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

by Jim Frederick

  Iraqis were not seen as humans. Many soldiers actively cultivated the dehumanization of locals as a secret to survival. “You can’t think of these people as people,” opined Yribe. “If I see this old lady and say, ‘Ah, she reminds me of my grandmother,’ but then she pulls out a fucking bomb, I’m not going to react right. So me, I don’t see them as people.” Children were considered insurgents or future insurgents, and women were little more than insurgent factories.

  Some began hoping they would die. “I don’t know if you have ever honestly prayed for death, but there were times we would just fucking take our helmets off,” remarked Private First Class Justin Watt (who had also been recently promoted). “We’d be sitting in a guard tower and be like, “Please, please put me out of my fucking misery.” Cross described an almost identical experience: “I had my first breakdown right there, where I was like, ‘Fuck this shit.’ I took off my helmet, threw it down, and just sat there. I stood up on top of the turret and started yelling, ‘Fuck this shit. You want to fucking kill me, just kill me, please. Somebody, sniper, come on, shoot me!’” Charlie Company’s First Sergeant Dennis Largent said, “My soldiers passing through Bravo’s AO would tell me about their soldiers saying, ‘It would be easier if I got shot or blown up. At least this shit would be over.’”

  Specialist James Barker described the paradoxical yet typical swings that combat-weary soldiers have between thinking they are doomed and thinking they are invincible. “I knew I was going to die, it was just a matter of time, so I just didn’t care. I would run straight at somebody shooting at me instead of taking cover. That was my mentality: I’m already dead so, fuck it, what can anybody do to me? I’d gotten shot at so many times and blown up so many times and hadn’t taken a scratch that it’s like, ‘Oh fuck, I’m untouchable. I am a bad ass and nobody can fuck with me.’”

  Second Platoon and 3rd Platoon survived, stayed sane, and arguably even thrived in the exact same environment in great part due to their outstanding platoon sergeants and their daily, active effort to combat the hate 1st Platoon had given in to. But 1st Platoon did lose more men, including three leaders killed in a two-week period, which they did not. The disarray caused by those losses was compounded by a consistent leadership vacuum. And emergent dysfunctions were magnified further by the higher command’s constant unfavorable comparison of 1st Platoon with Bravo’s better-functioning platoons. “You can see what happens when the pressure on a set of leaders—junior leaders—becomes so great that men’s decision-making processes start to break down,” observed the battalion’s executive officer, Major Fred Wintrich. “Moral decision-making processes. And that’s what leadership is supposed to mitigate.”

  House searches turned extremely violent. “A lot of people got dragged out of their house by their hair and beat down,” recalled Diem. “I want you to imagine just for a second that you and your wife are watching TV one day, and then the door gets kicked in and some soldiers come in and drag your wife out by the hair and smack the piss out of you in your living room, asking you questions in a language you’ve never heard, holding guns to your head.” Most of the time, this violence was not strictly random. Usually there was a shred of evidence or a whiff of suspicion before such force was employed. But the trip wire was thin. “It’s not like we did it for no reason,” Diem said. “We worked off suspicion. It was sort of like Puritan witch-hunters.”

  Suspected insurgents were beaten as a matter of course, with the full blessings and, in fact, insistence of some team leaders and squad leaders. Sergeants would egg the younger soldiers on, making fun of privates who didn’t hit detainees hard enough.

  During patrols, Green frequently volunteered to kill anyone his NCOs wanted him to. “I was always saying, ‘Anytime you all are ready, you all are the ones in charge of me. Anytime you all say the word “go,” it’s on,’” he recalled. “One time, we pulled these guys off the road and took them in this house and we were hitting them and trying to make them tell us what they were up to, and Yribe was talking about shooting them. And I was like, ‘I’ll do it! I’ll take them out right now and shoot them. All you gotta do is tell me to.’ And Yribe started talking to Babineau, like, ‘Oh, Babs, but you wanted to shoot them, right?’” That’s when Green realized Yribe had been pulling his leg the whole time.

  Many of the men say the beatings began in earnest when they watched the men they had detained get released by higher headquarters. The way they saw it, they were just taking justice into their own hands because the battalion or the brigade could not be trusted to keep the men trying to kill them behind bars. Brigade commander Colonel Todd Ebel countered that 85 percent of the brigade’s detainees went to prison, a statistic he points to as proof that raids were well targeted and backed up by a judicial system that worked. The men of 1st Platoon say that number does not come close to their experience. “We would turn them in to Mahmudiyah and what happens?” said one. “They’re released. Not enough evidence. It came to the point where we had to have criminal investigation packets thicker than a book to send these assholes to jail. We couldn’t rely on Army intelligence to put these guys in jail, so we had to let that town know that we were in charge.”

  Many men believed it to be a fact that the battalion and brigade not only did not care if they lived or died but probably even conspired against them. Their disenfranchisement and their apathy would get them into more trouble, which in turn would then further convince them that they were being singled out.

  “I probably didn’t help it sometimes with my platoons, since our AOs bordered each other,” said Alpha Company commander Jared Bordwell. “One of my platoons would be in contact and would send a report up, or an explosion would happen in B Company’s area and we would send up a report of ‘We just heard an explosion 600 meters this degrees.’ And they would ping Bravo. ‘What the hell is going on in your AO?’ And the TCPs were like, ‘Oh, yeah. There was an IED that just went off.’ Those guys had gotten to the point where they were like, ‘Whatever.’”

  At the beginning of the March TCP rotation, Fenlason sent 2nd Squad to TCP5. He, the headquarters element, and 1st Squad went to TCP1. And he sent 3rd Squad to cover both TCP2 and TCP6. Fenlason said that there was no difference in the dangers between TCP1 and TCP2, that the TCPs were equally dangerous, but this is not true. By March, TCP1 had been running continuously as the TCP mission headquarters for four months. It was a sturdy two-story house with working, generator-driven electricity, good sight lines in every direction, and defenses that were still crude but that had been improving steadily. This TCP was also the most heavily staffed, usually with a full squad plus the medic, radioman, platoon sergeant, and a squad of Iraqi soldiers.

  Fenlason would not have known about the relative safety of TCP2 anyway, because he had never been to TCP2, either before this rotation or at any time during it. TCP2 had just been reopened for the first time since it had been shut down in mid-December. This time, at least, the men were allowed to take over a house on the northwest corner of Sportster and the small, unnamed canal road. It was a hovel, more a collection of rooms than a home, each no bigger than 150 square feet, laid in an end-to-end, almost serpentine arrangement. Many of the rooms did not have windows, and of those which did, the windows were just small, paneless holes a foot or two square. There was no electricity, no running water, and no furniture except for cots, plastic patio chairs, and tables fashioned from sheets of plywood laid atop cardboard boxes. The latrine was a plastic chair with the seat cut out where soldiers would defecate into a WAG Bag. There was a wall along the Sportster side and about ten feet of wall on the canal road side. The rest of the house’s yard was exposed. To mitigate this danger, there were several HESCO Barriers, but not having been filled with dirt, they were useless.

  With Lauzier on leave, Fenlason gave 3rd Squad the job of manning TCP2 and TCP6 because he believed it to be the easiest. Unlike Blaisdell and Gebhardt, who preferred switching up guard rotations every few hours, Fenlason ran TCP2 and TCP6 as
static positions. The men would live out there the whole time. Even though Fenlason once declared that he would not have sent Specialist Cortez to the promotion board to become a sergeant if he had been platoon sergeant at the time, he maintained that this duty was an appropriate tasking for Cortez. “Cortez was going to go to TCP2,” he explained, “because all I wanted him to do was pull guard. That’s it. IED sweeps and pull guard. Which is tactically and technically well within the realm of someone of his experience and pay grade.”

  Fenlason had a fondness for static positions, seeming to think they were easier to man than dynamic positions. It was an infantry philosophy that many of his men could not fathom, and one that the other platoons did not subscribe to. Fixed positions invite attack. Said one squad leader from a different platoon: “A static position like a TCP was a no-go for us. In order to keep them from attacking us, we had a constantly roving patrol out there.” When they are boring, static positions breed complacency, and when they are dangerous, they are mind-rackingly stressful.

  Indeed, Cortez was not coping well with the added responsibility. He was focusing intently on the dangers around him and becoming increasingly bitter about his sense of abandonment. “A lot of time you couldn’t sleep,” Cortez said. “There were windows where somebody could walk right up and just drop a grenade and you wouldn’t even know it.” Fenlason maintained that no one ever expressed anxiety to him about the dangerous conditions at TCP2, but several soldiers contradict this assertion. “I kept asking to get the HESCO baskets filled,” said Cortez. “I asked for more concertina wire, more sandbags to fortify the position. All they kept telling me was ‘No, don’t worry about it. We will get it later on. We don’t need it right now.’ So basically we were just told to just sit there and wait to get killed, that’s the way I took it.”

  In Achilles in Vietnam, psychologist Jonathan Shay describes how the long-term debilitating effects of combat are exacerbated exponentially when a soldier’s sense of “what’s right” is violated by his leaders. “The mortal dependence of the modern soldier on the military organization for everything he needs to survive is as great as that of a small child on his or her parents,” he writes. During his clinical treatment of Vietnam veterans, one of the most persistent causes of stress soldiers described was the perception that risk was not evenly distributed. Shay continues: “Shortages of all sorts—food, water, ammunition, clothing, shelter from the elements, medical care—are intrinsic to prolonged combat…. However, when deprivation is perceived as the outcome of indifference or disrespect by superiors, it arouses menis [the Greek word for ‘indignant rage’] as an unbearable offense.” This rage, Shay writes, is instrumental in the soldiers’ own “undoing of character” and “loss of humanity” essential to the commission of war crimes.

  Even though TCP2 was only three-quarters of a mile from TCP1, Fenlason never went to evaluate TCP2’s defenses or to see how his soldiers were performing there over the next three weeks. With Platoon Leader Norton and 3rd Squad Leader Lauzier both on leave, and with 3rd Squad headed by a soldier Fenlason knew to be a poor leader, not once did he go to TCP2 in the next twenty-one days to assess how Cortez was enforcing standards or fortifying a brand-new battle position.

  Fenlason justified his absenteeism as a reflection of the degree of trust he suddenly had in his men—whom he had originally assessed as a “fucking bucket of crap”—after just a month of leading them. The men down at the TCP didn’t know why Fenlason did not come down, but by this point that suited them just fine. He was the last person they wanted to see. “Fenlason was reliable, I will give him that,” said Specialist James Barker, one of the soldiers stationed at TCP2 with Cortez. “We knew he would never, ever come check on us, so we could do whatever we wanted.”

  While 1st Platoon’s attention was focused on the TCPs, Kunk and the rest of the battalion, in fact all of 2nd Brigade, were looking west, to the Yusufiyah Power Plant. On March 2, a brigade-wide effort called Operation Glory Light kicked off. A weeklong initiative, it was one of the largest missions of the war since the invasion. It began with joint air assaults by U.S. and Iraqi troops into the town of Sadr-Yusufiyah, just north of the power plant, by troopers from both infantry battalions of the Deuce. Though the effort was spearheaded by the 2-502nd, the 1-502nd’s Charlie Company and Alpha Company both contributed a platoon or two, flushing terrorists from one of the most lawless areas of the brigade’s AO. “This could be the final crushing blow for the anti-Iraqi forces in the Baghdad area,” Kunk told Stars and Stripes at the time, something he could not possibly have believed.

  Parts of Bravo’s 2nd Platoon moved with Captain Goodwin into Rushdi Mullah as a blocking element to prevent insurgents who were fleeing the main thrust from coming their way. They rolled in first thing on the morning of March 4 and cleared the entire village. Then they took over a house and laid in for several days of overwatch. They suffered intermittent fire in various forms, including mortars and small arms. They had a sniper dogging them, who was particularly aggravating because he was extraordinarily patient, firing perhaps as few as ten shots in thirty-six hours, from as far away as three-quarters of a mile, and he moved after every shot. They sent some snipers of their own to lie in wait for him, but they never found him. They tried making a “Scare Joe,” a helmet on a stick that they would pop just above the rim of the walled roof, but he never fell for that. Goodwin also sent out patrols into town every few hours to maintain a presence and keep the townspeople on their toes.

  Just after 4:00 p.m. on March 5, twenty-one-year-old Specialist Ethan Biggers got out of one of the Humvees parked in front of the house and went inside and up to the second-floor balcony, which had a protective four-foot wall running around its perimeter. He needed to stretch his legs, get a change of scenery. He was Bravo’s radioman, the communication link between Goodwin, the rest of the company, and higher command, so he had been practically living inside the truck for two days straight to be near the radios. Some people were always up on the balcony, either getting some air or as part of the guard rotation. Because of his job, everybody in Bravo knew Biggers, and because of his personality, everybody loved him. He was the entire company’s little brother, who never had a sour word about anyone. He and his fiancée, Britni, were expecting their first child.

  Goodwin was up there too, inside one of the two rooms on the second floor, and so was Platoon Sergeant Jeremy Gebhardt. Gebhardt had his vest on but his helmet off, and others, even those on the balcony, were in similar states of disrobe. It was against regulations to have anything but “full battle rattle” on when outside, but on days-long missions like this, even leaders thought that was not really realistic. Gebhardt allowed soldiers to remove some of their protective gear as long as they kept their heads below the lip of the wall, because this was the tallest house in the neighborhood. Goodwin knew about this and tacitly approved the relaxation of the rules.

  Upstairs, Biggers sat down on the outdoor stairwell leading up to the third floor with his head still below the outer wall, took off his helmet, and started talking to one of the medics. Several minutes later, first one shot rang out, from far away. But it was quickly followed by a second, perhaps as close as a hundred yards. This one hit the wall behind the stairwell, ricocheted, struck Biggers above his left eyebrow, and exited out the back of his head, each hole about an inch wide.

  Jesus, that was close, some of the soldiers exclaimed. But then the unit’s interpreter noticed that Biggers was not moving. “He’s hit, he’s hit!” he shouted. Soldiers dragged Biggers inside and started first aid, but blood and brains were spilling out of his skull. There was so much blood, a bandage would not stay on his head. A medevac bird arrived quickly and rushed him out, but he had lost a substantial amount of his brain and was in a coma.*

  Another arguably avoidable casualty was a further blow to Goodwin’s status. “That shooting became a huge thing,” remarked Alpha commander Jared Bordwell. “Diagrams, trying to figure out the trajectory and all that stuff. Th
ey were trying to figure out not only how it happened but who they could blame. Who can we blame for this happening?”

  The first lieutenant who investigated the event found Biggers’s head shot preventable, and Colonel Ebel agreed. Ebel recommended that letters of reprimand be issued to Goodwin and Gebhardt. He chastised the commander and the NCO for “failure to ensure a climate of leadership that demands strict adherence to published standards…. In this case the commander bears the responsibility for enforcing policy.” As with Nelson’s and Casica’s deaths, however, the men who were there insisted that a helmet would not have stopped the shot. “If you were there and actually saw where the bullet was, it wouldn’t have even hit his helmet,” said one of 2nd Platoon’s squad leaders.

  While far from the final crushing blow to the insurgency in the Baghdad area, Operation Glory Light was declared a success. U.S. soldiers cleared significant amounts of new territory, found nearly two dozen IEDs, uncovered two weapons caches, and detained seven suspects.

  On the morning of March 8, Kunk’s convoy was returning from the area of the power plant as Glory Light was winding down. “We had to come down Sportster,” he said. “Stopped at every one of those battle positions. Talked to every one of the soldiers. Everything was going good.” His convoy headed up Fat Boy, where it hit an IED but no one suffered any casualties. Twenty minutes later and three hundred yards up the road, the convoy got hit again. This time Kunk suffered a puncture wound to his left calf. The wound got infected and he was relegated to bed rest from March 12 to March 19.

  * Shortly after his injury, after he had been sent back to the United States, Biggers and his fiancée were married by proxy, and a few months later she gave birth to their son. Biggers would remain in a coma for nearly a year, until his family took him off of life support. He died on February 24, 2007.