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

by Jim Frederick

  “There is no way we can do that with Galloway,” Eidson responded.

  “You have to,” said Goodwin. “There is no one—repeat, no one—who can come get you.” Luckily, a convoy of U.S. and Iraqi platoons happened to be passing by. They stopped and formed a chain of about a dozen Americans and Iraqis to yank Galloway from his seat. They reloaded everybody into the Humvees to catch the medevac that was now en route to Yusufiyah.*

  It was not lost on anyone: The casualties just kept mounting. Every week or two, they were losing someone, or multiple people—frequently leaders—to injuries or death. The average was about one a week. Lieutenant Ben Britt was the only platoon leader left in Bravo Company, and while he hid it from the lower-enlisted soldiers, Eidson’s injury shook Britt badly.

  “I just know I’m next,” he told Yribe and Lauzier that night. “It’s bad juju to be a lieutenant,” he said. “My number is up.” They told him that you can’t talk like that, but they viewed Britt’s pessimism as a significant change. He had always been the one to tell the most depressed, fatalistic, negative soldiers to always look at the odds—even in a war zone, he would often counsel them, the numbers are always with you. Far more people come back than ever get killed, and it almost always is the other guy who gets it.

  The feeling that death was certain was becoming pervasive throughout the platoon, and it was spreading like a panic. More and more men started to believe that they simply weren’t coming home. Some of the men say drinking in the ranks was becoming fairly common around late December. It is difficult to judge just how pervasive the drinking was, but it was common enough that just about everyone in 1st Platoon under the position of squad leader acknowledged that it was happening, even if they denied taking part. More than a few soldiers were sneaking drinks to cope with the stress, to take the edge off, to fall asleep, to calm their nerves.

  Booze was always on offer in Iraq, even in the Triangle of Death. There were plenty of IAs or interpreters who were happy to procure bottles of whiskey or gin or even pills or hash for any soldier who wanted them. A lot of Iraqis were users themselves, often on the job. In addition to their drinking and smoking habits, IA soldiers were also enthusiastic consumers of pornography. Anyone who thinks that Iraq is a Muslim puritan stronghold where nobody drinks or does drugs is sorely mistaken. Many Iraqis enjoy a stiff drink (or several), and it is not outlandish to speculate that part of the reason Iraqi society ultimately rejected Al Qaeda was because they were simply not going to live by its teetotaler code.

  While many men within 1st Platoon were having trouble adjusting to the casualties the unit incurred, the incessant operations tempo, and the constant threat of violence, Private First Class Steven Green was reacting particularly badly. He had always been a loudmouth, a malcontent, a racist, and a misogynist. He was fond of quoting a line by Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate general and first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan: “To me, war means fighting, and fighting means killing.”

  But the day Nelson and Casica died he had snapped. That was when he gave up even pretending to support any notion of peacekeeping, society-building, or being nice to Iraqis. From then on out, all he cared about was killing them. This was well known, and not something he attempted to hide, even from superiors.

  That, in itself, was not necessarily exceptional. Many of the men by this point hated Iraqis and many would offhandedly opine that the whole country needed to be leveled, or the only good Iraqi was a dead Iraqi. But only Green talked about killing Iraqis all the time, incessantly, obsessively. Only Green talked about wanting to capture Hadjis, flay them, and hang them from telephone wires. Only he talked about burning them alive so they had to smell their own flesh cooking. Everybody was frustrated that the enemy was cowardly, but Green had a harder time accepting that this was simply the nature of this war: U.S. soldiers had to behave more honorably than the enemy. Why, he sincerely wanted to know, did Americans have to restrain themselves when the insurgents did not?

  At the prodding of Staff Sergeant Miller, Green went to see Lieutenant Colonel Marrs from the Combat Stress team, who was visiting from FOB Mahmudiyah on December 21. The intake evaluation form she filled out while talking to him that day is a horror show of ailments and dysfunctions. In the entry marked “Chief Complaint,” she quoted him: “It is fucking pointless.” Green told Marrs he was a victim of mental and physical childhood abuse by his mother and brother, he was an adolescent drug and alcohol abuser who drank every day between 8th and 10th grade, and he had been arrested several times. He told Marrs he had been suffering from symptoms of instability, extreme moods, and angry outbursts, including punching walls, ever since the deaths of MacKenzie and Munger. (Her notations indicate he said their deaths happened about a month before, but it was actually seven weeks.) Green told Marrs he was experiencing all of the following: sadness, difficulty falling asleep, nightmares involving violence and the death of his friends, anxiety, worry, increased heart rate, tightness in his chest, shortness of breath, feelings of helplessness, being easily startled, being quick to anger, and thoughts that he would not make it out of combat alive.

  In her own observations, Marrs noted that Green had abnormal eye contact, including staring, and that his mood was angry. Green told Marrs he was having suicidal and homicidal ideations, especially thoughts about killing Iraqi civilians. On his one-page intake sheet, Marrs noted his wanting to kill Iraqis four separate times. One entry states, “Interests: None other than killing Iraqis.”

  She diagnosed him with Combat and Operational Stress Reaction (COSR), an Army term to describe typical and transient reactions to the stresses of warfare. COSR is not a condition recognized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV, the bible of the psychiatry profession, something the Army is well aware of, since it doesn’t even consider COSR an ailment. As one Army journal article puts it, “Those with COSR are not referred to as ‘patients,’ but are described as having ‘normal reactions to an abnormal event.’” Thus believing Green’s psychological state to be normal, Marrs prescribed him a small course of Seroquel, an antipsychotic drug that also treats insomnia, and recommended that he follow up with another visit (though she didn’t specify when), and she sent him back to his unit.

  “I told her, ‘My main preoccupation in life is wanting to kill Iraqis, whoever they are, wherever they are,’” Green recalled. “She said, ‘Okay, here’s these pills that will help you sleep, and we’ll probably be around.’ I don’t think she thought I was serious, even though I was going out of my way to be like, ‘Look, I’m serious about this.’”

  According to Goodwin, Marrs reported back to him that Green “needed a little bit more counseling.” Goodwin, like most of Green’s superiors, thought Green’s problems were manageable anger issues that could be dealt with, he said, “through time, through grief counseling, if necessary, medication, through Combat Stress, and supervision.” When Staff Sergeant Bob Davis, a Combat Stress technician with a reserve unit out of Boston, arrived in January 2006 as part of the team to relieve Marrs’s team, she told them about Green. “She warned us that, given his experiences and the things that he’s done, he might be someone we’d want to follow up with.” Despite this warning, they would not see Green until March 20, 2006.

  While Sergeant First Class Phil Blaisdell and his 3rd Platoon suffered countless frustrations with Iraqis who would lie and stonewall, he always tried to put himself in their shoes, and he tried to get his men to think that way too. One day, a local told him that the traffic control points were particularly onerous in the mornings because people were trying to get to work in Baghdad. He had never thought of that before, that people were commuting. But from then on, he tried to get the checkpoints open by 6:00 a.m. to handle what he quickly noticed was, yes, a morning rush north. On particularly hot days, when the backups were long, he’d have his men hand out bottles of water to the waiting cars. He tried to talk to the people and explain to them what was going on to the best of his ability. Wheneve
r he was at the JSB, he would run up and down Malibu as much as possible, talking to the Quarguli sheikhs, trying to solve their problems, even if they were small ones. If the roads were closed but they had a harvest of apples they wanted to get to Baghdad, they would call Blaisdell. “I’d say, ‘Okay, but I got to search the cars, though. Is that okay?’ They’d be like, ‘That’s fine.’ We worked together on shit. It made all the difference in the world.”

  Getting his guys to not give in to hate no matter how frustrated they were, or how badly some of their friends got hurt, was by far his biggest challenge. “Soldiers can turn negative in a heartbeat,” he remarked. “‘Fuck this! Fuck these people!’ People would get mad that they were not telling us information. But you know what? If I was them, I wouldn’t tell an American anything either!” He tried to make his men understand that the main reason Iraqis were uncooperative was that they were scared to death for their own lives and they did not believe that the United States was capable of protecting them. When a squad of Americans rolled up at a house and asked for info, and if an insurgent then got nabbed, every single other insurgent in town knew who had squealed, and there would be reprisals. Blaisdell started getting informants to text him, or to drop notes out of car windows at TCPs, rather than risk talking to him in person. He told his men not to tear apart people’s houses, not because he was a softy but because Iraqis are not stupid: they knew houses were getting searched regularly now, so the ones who happened to be insurgents pretty much stopped hiding incriminating materials in their homes months ago. This was another reason he told his men to be careful when they found a cache of weapons in someone’s yard. Some Iraqis had started framing neighbors they had grudges against. And then, once that started happening, others figured out that by saying they had been framed, they could still stash guns in their own backyard. See? It was all a mind game, he explained, and it was dizzying. But the worst mistake you could make was to think that the Iraqis were not several steps ahead of you.

  Blaisdell had the same lack of patience for soldiers slapping people around. “There’s a twelve-, thirteen-year-old kid in the house, and if I saw a soldier slap the father around, I’d ask that soldier, ‘Hey, what would you do if some guy came in your home and slapped your dad around?’ He’d always say, ‘I’d fucking kill him.’ Okay, so what makes you any different than that kid right there? And you know what he’s going to do now? He’s going to go plant an IED. And it might not be you that gets killed. But some other soldier is dead because you had to be a tough guy.”

  Second Platoon’s Sergeant First Class Jeremy Gebhardt was quieter than Blaisdell and did not have quite the local politician in him that his counterpart did. He did not glad-hand the locals as much, but he believed in and worked on some of the larger infrastructure missions, such as getting schools reopened and water treatment plants up and running. But he, like Blaisdell, considered managing the attitudes and morals of his men to be the biggest part of his job. Anytime he heard complaints about the Iraqis—or about superior officers, for that matter—he snuffed it out quick.

  “You need to shut the fuck up and focus,” he would say.

  * Galloway survived but lost both his left limbs, and Eidson, the third Bravo leader to be injured in less than three months, was sent back to the States, where he underwent several surgeries that restored function to his arm.

  13

  Britt and Lopez

  TWO DAYS AFTER Eidson and Galloway got hit by an IED, Britt was still in a melancholy mood.

  “I just have a feeling that I’m not going to make it back from here,” he said.

  “Sir, you can’t think like that,” Yribe responded. “It just doesn’t seem like I’m going to be able to make it back with all the people that are dying.”

  “If it’s your time, it’s your time,” Yribe said. “There’s nothing anybody can do about it.”

  One of the day’s major missions was another clearance of Caveman. Bravo First Sergeant Andrew Laskoski, Britt, and a mixture of 1st Platoon’s 3rd and 1st Squads were assigned to accompany an Iron Claw team. In the medic area of FOB Yusufiyah, there was a dry erase board where all the medics were supposed to write their whereabouts. Since he knew they were going on Caveman that day, Specialist Collin Sharpness wrote, “Getting Blown Up.”

  They started around 8:00 a.m. Following Iron Claw’s big rigs as they slowly inched west on the north side of Caveman, the men walked behind, looking for IED triggerman hides or caches along the side of the road, walking cloverleaf patterns for five hours straight in the drenching heat. The Humvees, each with a driver and a gunner pulling security, followed behind them. Around 1:30 p.m.—whoosh!—an RPG screamed past them and narrowly missed one of the Iron Claw vehicles. A few soldiers tracked the flight path across the canal, over the south side of the road, to where they saw an assembly of some type, a tube from which it looked like the RPG had been fired remotely. As Lieutenant Britt and the Iron Claw lieutenant were discussing their next move, three mortar rounds landed nearby in quick succession, one hitting the right rear quadrant of the lead Iron Claw vehicle, disabling it. The Iron Claw lieutenant said his crew needed to go back to Yusufiyah for repairs before they could do any more clearing.

  Everybody started turning around as Britt called the situation up to the TOC. The Iron Claw convoy was long gone, and the Bravo vehicles were almost back at TCP4 when Goodwin told Britt to go get the mount. But that wasn’t feasible, Britt responded, because it was on the other side of the canal. Go get it, said Goodwin. That is a no-go, said Britt, it is on the other side of the second road as well, and that road had not been cleared. Britt asked if it was okay for them to backtrack all the way from the beginning and clear the south side of Caveman up to the mount. They had already been out there six hours, Goodwin calculated, and one Iron Claw vehicle was now damaged. To get more clearance vehicles out there could take well past nightfall. Goodwin refused. Find the closest bridge, get in there, get the thing, and get out, Goodwin said.

  “I don’t care if you have to swim across the fucking canal,” he insisted, “but you will get me that tube.”

  “Yes, sir,” Britt responded.

  The men saw a small footbridge about two hundred yards northwest of the spot where they first turned around. Britt assembled a team of about eight men, including Laskoski and Yribe. They’d have to walk across the bridge, track back southeast another three hundred and fifty yards, pick up the mount, and return. They headed out. Just as they crossed the canal, they saw a blue Kia Bongo, a kind of small, high-cab pickup truck that is ubiquitous in Iraq, driving toward them from the southeast on the south side of Caveman. The soldiers wanted the Bongo to stop well in advance of where the RPG mount was, so they started yelling and making hand gestures to stop. The Bongo would not stop. Now it was approaching the RPG’s kill area. Laskoski ordered one of the soldiers to fire a warning shot. He did, but the Bongo still didn’t stop. The soldier fired another. With the truck about to enter the area, and still defying the warning shots, Laskoski ordered the men to open fire on the truck. They sprayed it with dozens of bullets, yet it continued to drive all the way through the RPG tube’s area, while under fire, until it rolled to a stop fifty yards past it.

  Laskoski said, “We’re going to have some dead bodies in that truck.” The group headed down to check it out. Astonishingly, there were no dead bodies, just an older man in the passenger seat, with a gunshot wound to his right calf, and a younger man, the driver, who was completely unscathed. The older guy was some sort of Quarguli sheikh, carrying an ID card that Kunk had distributed to local grandees.

  Britt said, “All right, let’s go get this thing.” Laskoski and some other soldiers hung back to deal with the men in the Bongo, while Britt, Yribe, and Sergeant Roman Diaz headed out to get the RPG tube. Thirty-three-year-old Specialist William Lopez-Feliciano from Quebradillas, Puerto Rico, who had arrived at Bravo only three weeks earlier, was standing there, tentative, not knowing which way to go. They were already fifty or sixt
y yards on their way, but Yribe turned back and yelled, “Yo, Lopez, let’s go,” and he scrambled to catch up.

  The four men walked closely together. They were bunching up, which wasn’t safe. Yribe was up front, but Britt, with several feet of antenna sticking out of his backpack, was almost on top of him.

  Yribe turned around and said to all of them, “Hey, back off me. Get separated.” He turned around again, and said to Britt, “Back off me, sir.” Britt fell in behind Yribe and Diaz, with Lopez bringing up the rear.

  Then everything went black. A deeply buried IED with several hundreds pounds of explosives exploded directly under where Britt and Lopez were standing. The blast was so massive that soldiers heard the explosion in Lutufiyah ten miles away. Britt was thrown fifty feet into the air, cartwheeling “like a rag doll,” remembered one soldier. Within a second or two, his body had plummeted back to Earth and into the canal. The blast ripped Lopez into two pieces, bisecting him at the waist. The pressure wave sucked the earplugs out of Yribe’s ears and covered him and Diaz in dirt, smoke, and human tissue. The bomb was so big that all four of them should have been dead, but something about how the IED was set focused almost all of its energy straight up rather than out. Diaz and Yribe were relatively unharmed, but they didn’t know that yet. At first they were just trying to figure out if they were still alive.

  When Yribe shook himself awake, he couldn’t tell how long he had been out. It must have been only a couple of seconds. Diaz was on one knee, right behind him.

  He grabbed Diaz and yelled, “Are you okay?” Diaz said yes. They started to run back west where Laskoski was heading toward them. Laskoski gripped Yribe by the vest, but Yribe couldn’t make out what he was saying. Yribe was trying to talk, but his mouth was full of dirt, so he started spitting it out, right into Laskoski’s face.