1921 and 1958, until revolutionaries overthrew and executed King Faisal II.

  In 1968, the Sunni-controlled socialist Baath Party returned to power for the second time in five years, led by President Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr and his right-hand man, Saddam Hussein. Saddam began eliminating opponents, and when al-Bakr resigned suddenly in 1979, citing failing health, he was sworn in within hours. He quickly initiated a series of purges and executions of anyone who threatened his grip on power, including influential Shi’ite clerics.

  Saddam instituted a state that was nominally socialist and appealed to nationalism, but it was really a personality cult. In 1980 he launched a war against Iran, which would last eight years, deplete state coffers, cost a million Iraqi lives, and leave the countries’ boundaries essentially where they started. Then, in 1990, Saddam invaded Kuwait, citing disputes over oil prices. The United States’ response led to the Gulf War, during which Saddam was badly defeated. After years of diplomatic tussles over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the UN Oil-for-Food program, President George W. Bush, buoyed by then-questionable and now-discredited evidence that Saddam was pursuing WMD and aiding Al Qaeda, invaded Iraq in March 2003 and toppled the dictatorship in twenty-one days.

  Saddam had realized the importance of South Baghdad as a gateway to the capital and as the fault line between the Shi’ite south and Sunni midlands. Two of the country’s key highways cross here, making it a transportation and logistics choke point. You cannot easily get into Baghdad from the south without passing first though Lutufiyah, a town of 20,000, and then Mahmudiyah, population 100,000. Likewise, Yusufiyah, a town of 25,000 people seven miles to the west of Mahmudiyah, is a crucial connector between Fallujah and the Syrian border with Iraq’s south. Including all the smaller villages and farmland, population estimates for the region as a whole range between 500,000 and 1 million people. Mahmudiyah has some apartment buildings eight or more stories high and the densely packed atmosphere of a city many times its size. Yusufiyah and Lutufiyah, however, with their dilapidated, low-slung tan buildings and garbage-strewn streets with open, black-water sewers scratched into the mostly unpaved street shoulders, feel smaller than they actually are.

  Seeking a buffer of allies to balance out the Shi’ite urban populations here, early on Saddam instituted a land-grant system and other rewards programs for Sunni families and other political compatriots willing to settle and farm the surrounding countryside. He made enticements particularly sweet for retired military and intelligence officers (who, in Saddam’s time, were mostly Sunni) and politically connected families of soldiers killed in the Iran-Iraq War. To this day, for example, Iraqis call two small villages outside Yusufiyah “Al-Dhubat” and “Al-Shuhada,” which mean, respectively, “The Officers” and “The Martyrs.” Saddam improved the highways and expanded and upgraded the already extensive network of hundreds of miles of canals bringing the water of the Euphrates to the far reaches of the area.

  Some families from Sunni tribes with ancestral ties to the western province of Anbar, such as the Janabis, Quargulis, Ghariris, and Dulaimis, also heeded the call, becoming powerful presences in the area. Saddam gave tribal chiefs large stretches of prime agricultural land, money, and other favors in exchange for little more than passive loyalty. This largesse created wide economic disparity. Many of the houses near the Euphrates, a stronghold of the Quarguli tribe, would qualify as mansions in any country, with expansive, well-manicured yards and lush palm groves, while the Qadisiyah apartments and other housing blocks in Mahmudiyah are slums as abject as anything in poorest Baghdad. In times of unrest, however, Saddam expected repayment. During the failed Shi’ite uprising of 1991, for example, he called upon local Sunnis, especially the Janabis, to curb the rebellion.

  While the area around Yusufiyah and farther west, especially on the banks of the Euphrates, is prime farmland, Saddam turned the region around Lutufiyah into a hub of the Iraqi military-industrial complex. The Medina Division of the Republican Guard and the Hateen Weapons Munitions Complex were headquartered not far to the south, and six miles due west of Lutufiyah was the massive Al-Qaqaa State Establishment—a weapons assembly and storage depot with dozens of bunkers and buildings sprawling across twenty square miles.

  Eight miles west of Yusufiyah town and right on the banks of the Euphrates is the Yusufiyah Thermal Power Plant. The Russian Technopromexport corporation started constructing a 1,680-megawatt natural-gas and fuel-oil power plant on the one-square-mile site in 1989, but work halted in 1991 before the Gulf War. Construction resumed in 2001, but the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian engineers made little progress before ceasing work during the 2003 invasion, and yet again as sectarian violence escalated in 2004. By 2005, it was a wasteland of rusting water tanks and mini-mountains of rebar. Nothing on the site was close to being completed except for a five-story cement hull designed to house the turbines and the hundred-foot-tall smokestack, which was visible for miles around.

  After the invasion, no Americans permanently occupied the region and the power dynamic that had existed for decades was upended. Sunni tribal leaders and other prominent men were unwilling to give up their grip on power, but their mandate, in the form of Saddam Hussein, had vanished. The Shi’ites, meanwhile, with the numbers and momentum finally on their side, were only too willing to take advantage of the power vacuum. First the government and basic services stopped functioning, and then the killing began.

  In South Baghdad, civil war flared almost from the beginning. It started with a lack of law and order and a spate of revenge killings tied to anything from tribal feuds and personal vendettas to a more generalized score-settling by Shi’ites against Sunnis for decades, if not centuries, of repression. By the summer of 2003, however, the burgeoning Sunni insurgency had become more organized, allowing the outnumbered Sunnis to fight back. Two of the most powerful homegrown Sunni insurgency groups were the Islamic Army in Iraq (IAI) and the Mujahideen Army. Like virtually all Iraqi insurgent groups, both denied any fealty to Baathism or nostalgia for Saddam and his regime, even though many of their members are former party grandees, military officers, or other elements of society that were favored under his rule. Both groups’ aims are distinctly political and nationalistic, and while they have become more religiously conservative over time, the roots of their sectarian hatred are not so much because they view Shi’ites as heretics but because they see them as collaborators. Sunni groups retaliated against Shi’ites but also started mounting attacks against American forces, contractors, and any element of what they believed to be a puppet Shi’ite government.

  An early foreign arrival to the area was the thirty-six-year-old vagabond Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.* After the American invasion of Iraq, Zarqawi created a group called Monotheism and Jihad and started spending most of his time in Iraq’s Anbar province and South Baghdad. He didn’t waste any time causing widespread carnage, developing an abiding fondness for suicide car bombings. In a one-month frenzy of violence in August 2003, he planned spectacularly lethal hits on the Jordanian embassy, the UN headquarters in Baghdad, and the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf.

  Thanks to such high-profile attacks—and his gruesome habit of releasing videotaped beheadings over the Internet—Zarqawi’s infamy grew, making him one of the most notorious terrorists in the world. Followers flocked to him. With each one of his well-publicized successes (or American scandals such as Abu Ghraib), more money and men from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria flowed across the Syrian border. In the fall of 2004, Zarqawi joined Al Qaeda, changing the name of Monotheism and Jihad to Al Qaeda in the Land Between Two Rivers, or Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), even though relations between him and Osama bin Laden had been strained ever since they met i
n 1999. From the start, bin Laden found Zarqawi’s extreme hatred of Shi’ites to be particularly divisive. Their rift was a common one in Islamist circles. Bin Laden and Al Qaeda believed that the war against the “far enemies” (the United States, Israel, and Western unbelief in general) was the priority, while Zarqawi insisted that overcoming the “near enemies” (Shi’ites and purportedly apostate Middle East governments such as those in Jordan and Saudi Arabia) was paramount. The alliance was one of convenience for both parties, and it was deeply flawed from the beginning. Zarqawi benefited from the worldwide recognition of the Al Qaeda name and the added credibility it gave him, but he retained operational control of what targets to hit and when. Bin Laden needed a ready-made presence in the place that was quickly becoming the global epicenter of anti-American anger, and it provided an easy way to make sure Zarqawi’s power and prominence did not eclipse his.

  In South Baghdad the interests of Al Qaeda, local insurgencies, and pure tribalism frequently intersected. The number of nationalist insurgent groups similar to but smaller than IAI and the Mujahideen Army was legion, and they were in a constant tumult of mergers, alliances, disputes, spin-offs, and splits. But they found an early and easy ally with Al Qaeda. The Quarguli and Janabi tribes, among others, had interlinking roles in smuggling during Saddam’s time, and Al Qaeda successfully co-opted and exploited those links to build a formidable recruiting and financing pipeline. Near Yusufiyah, for example, an arm of the Sunni Janabi clan had been feuding with the Shi’ite Anbari tribe for a long time. With the Janabis’ help, Al Qaeda expelled dozens of Anbari families from their homes, which AQI turned into safe houses, classrooms, weapons storage areas, and torture chambers.

  Sectarian violence increased. It broadened, becoming systematic, increasingly bloody, and relentless. Sunni gangs forced Shi’ites from their homes. Flyers circulated warning Sunni landowners to get rid of any Shi’ite tenants or both landlord and tenant would be killed. Kidnapping, torture, and murder became everyday events. Bands of masked thugs chased people down in the street, beat them bloody, tied their hands, and executed them. No occasions were off-limits, no tactics were taboo. One suicide bomber drove an ambulance to blow up a Shi’ite wedding party in Yusufiyah, killing four and injuring sixteen.