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

by Jim Frederick

  When he voiced such concerns, he was told that he was whining. Laskoski, for his part, had quickly decided that Gallagher was incompetent and noted deficiencies of not just discipline but combat readiness. “It was the rainy season,” Laskoski said. “Arms and ammunition, you’ve got to keep that maintained twice daily, three times, it doesn’t matter how many times, daily. I looked at some of his vehicles and they were just trashed out. Ammo rusted, commo [communications] gear just not working. That’s unacceptable.”

  Looking more closely at the assignments at the TCPs, Gallagher concluded that he did not have enough men to meet minimum staffing requirements. “When you talk about an Army guard rotation, you are talking about three reliefs,” he explained. And when he arrived, each TCP typically had six, seven, or eight troops. Guard detail alone required three people, with three in relief for every guard position. “So, right there, there are not enough people.”

  And at the TCPs, time not on guard was not really downtime. Soldiers not on guard had to search vehicles and people passing through the checkpoints, do IED sweeps, supervise IAs, and be ready for any ad hoc tasks or emergencies that arose. “You are burning the candle at both ends,” Gallagher admonished. “You can’t ask a guy to pull guard for six hours and then as soon as he gets off guard to go on a six-hour IED sweep.” Similarly, because everyone was already doing something else at the TCPs, it was impossible to reinforce the positions’ pitiful defenses.

  He likewise thought that searching for IEDs on foot was crazy and dangerous and demonstrated contempt for the soldiers’ safety. “You are looking for a large-caliber artillery round that is designed not to be found, and the blast radius of that round exceeds your visual radius,” Gallagher said. Gallagher would clear Sportster using Humvees until he had to be specifically ordered not to. He began butting heads with Sergeant Major Edwards immediately over the issue. “It was a death march,” he asserted. “I told them the way we were doing business was absolutely ridiculous. The exact words I received from the sergeant major were ‘Who are you to question brigade policy?’”

  Even Gallagher’s critics among the soldiers acknowledge that he always led from the front. He never asked his soldiers to do something that he didn’t do. Frequently, he would pull guard himself, just to buy another soldier an hour or two of rest. “He was the only platoon sergeant that would pull guard,” said one. “He’d be like, ‘Yeah, put me up for two night shifts. You guys need to rest too.’”

  And despite how foolhardy he thought the policy was, he led every IED sweep he could. “I was the point man,” he said. “I felt if anyone should be blown up it should be me. I was not going to put soldiers in danger.” He also ranged 1st Platoon’s positions randomly. It was his way to stay connected to every facet of the platoon and keep his soldiers on their toes. “I have been in the Army a long time,” he explained. “I know soldiers act out when there is no leadership. I would try not to let the soldiers know where I was going. I was the variable that nobody knew. It was deliberately built that way so that the soldiers don’t plan on doing things that they are not supposed to do.”

  Once he had fully evaluated the situation, Gallagher became convinced, like many of the others in 1st Platoon, that he was going to die. “My survivability as well as the soldiers’ was very suspect on any given day,” he acknowledged. “My wife asked me the likelihood of my, based on my experience, making it out. I said it was not very good. It’s probably not going to happen.”

  Gallagher had little time at the helm of 1st Platoon before Battalion deemed his tenure a failure. Not a week had gone by before Kunk and Edwards regretted their decision. “Gallagher was not getting his job done,” Kunk said. “Gallagher was falling under the same trap that Miller had. There was an excuse why they were not in uniform, why they didn’t have security.” Circling the battlefield, Kunk and Edwards would see that, again, 1st Platoon didn’t have their helmets on, or were failing in some other way. “So we took corrective actions, we did some teaching, coaching, mentoring,” Kunk said. “We followed up about three days later, and it was worse.” Kunk repeatedly pointed to the success that 2nd and 3rd Platoons were having as proof of Gallagher’s deficiencies. “The other two platoons never had any trouble doing the three missions they had to do,” Kunk said.

  Many members of 1st Platoon insist that if uniform discipline, let alone other more serious discipline breaches, was really an issue, then the sparkle of Blaisdell’s and Gebhardt’s halos had become so strong that Kunk, Edwards, and the rest of the battalion were simply blinded by them. Second and 3rd Platoons, they claimed, dumped their ACU (Army combat uniform) tops when it was too hot or went several days without shaving when it suited them just as often as 1st Platoon did. To the men of 1st Platoon, the battalion’s conviction that they were incompetent now just seemed like a grudge. “Everything that ever went wrong in that entire area was our platoon’s fault,” said 2nd Squad Leader Chris Payne. “We were the only ones ever out of uniform. We were the only ones who took our Kevlars off outside the wire. We were the only ones who did this and the only ones who did that.”

  Compounding Gallagher’s problems was the fact that he and Lieutenant Norton did not get along. Gallagher thought Norton was young and callow, the epitome of the “Joe lover” he despised. He found Norton unprofessional, even treacherous, going behind his back to discuss important matters with Miller or the other squad leaders before he discussed them with him. “I do not know why I was X’ed out of the loop in a very early period,” Gallagher said. “I felt the relationship was sort of doomed from the beginning. I just think Norton’s demeanor, his character, was very immature.”

  Norton didn’t have a huge problem with Gallagher, aside from the fact that he was not impressed with his intelligence, his tactical skills, or his relationship with his men. Coming from Charlie, where he benefited from First Sergeant Largent’s and Sergeant First Class Hayes’s mentoring, he found Gallagher wanting. Norton thought Gallagher was clueless when it came to managing relationships. It is one thing not to want to be a political hustler, Norton observed, but it is another when your sour disposition starts working against your own goals.

  Norton felt he had been put in this position to fix things, not to declare 1st Platoon unfixable, as Gallagher was doing. Emotionally, 1st Platoon was frayed, there was no question about it. But tactically, Norton felt, they were not that bad. They still got up every morning and they went on patrols and they completed their missions. They needed a huge attitude readjustment, obviously. Norton was trying to get the guys to focus more on the Iraqis as people, to consider that man over there as not just another fucking Hadji but as Ali, who owns a falafel shop and loves his kids and has problems because he needs to get to Baghdad and back every week to buy restaurant supplies.

  “I really had to work to convince them, ‘Dude, not everybody out here needs to be killed. Not everybody needs to get the crap kicked out of him. In fact, beating the crap out of people is wrong, you know? Geneva Conventions? Look it up. It’s a concept.’” Norton thought that getting the men to change their focus was an achievable goal, but he was certain that if Gallagher really wanted to get 1st Platoon yanked to the rear, he wasn’t going about it the right way. “Gallagher vocalized it too emotionally and not tactfully at all,” Norton explained, “so it was easy for them to say, ‘Oh, he’s just throwing fuel on their fire.’”

  Around this time, Miller headed up to Striker for a week or so to get a chipped tooth fixed. While there, he started looking for a new job without telling Kunk or Edwards. He bumped into Staff Sergeant Chaz Allen, who was in Battalion’s liaison office with Brigade and was itching to see more action. “I told him that it was rough down there,” Miller recalled. “I asked him what his plans were. He said he was trying to get down there. I asked him did he want to swap?” Allen was all for it. He had been to Kosovo, but he hadn’t deployed for OIF1, so he was eager to get back down on the line.

  Second Brigade’s Command Sergeant Major Brian S
tall called Edwards to say, Miller is up here wanting to know if I have a job for him. This was not a move Kunk took kindly. “Instead of looking us in the eye, like a leader should, and being honest and straightforward, and telling your command sergeant major and your battalion commander that you can’t do the job, or that you’re burned out, or that you might be under stress, he went fishing for a job,” he said.

  Miller didn’t see it that way. “I wasn’t going to let someone determine my fate,” he stated. “I wasn’t going to be held responsible for my guys dying if I wasn’t getting the support I needed to prevent it from happening. I think I had the leadership ability to get them through, after all the casualties we were taking. Maybe not. But if they had said you’re the platoon sergeant and you’re staying the platoon sergeant, then, roger that, I would have Charlie Miked,” he said, using Army slang for “Continued Mission.” “I will take the responsibility for every casualty when I was in charge. If they want to blame me, then so be it. Those were my guys. And they still are, whether they’re here today or six feet below. But to blame me, and make me a squad leader, and still keep me around in the same platoon? No, that ain’t gonna cut it.”

  After rotating down to the JSB for the first time, Gallagher assessed the Alamo bridge as even more dangerous a position than the TCPs, and he pulled his men off of it. How to properly treat the AVLB had been a controversial issue throughout the year and would continue to be so for the rest of the deployment. The battalion’s order was to “secure” it. According to the U.S. Army’s Field Manual 3-90: Tactics, “secure” means to prevent a unit or facility from being damaged or destroyed by the enemy. Obviously, there are a number of ways to secure something, a point that Operations Officer Rob Salome said he consistently tried to impress upon Captain Goodwin. “I don’t have to physically have my hand on something to secure it,” he pointed out. “I can secure it by fire or overwatch or with a patrol, not necessarily by occupation. John didn’t understand those critical pieces of those definitions, so he couldn’t articulate those to his NCOs either.”

  Kunk asserted that it was possible to see the Alamo from the JSB patrol base’s crow’s nest and thus it was securable from there. Everyone else disputed this. The bridge may have been technically visible, but sight lines were not clear enough to make it securable, especially at night, especially since there were recessed routes to the bridge via the canal banks that could be checked only from very close distances. Before late June 2006 the battalion never issued written guidance to Goodwin on how the position should be manned, rationalizing that squad-level staffing decisions are customarily a company commander’s job. Goodwin, for his part, never issued any kind of guidance to the platoons. “I let the platoons figure out their staffing down there,” Goodwin said.

  So it is unclear who ordered Gallagher back out to the bridge, and it is unclear whether he received instructions that he had to have men literally on top of it, but he was under the impression he had no choice. “I had to send people back out there,” he explained. “So I sat my best NCOs down and told them these are dangerous missions. I told them what could happen if they go out and not do the right thing. ‘You need to be on your guys’ ass. You need to not be fucking around, or these will be the implications if you do not obey,’ I told them. ‘You will be on Al Jazeera getting your head chopped off.’”

  Second and 3rd Platoons found other ways of securing the bridge without always having men standing next to it. Sometimes 2nd Platoon would run patrols down there, or they would overwatch it from an ambush spot, or they would just run a Humvee back and forth from TCP4 to the AVLB to the JSB and back at irregular intervals. Blaisdell would employ all of these tactics as well, saying that he never put a Humvee down there in exactly the same location twice. He used the truck, he said, “like a roving TCP.”

  Regardless of how they varied the detail, it was still common for there to be just two to four men and a truck guarding the AVLB. No one passing by, from Brigade on down, ever corrected them. Captain Shawn Umbrell and other company commanders said the staffing down there was common knowledge. “Sometime in November or December, I remember in a meeting being briefed that the truck at the AVLB took some small-arms fire,” Umbrell recalled. “And I think they said there were like four guys at that position with one truck. And that was the first I heard of it. And I remember thinking, ‘Holy cow! We’re manning a TCP that shorthanded? Four guys in one truck?’ I’m looking around and trying to gauge the looks on other people’s faces, and I don’t recall Colonel Kunk ever saying, ‘That’s unsatisfactory. You need to up the numbers down there.’ But I remember hearing Colonel Kunk talking later, ‘I never knew we had three or four guys!’ And I’m thinking, ‘What do you mean, you never knew? We all knew.’”

  Their relationship already strained, Sergeant Major Edwards and Sergeant First Class Gallagher almost came to blows in January. An Iraqi base was being constructed adjacent to the JSB, which required earthmovers, bulldozers, dump trucks, and other heavy support machinery. On the day Edwards came to visit, it had also been raining. There was not enough room at the JSB to harbor all this equipment and the terrain was messy, so the place was sloppy.

  “I think what upset him the most was when his PSD came in—because he had a large entourage, there was not enough room for him to move around,” Gallagher said. “His discomfort getting in prompted much of this.” Edwards sought out Gallagher and began to berate him about how messy the JSB was. He was especially irritated that he had also seen some soldiers relaxing, playing a video game. This was not the first time that Gallagher had heard Edwards’s concerns about tidiness, but he frankly thought they were misplaced and mistimed, and, given everything that was going on, he had less patience for Edwards’s yelling than ever before.

  “I am not really worried about trash right now, Sergeant Major,” Gallagher replied. “I am worried about my guys getting some rest.” Edwards did not like that response and started to yell some more, so Gallagher volunteered to go pick up the trash himself rather than disturb the men. He started walking around plucking cigarette butts out of the mud. This response was also not acceptable. The discussion, according to Gallagher, went downhill quickly, turning personal and almost degenerating into a physical altercation. “The conversation was very volatile, and I took some offense to the fact that the conversation degraded to a nonprofessional basis,” Gallagher said.

  Not long after Gallagher’s run-in with Edwards, he tangled with Green, who had continued his downward slide. No one thought he was an exceptional soldier, but he was not terrible. While not extraordinarily brave, Green was no coward, either. He never ducked a combat mission or froze under fire. But his performance and his attitude, even his hygiene, were declining rapidly. Many in the platoon, when they thought about him at all, were split on whether he was just a little messed up or a turd through and through. Some could not countenance all his talk about blacks or Jews or his increasingly frequent assertions that they should lay waste to the entire country. Others admit to having an odd kind of affection for him, like a disturbed, runty little brother they wanted to protect.

  Lieutenant Norton remembered having a couple of late-night bull sessions with him as he made the rounds checking on guard positions. “He was very mad with everything that happened,” Norton said, “but the more you talked to him, the more you realized just how demented his thinking was. Pretty much everybody besides himself was bad. Democrats were bad. Republicans were bad. JFK was an idiot. Abraham Lincoln was a dumb ass. Everybody outside of his town in Texas was an idiot. But then, all the people inside of his town were idiots too. ‘If we just killed everybody in Iraq,’ he’d say, ‘we could go home.’ In conversation, he’d come around and see that, no, we can’t kill everyone. In fact, we need to be nicer to Iraqis than they are to us. But it was like Groundhog Day. The next day, it was back to ‘Everybody’s a dumb ass. Everybody deserves to die.’”

  Gallagher could not figure out why the NCOs allowed Green to coast by on lower
standards than those applied to everyone else. On this particular day in late January, when the whole platoon was back in Yusufiyah, Gallagher was especially high-strung. He was getting in everybody’s face about rolling down their sleeves, cleaning their area, making sure stuff was picked up. Lauzier grabbed a toothbrush and started scrubbing away on a doorjamb or a piece of equipment in elaborate and mocking protest against Gallagher being so fussy. Green walked by, with sunglasses atop his off-kilter cap, his ACU top unzipped, and his trousers slung low, almost falling off his butt. Gallagher could not believe what he was seeing. The lack of discipline, the insolence, the completely unsoldierly bearing were simply dumbfounding to him. The final outrage: The crotch of Green’s pants was ripped and his genitals were exposed.

  “Green, get the fuck over here!” Gallagher bellowed. “What is your motherfucking problem, son? You had better get your uniform straight or I will kick your ass.” He told Green to hit the floor and start doing push-ups. Green grudgingly did so as Gallagher continued to upbraid him for his slovenly appearance. “You are a fucking scumbag, Green, you know that?” Gallagher yelled. The word “scumbag” hit a nerve. Green popped up and stepped to Gallagher.

  “I’m a scumbag?” he screamed. “Fuck you, you fucking bitch!” Incensed and eyes wide at this insubordination, Gallagher squared his chest to Green, whom he outweighed by at least sixty pounds, and shook his pointed finger to the side of his face, in the classic drill-sergeant pose. He yelled every syllable ponderously.

  “Stand down, Private. Get yourself squared away, Green, or you will regret it.”

  “Oh yeah? Let’s go, right now!” Green yelled. “You want to make it personal? Well, come on, motherfucker, let’s go.” Gallagher was again dumbfounded. He had never experienced anything remotely like this. “I seriously contemplated, after eighteen years in the Army, throwing away my career to physically abuse him,” Gallagher later recalled. They stepped up to each other even closer, chest to chest, a ridiculous picture because Gallagher outsized Green in every way.