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

by Jim Frederick

  “That was me. I did it,” Green said. “I killed that family.”

  Caught off guard, Yribe dismissed the idea immediately as more of Green’s crazy talk. This is exactly the kind of stupid shit Green would say. And it was insane. How could a scrawny guy just slip away from a TCP by himself in the middle of the day and rape and murder a family? It just didn’t figure. But Green kept insisting, and he knew details. He knew there were two parents and two girls, he knew there was a burned body, and he knew where the bodies were located in the house. Yribe was taken aback, but then he figured it was possible to have listened over the radio net as he was relaying the scene back to company headquarters. Yribe told Green to shut the fuck up, he didn’t have time for his bullshit right now.

  The next day, Cortez found his way up to TCP1 on a resupply or some other mission. He went to Yribe. He was in tears. He said he was so shaken up by what he had seen in the house—the littlest girl reminded him of his niece, he said—he needed to go to Combat Stress, but Fenlason wouldn’t let him. Gimme a second, Yribe said. Yribe went to Fenlason and pleaded Cortez’s case. The dude is really messed up, Yribe said, I think he really needs it. Fenlason relented and he sent Yribe to cover TCP2 while Cortez went to Mahmudiyah to see the psychiatrist there.

  Yribe was anxious to get to TCP2. He had been thinking all night about what Green had told him, and it was bothering him. Yribe did not share any of it with Captain Goodwin when he briefed him on the crime scene. What was there to tell? That Green was talking shit again? He figured that Cortez must have gotten rid of the green shotgun shell, because it wasn’t in the small packet of evidence they had turned in. Once Yribe got to TCP2, however, he yanked Green’s elbow.

  “Now,” Yribe demanded, “tell me everything, every single detail.”

  “No,” Green said, “never mind. Forget I said anything. I’m either leaving Iraq in a body bag or as a free man. Just forget it.”

  “You tell me what happened,” Yribe insisted, “or I will put you in that body bag myself.”

  Green started to talk. Again, Barker was there for the whole conversation, and again, Barker did not say a word. Green started telling Yribe everything he had told him the previous night, about the house, the four victims, details about the arrangement of the bodies, and what they were wearing, but in far greater detail than had ever been passed over the radio, such detail that only someone who had been there could possibly know. As he talked and retraced his steps, Green adamantly insisted that he had slipped away unnoticed while the other men were sleeping and acted alone. Barker volunteered nothing, and Yribe asked him no questions. The thing that really convinced Yribe, though, was not just what Green was saying but how he was saying it. Ordinarily, Green was manic and boastful, either jokey or angry or hysterical. Right now, however, Green was just serious, sober, matter-of-fact.

  When Green was finished, Yribe stood up and told him, “I am done with you. You are dead to me. You get yourself out of this Army, or I will get you out myself.”

  21

  Twenty-one Days

  GOODWIN HAD LOW expectations of Fenlason’s meeting in Mullah Fayyad, but he was delighted to hear how well it had gone. “It was awesome,” Goodwin said. “Grass-roots politics right there.” When the group of Iraqi attendees made good on their promise to have a second meeting a few weeks later, Goodwin was there. Fenlason, working with the Civilian Affairs captain on FOB Mahmudiyah, secured $15,000 worth of medical supplies for the local doctor. When the men of 1st Platoon later found out about that, their rage was nearly uncontrollable. They can get fifteen grand for a Hadji doctor, they muttered to each other, but they can’t fill our fucking HESCO baskets?!

  The events of the second meeting roughly mirrored the first, but that was fine. Everybody understood that no breakthroughs were going to happen overnight. This was the beginning of a long process. The Americans discussed how they wanted help locating insurgents. The Iraqis wanted safety and basic utilities restored. There was a circularity to the proceedings, but in all, Goodwin was enthused. “They voiced their concerns, and we addressed them,” he said. “I said I would try to fix what I could. And I made promises where I could. We were moving forward.”

  Before the meeting broke up, however, the group talked about a couple of remaining issues. The men asked Captain Goodwin if he could get his soldiers to stop beating them up. He thought they were talking about arrests, where things maybe got a little rough. But then they clarified. No, they said. Sometimes, American soldiers would hit them and kick them with no provocation whatsoever at traffic checkpoints. Worse, sometimes they would appear at their homes in the middle of the night and pummel them for no reason at all, not even as part of an arrest. Goodwin knew that insurgent groups frequently used Iraqi uniforms, or were, in fact, actual Iraqi policemen whose true loyalties lay with the Mahdi Army, the Badr Corps, or some other militia. But U.S. Army uniforms were harder to come by than Iraqi ones, and anyway, he would have thought Iraqis could tell the difference. He chalked it up to the out-of-control rumor mills and conspiracy theories rampant in Iraq.

  “You can trust me when I say that they’re not my guys,” he told them.

  “But they look like you,” they said.

  “Trust me,” he said. “They are not my guys.”

  Finally, there was the matter of the murder of a family in the small nearby town of Al-Dhubat a few days ago. Did anyone, the Americans asked, know anything about that? Violence was rife, it was true, but this crime seemed, well, odd, for several reasons. The Iraqi elders said they had no leads, nothing to offer, except to say it was horrible, what inhuman things the insurgents could do. Is it any wonder no one feels safe?

  Those opinions conformed to all the data that had been collected so far. The Iraqi Army had begun interviewing neighbors and family members the morning after the murders. Theories about who committed the crime were so conflicting as to be inconclusive. Some said the family was killed by the Iraqi Army. Others said it was the Americans. Some said it was the Badr Corps or the Mahdi Army. Others said it was a tribal feud or a family grudge gone bad. There were no eyewitnesses, or at least none who could offer a consistent story about what they saw. Since the bodies had been removed so quickly (the family was buried in a nearby cemetery the day after, with only stones as grave markers), and since so many soldiers had tramped through the house, there was literally no usable physical evidence beyond a few AK-47 shell casings. A U.S. intelligence officer in the area a few weeks later asked about the incident and got much the same answers from the locals. Although the investigator found the atmosphere tense and unnervingly anti-American, nobody claimed Americans were the perpetrators in any greater numbers than for any of the other theories. Without conclusive evidence, and with no one presenting a compelling rationale that would favor one hypothesis over another, it was instantly a cold case, like literally tens of thousands of murders in Iraq that year. The resources devoted to any further investigative work on the crime plummeted to zero.

  Yribe, like most of 1st Platoon, never liked or respected Fenlason. He was a know-it-all with not nearly enough battlefield experience to be telling him or anyone else in the platoon what to do, Yribe felt. And Yribe thought Fenlason was way too soft on Hadj, preferring to make time with them to score points with the higher-ups than to do anything that might actually benefit his own men.

  On March 19, 1st Squad was doing a cordon-and-knock mission in one of the small villages around Mullah Fayyad and Yribe was surprised to see Fenlason come along for this one. They had searched about fifteen or twenty houses when, at one home, no one was answering the door. After they pounded and pounded, finally someone opened up.

  “The Americans want to search the house,” said the interpreter. “Do not be afraid.” As soldiers fanned out, Yribe walked down a hallway. He knocked on the last door. It was locked. While he was jiggling the handle and laying his shoulder into it, getting ready to knock it in, an old man behind the door holding a pistol pulled it open. As Yribe
’s momentum carried him, surprised and with his weapon down, into the room, the two men practically bumped into one another, and the old man fired.

  Yribe’s rifle was not pointed forward, it was across his chest, barrel down, so his reflexive motion was not to pull the trigger but to stroke the man across the face with the butt of his rifle, knocking him back hard and opening a gash above his eye. Yribe got on top of him and got ready to keep pounding him. Fenlason and 1st Squad leader Chaz Allen were there, though, and threw Yribe off the man, yelling, “Stop!”

  Yribe patted himself down to see if he was shot. The old man had missed. Yribe looked down and saw Fenlason giving first aid to the man, helping him up, giving him water. Yribe was enraged.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Yribe asked. “We should kill him.” He had to walk out of the room or he was going to go berserk on both of them. Fenlason called some other soldiers to take the man outside and have him patched up by Doc Sharpness until they decided what to do with him.

  “Fuck this! Fuck this! Fuck this!” Yribe yelled.

  “Hey, pal, slow down,” said Fenlason. “You need to cool off. What is the problem?”

  “The problem is we should kill that motherfucker, not take him in. He fucking tried to shoot me.”

  Allen pulled Yribe aside and said, “When you entered that room, where was your weapon? You had it slung down like Mr. Cool Guy. If your weapon had been up at eye level where it should have been, you could have shot him and it would have been a clean shot. But we all know you can’t go back in there and kill him now.” Some of the other guys started teasing Yribe about it.

  “Dude, you had a chance,” they said, “and didn’t fucking kill a guy? A guy who actually had a gun! What a fucking loser.”

  “No,” quipped Watt, “that’s not his M.O. Yribe only shoots women and children.”

  “That’s fucking cold, Watt,” Yribe said.

  At the end of the mission, Fenlason called Goodwin and asked him what he wanted to do with the old man. He was seventy-two, he was hard of hearing, and he was scared out of his mind. He shouldn’t have had a pistol, granted, but Fenlason seriously doubted he was an insurgent. He suggested they confiscate his pistol and just let him go. Goodwin agreed.

  Yribe did not like that one bit, and he stewed in the Humvee all the way back to TCP1. By the time they arrived, he was fuming. It was cut-and-dried in his mind: This dude tried to kill a U.S. soldier. He is an enemy and should be treated that way. In the central area of TCP1, he began spouting a nonstop tirade about how this whole mission was fucked if they just kept letting go people who tried to do U.S. soldiers harm. Fenlason was a pussy. The whole chain of command was filled with gutless wonders.

  This was all well within Fenlason’s earshot, so Fenlason came to the central area of the TCP and said, “You need to cool it, Tony.” Yribe, however, would not let it rest, and since he commanded a lot of sway among the younger men, Fenlason noticed he had a lot of disgruntled soldiers on his hands.

  “Shut the fuck up!” Yribe yelled. “Don’t even talk to me!”

  “Who do you think you’re talking to here, pal?” Fenlason responded.

  “Fuck you. You are a piece of shit. If you come one more inch closer, it’s going to be the worst fucking day you’ve ever had. I want out of your platoon. There is no way I can work for a piece of shit like you.” One of the other sergeants started pushing Yribe out the door, telling him to go get his head together somewhere else.

  Their scuffle almost reignited several times, because every time Yribe started to leave, Fenlason would say something like, “You better walk away,” which would only cause Yribe to come scrambling back with: “No. Now I am staying. You have to make me leave, but you’re too much of a pussy.” This went on for several rounds before some other sergeants finally dragged Yribe away for good.

  “You are done, Tony,” Fenlason said as they finally hauled him out of there. Staff Sergeant Allen tried to calm Yribe down.

  “Hey man, you can’t be blowing up like this,” he cautioned.

  “Sergeant Allen, I don’t know you,” Yribe answered. “I haven’t worked with you very long. But I respect you right now. But I’m not going to respect this guy. This guy will get everyone killed.”

  “Well, that’s not for you to decide, is it? You’re an E-5, he’s an E-7. We work for him.”

  “I’m not going to work for him. I can’t work for you either. If you’re going to work for him, I can’t work for you.”

  “Roger that, then,” Allen fired back. “Then I don’t need you.”

  Fenlason was already moving against Yribe. He could not tolerate that kind of insubordination. He had Allen and Staff Sergeant Payne write up statements that night, and he forwarded them to Goodwin. He thought for certain Yribe would be in for some sort of disciplinary action, or even a psychological evaluation, but after a brief double check of what had happened, Goodwin decided not to take any punitive action against Yribe. Yet after a rupture like that, there was no way Goodwin could leave Yribe in 1st Platoon.

  Third Platoon’s Phil Blaisdell said that he’d be willing to take Yribe. He sat Yribe down and told him he had no idea what had just happened between Fenlason and him. Frankly, he didn’t want to know and he didn’t care. “With me,” Blaisdell said, “you start with a fresh slate. Follow orders, do a good job, get along with the rest of the platoon, and I am sure everything will be fine.”

  Goodwin’s decision not to punish Yribe rankled Fenlason, but he saw the overall outcome—Yribe left, Fenlason stayed—as a turning point in the dynamic of the platoon. Fenlason had proved that he was not going anywhere, and that his authority could survive a full-scale coup attempt by the most powerful representative of the old 1st Platoon mentality. “That was when people began to realize that the immovable object was in fact immovable,” he said. “That was the day there was no doubt that it was my platoon. We were done negotiating.”

  Fenlason’s platoon was still very much in trouble, however, and he remained willfully ignorant of the extent of its problems. In order to take Yribe, for example, Blaisdell had to give someone up: Sergeant Daniel Carrick, who was considered one of the best young NCOs in the company, if not the battalion. He was Ranger qualified and had been to all the right schools and had gotten all the right skill badges very quickly. His culture shock upon arriving at 1st Platoon was extreme. Showing up more than six months into their deployment, Carrick never had much chance of being taken seriously by his fire team. Dealing with the aura left by Yribe was his first big challenge. Again and again, he would hear, “Sergeant Yribe wouldn’t do it that way,” or “Sergeant Yribe didn’t care about stuff like that.” He had to tell them that he didn’t give a fuck about how Sergeant Yribe would do it because he was not Yribe, Yribe was not here any longer, and this was how they were going to do it now. But more than that, he was alarmed at how angry they were—at Hadj, at the chain of command, at life. “There were a lot of guys at 1st Platoon who would love to go on patrol, but only because they wanted to fuck something up,” he said. “They wanted to punch somebody in the head or they wanted to shoot up somebody’s car.” In his eyes, a lot of the lower-enlisted were clearly thugs and degenerates back home and they had never been properly instilled with Army discipline in the first place. Here, they were out of control. “After being with them for a month, I was just like, ‘These guys are the biggest group of bitches and psychopaths that I ever could have fallen into,’” as he put it. “They would get booze, and how do you stop this when Joes just do whatever they want? As a leader, what do you do? I didn’t know. I knew about it, and I would tell them to knock that shit off, but I could never find the stuff. So what am I going to do?”

  Other team leaders likewise acknowledged that they knew drinking or drug use was going on but that it was difficult to prevent. During the three-week TCP rotation in March, Sergeant John Diem had two soldiers melt down on him on two consecutive days. One day, the first suddenly became uncontrollable and inconso
lable. “It was like a hysteria, left and right emotions, for hours,” Diem said. “I told him to lie on his bunk and we’d take care of guard. I didn’t understand it. I had known him for six months, I’d always been able to depend on him. Then, one day, he just went off the bend. I thought it was an extreme combat stress injury. So we got him out of there, somewhere where he could be closely watched. The very next day, we were doing a route clearance, and somebody tells me that one of my guys is asleep in a Humvee. So I go down there, and I fucking get on top of the Humvee, and I’m yelling, ‘Hey dickhead!’ And I’m yelling at him and he’s not moving. He’s breathing, but that’s it. He’s not aware of what’s going on at all. So I give him a couple shots upside the K-pot [helmet] to check for responsiveness. And he’s like, ‘Stop hitting me. Stop hitting me.’ Like almost completely unresponsive, like a catatonia, like a …like a …drug overdose. So I put him to bed. I get another guy out there on guard. I toss these two guys’ shit and we find pill packs of some shit that I’ve never seen before. And those two guys lived with me. I had thought they couldn’t make a move without me knowing. But I came to learn that it was pretty free game. It was something that you could get if you even half-ass wanted it.”

  Many soldiers assert that substance abuse was pervasive. “It was fairly common,” said one. “That’s how they began to deal and cope with certain things: All the soldiers who had been killed, the long hours they were pulling. Some of the soldiers used painkillers or drank because it was their only escape. That is what they had to do in their own mind to keep themselves from freaking out. Still, I was extremely upset and mortified by the idea that people would do that—all the times you thought your life was safe while you slept and they were on guard, it wasn’t.”

  In Iraq, stray dogs are rampant and a constant nuisance. Most are mangy, disease-ridden, and nasty, and they run in large, wild packs. But some, every once in a while, manage to have good looks, clean coats, and friendly natures. These strays were frequently snatched up by soldiers and turned into pets. Although keeping dogs was always against the rules, many of the on-the-ground commanders recognized the undeniable positive impact they had on morale—several platoon-level leaders had stories of stumbling upon a soldier who had just lost a comrade in battle tucked away in some lonely corner of a base, cradling a dog in his arms, just petting it and sobbing into its fur—so they frequently just looked the other way. There were two dogs that hung around TCP1—an adult and a puppy. But the puppy got sick and started to lose its fur. Fenlason sent the word out: The puppy needs to be put down, and the faster you put it out of its misery, the easier it will be on canine and human alike.