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

by Jim Frederick

  Around this time, the Iron Claw convoy arrived at FOB Lutufiyah. Word was circulating at all levels about what had happened, and some of the Charlie men were getting heated.

  “They fucking shot up our guys!” some of them yelled. “They killed our own dudes!”

  Dougherty called the Iron Claw platoon leader into his office and said to him between deep breaths, “I know this was an accident, but there is a lot of anger here right now. So you and all of your guys need to be out of here and out of the way. You guys need to go to your trucks and stay there.”

  In all, six Charlie Company soldiers were hurt and Staff Sergeant Jason Fegler died. Extensive investigations followed. The Iron Claw gunner was exonerated for following proper escalation of force procedures even though there was no standard, brigade-wide night recognition signal in place at that time. If anything, the reports found areas of fault with the Charlie convoy for using closed radio frequencies and because they had taped their Humvees’ headlights square to look more like Iraqi vehicles—a tactic that has obvious benefits and drawbacks. The investigating officer found only U.S. shell casings along the route and did not find any bullet holes on the vehicles’ sides and rear, concluding that there had not been any insurgent fire that night. Kunk refused to recommend any of the Charlie men for Bronze Stars with Valor medals or any other awards for their actions because he concurred that there was no enemy fire at all that night—something that the Charlie men involved in that incident passionately claim there was. “All the written reports saying there were no enemies involved? That’s bullshit,” said Shoaf. “We started shooting because there were some dudes shooting in our direction before any of this occurred.”

  Fegler’s memorial was held on November 11 at FOB Mahmudiyah. The battalion typically held a memorial service within a week after a soldier died. They were simple but emotional affairs. Kunk would say a few words, the company commander would say a few words, there would be a few Bible readings, a few hymns, a friend would give a remembrance, and the chaplain would give a homily. Soldiers, two by two, would pay their respects to the classic soldier memorial erected on a dais—the soldier’s helmet perched atop his rifle, its barrel stuck to the ground, with his dog tags hanging from it and his boots in front. The hardest part for most soldiers was the final roll call, when the first sergeant would call the names of the platoon’s soldiers and they would shout back, “Here, Sergeant!” Until he got to “Fegler! … Staff Sergeant Fegler! … Staff Sergeant Jason Fegler!” Anyone who had resisted crying until now was usually in tears.

  Transportation from MacKenzie, Munger, and Smith’s memorial had been the occasion of Fegler’s death. And, like a daisy chain of carnage, transportation from Fegler’s memorial became the setting for another major casualty. As the Bravo Company convoy mounted up following the memorial, Executive Officer Habash asked First Sergeant Skidis if his truck had an extra slot. Sure, get in, Skidis said. Habash headed for the front right passenger seat, the customary place for the man with the highest rank. But the left rear door on this truck didn’t open, he remembered, so he climbed across the truck’s interior to that seat. Skidis took the front right spot.

  Just before 10:00 p.m., the Humvee hit an IED on Route Fat Boy just north of Yusufiyah. There was heat, flash, and confusion. Habash remembers everything going white and then black, and, for a moment, none of his senses were working. Unable to process any data, he asked himself, “Am I dead?” Reality reasserted itself within seconds, however, as he saw and smelled the cab, which was filled with smoke.

  The driver was yelling, “What do I do? What do I do?”

  Between his screams of pain, Skidis yelled, “Just go! Go! Just drive!” Safely past the kill zone, they assessed quickly that no one was mortally wounded, but the truck was on fire. They stopped and extinguished the flames, pulled security, and a QRF from Yusufiyah came to relieve them. One soldier had a sprained wrist, but the blast had pulverized Skidis’s calf. He was in excruciating pain. The explosion had not penetrated the door, but the concussive force of the shock wave was so powerful, the door wall hit Skidis’s leg like a hammer, and now his lower leg was swelling fast. The head medic diagnosed it as compartment syndrome, a serious condition in which so much blood is pouring into the relatively inelastic leg muscles that surgery is required to relieve the pressure. Skidis was medevaced to Baghdad and then home, where he would endure seven surgeries to regain almost 100 percent use of his leg. Less than three weeks after Bravo had lost one of its platoon leaders, its senior enlisted man was out of the fight too.

  8

  Communication Breakdowns

  THE MOUNTING PRESSURES of combat made encounters with Kunk even more stressful than they had been in garrison. Kunk had three meetings with company leadership every week, one each with the company commanders, company first sergeants, and company executive officers. Many attendees loathed them since so much of them involved Kunk yelling erratically at various people for a variety of reasons. “His reaction to everything was the same,” remarked Charlie’s first sergeant, Dennis Largent. “If you lost a soldier, or if you had cigarette butts on the FOB, it was the same reaction. He would explode on you. He would just lose his mind, which made his whole leadership style just totally ineffective.”

  The meetings frequently started with the tedious but necessary minutiae of war fighting: How many trucks were running? How many suspected insurgents had been detained? How many weapons caches had been found? But something along the way would set Kunk off. The company commanders would joke among themselves before the meetings started: Did you hear that sound? Who’s the Kunk Gun traversing on today? Everybody got Kunked once in a while, but early on a pattern was established: Goodwin and Dougherty got Kunked all the time. It was very direct and very negative. Kunk yelled that they were shitbags; everything they did was fucked up. Sometimes, after the meeting, he would haul one or the other of them into his office to yell at them privately, although it wasn’t really private because the whole episode could be heard down the hall. Bordwell, who started the deployment on such shaky ground, had quickly rehabilitated himself into the battalion star, while the predeployment favorites suddenly became the problem cases. The company commanders routinely had small debriefing sessions among themselves afterward, just to decompress and assess what had happened in there. “We would sit down with Goodwin and just let him vent, the guy was just beat down,” remembered Bordwell. “Every time he went up there, it was a public whipping session.”

  Many of the company commanders and first sergeants didn’t see Sergeant Major Edwards as any help in turning the battalion into a well-run unit. In many battalions, intentionally or not, the lieutenant colonel and the sergeant major usually assume a good cop/bad cop act. One half of the duo is the hard guy, and the other balances as the more approachable one. In this battalion, however, both were bad cops. “Both assumed the negative role,” explained Bordwell. Many of the lower-ranking soldiers found Edwards to be an ineffectual yes-man. “The battalion sergeant major is supposed to be the guy that when I have a problem, and my first sergeant can’t fix it, I can go to the sergeant major, and he will go to the commander and say, ‘This is a problem. This needs to be fixed,’” said Bravo 1st Platoon’s Chris Payne. “And that did not happen. Or, if it did happen, he wasn’t any good at it.”

  Kunk threatened to fire both Dougherty and Goodwin within the first few months of arrival and several times before the year was through. These were not idle, motivational threats. He made moves. He passed the recommendations up to Ebel, but Ebel would always say no, there was no reason to fire them, and there were no captains in reserve anyway, so you had to work with what you had. When Kunk made his first serious attempt to fire Goodwin, because he perceived that the captain was not moving fast enough to install a piece of radio-relay equipment at the JSB, Goodwin decided he now had three enemies on his hands. “I had Al Qaeda, and I had the Iraqis. Not so much as an enemy, but I had to deal with them on a daily basis,” he said. “And I had
Battalion. That’s who my enemies were.”

  Many company-level leaders were concerned about the command climate, and Headquarters and Headquarters Company commander Shawn Umbrell continued to try to mediate between the captains and Kunk, but those efforts were frustrating. “I couldn’t understand why a battalion commander would have such a hard time building a team,” he said. “If you continuously crush their spirit, they are going to be timid, wondering if everything they do will earn them another ass chewing. It had an impact on the way those guys operated.”

  But Kunk did not see any problem with the battalion atmosphere. “I believe it was an open, honest command climate where you could come if you needed help. I thought there was an open and honest dialogue back and forth. I mean, could it be contentious? Yes. But trying to understand the whole environment there and the complexities of it was very challenging.”

  Delta commander Lou Kangas felt that was true—for him, anyway. “I personally felt like I had support. I would go to the boss with bad news and tell him what I was doing about it, and I was treated positively,” he said. “Colonel Kunk and the sergeant major supported me and my first sergeant for the most part. Now, other companies are guaranteed to say something dramatically different.”

  Umbrell tried to convince Kunk to reconsider some of his perceptions of his other subordinates, but Kunk frequently ended discussions with one of his favorite phrases: “Sometimes perception is reality, Shawn.” Umbrell found there wasn’t much he could say once Kunk had rested on that position; the way Kunk saw things equaled reality.

  As the battalion’s operations officer, the man who actually wrote the orders, Major Rob Salome contended that Kunk’s intentions were clear; Charlie and Bravo simply failed to meet them, and that was the problem. “Everyone got a Task and Purpose,” he explained. “Some people can look at the Mission Statement and the Commander’s Intent, and then the Task and Purpose, and tie all those things together to see how it achieves the mission. Some guys didn’t have the ability to make those critical links. One thing that you learn in Ranger School is how it all ties together. And John didn’t have that experience to lean on, so I had to become more and more descriptive as we went through the year. To the point where I was writing extremely descriptive Mission Statements where I put not only Task and Purpose, but a full Who, What, When, Where, and Why so there was no misunderstanding about what I was trying to say.”

  As he tried to manage both Goodwin and Dougherty, however, Salome discerned a distinct difference between them. “If I saw that John had done something that I thought was just wrong, and I said, ‘John, what were you thinking, man? That’s just dumb,’ he’d reply, ‘Sir, I know. I’m screwed up. I shouldn’t have done it that way. What can I do to fix it?’ Very apologetic and very submissive. But if I called Bill and had the same discussion, it was, ‘No, sir. We are not screwed up. We’ve never been screwed up. We did the right thing and I’ll tell you why.’”

  With this pressure bearing down on him, Goodwin became increasingly filled with self-doubt. He was not the most confident leader to begin with. According to Salome, Goodwin needed to have his every decision validated, which was fine when everyone shared a headquarters. But being physically removed from the battalion, and with battalion-Bravo relations going poorly from day one, Goodwin frequently seemed at a loss, without initiative, or even a firm grasp of what was going on in his sector.

  First Sergeant Skidis and First Lieutenant Habash had supported Goodwin the best they could. They not only had run a big portion of the company’s affairs, they had become his sounding board and confidants. Now, however, with Skidis hurt, Goodwin was even more at sea. Sergeant First Class Andrew Laskoski, who had been the battalion’s scout platoon sergeant, came in to replace Skidis, but it was hard to match the degree to which Skidis had run things and the degree to which Goodwin had relied upon him.

  Soldiers loathed the traffic control points for a variety of reasons. They hated the very idea of them because they despised being tied down to a fixed position. Everything they had ever been trained to do, every piece of Army doctrine they had internalized, told them that the key to the Army’s lethality was its ability to maneuver and fire, maneuver and fire. If this was the heart of bad-guy country, they wanted to actually go hunt bad guys, not play crossing guard. As Squad Leader Eric Lauzier put it, “If we were supposed to control the area, we said let’s go seize control of it, not sit around waiting to get hit. Let’s do patrols, set up ambushes and observation positions, do recon, control the tempo. Let’s put the pressure on them, instead of the reverse.”

  But not only were the TCPs static, they were undermanned. There was never any consensus about just how many men there should be at each position. Before late June 2006, Kunk issued no written guidance to the companies on staffing requirements at the TCPs, and Goodwin never issued written guidance to the platoons. Recollections of what the verbal guidance was varies widely. A squad at each position was the preference, but with four or five TCPs to cover, and with the company depleted through casualties and mandatory midtour leaves, that almost never happened. Add in missions that spontaneously arose—whether BDAs (battle damage assessments), Quick Reaction Forces, or investigating something suspicious that somebody at Bravo’s headquarters had seen on the J-Lens—and it was not uncommon for a TCP to have just three or four soldiers for an extended period of time.

  Squad leaders routinely received ad hoc mission assignments over the radio. The sergeant would frequently radio back to say that he only had five, or six, or seven guys total, and that he was the only NCO there. He would ask: Do you really want me to leave three guys at the TCP, and none of them a sergeant? Affirmative, would come the response. Do the mission. “Now you are going a click and a half to two clicks out in the bush with four guys,” Lauzier said. “You need four guys just to carry one casualty. What am I going to do if we get hit out there? Or the TCP gets hit and there are three guys there? You are screwed.”

  The TCPs were also shockingly underfortified. After 1st Platoon’s initial several-day rotation at the TCPs, platoon sergeant Phil Miller went to Goodwin to complain. Specifically, he wanted to get rid of TCP2, which he thought was a death trap. “I told Captain Goodwin that it’s in the open, there’s no cover, it’s only a click from TCP1,” he recalled. “So what do I gotta do? What would you like to see happen at that TCP to get rid of it?” Goodwin told Miller that he was worried about the canal running under the TCP. If it was undefended, insurgents could lay an IED big enough to make the road completely impassable. “So, the next time we went out to the TCPs, I took seventy-five strands of wire down there and told Sergeant Nelson, ‘You need to make sure no one can get anywhere near this canal.’”

  Nelson and his squad did as they were told. “We got it all done, and I told Goodwin, TCP2’s good to go. You can’t get anywhere near that fucking canal now, that bitch is locked down.” But TCP2 stayed. “Well, then I was pissed,” Miller said. “Because I was told one thing, and now I’m being told another. I don’t know whose call it was, but my big thing is if you’re fighting on the ground, it should be your decision.”

  The overwhelming majority of interactions with locals at the TCPs were routine, just men and women and kids trying to get wherever they were going and be on their way. But there were enough odd or disconcerting interchanges from the start to make the whole experience tense and unnerving, all the time. Sometimes it was like the Iraqis were testing them. Sometimes it seemed like a car would pass the stop signs or disobey a stop order from a soldier just to see how fast the soldier would resort to a warning shot. When they were back at the FOB, the soldiers loved reading in the news about how Iraqis were being terrorized at checkpoints because they were unfamiliar with how roadblocks worked or, since so many Iraqis were illiterate, they couldn’t read the warning signs. What utter bullshit, they would exclaim. After two and a half years, every single fucking Iraqi knows exactly what a checkpoint is, they would shout, and exactly how they work. Ninety-ni
ne times out of a hundred, they said, if there was a car speeding for the no-go line, that Iraqi was doing it on purpose.

  Iraqi men would loiter around the TCPs. It was obvious to the soldiers that they were doing recon on how the checkpoint operated. If you sent someone out to go talk to them, they would slink away, or if you happened to sidle up to them before they could get away, they would turn as friendly as could be.

  “Oh, hello, Meester. Very good. USA, number one!” they would say, all smiles. Likewise, it was common for a car or truck that had been waiting in line to pull out of the queue and speed away as soon as the driver could verify that full searches were in effect. That is exactly the kind of car that sergeants would love to send a team to follow, but there were rarely enough guys at a TCP to do that, so they just had to let them drive off. Other times, the soldiers would get scowls and get into scuffles with men pulled from cars, obviously humiliated, obviously pissed off, either about the rough way they were being handled or perhaps about the fact that their women were being looked at, commented on, talked to, ogled. Sometimes an Iraqi man would actually push a soldier. Sometimes there would be an interpreter to try to smooth emotions on each side, but often not. Soldiers couldn’t figure out why they got any resistance at all. The power dynamic at that moment was not exactly equal. But when they did get attitude, many soldiers found that a swift and solid jab to the kidney was very useful in extracting maximum compliance.