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

by Jim Frederick

  It was the third week of March, 1st Squad was still at TCP1, and Fenlason could hear some guys tromp up the stairs. A few minutes later they came back down. He could hear them talking in excited but hushed tones, catching snippets of some guys giggling and saying, “That was cool,” and others saying, “That shit was fucked up.” Fenlason recognized it as the murmur of soldiers who were up to no good. He came out of his office and demanded, “What the hell is going on here?”

  “Nothing, Sergeant,” somebody replied.

  “Don’t bullshit me,” Fenlason pushed. “What the hell is going on?”

  “Green threw the puppy off the roof,” somebody answered.

  “He did what?” Fenlason asked, incredulous, to a wide round of more murmurs and shuffling.

  “C’mere, you jackass,” he said to Green.

  “What, Sergeant?” Green responded, giggling. “You said to get rid of it.”

  “And do you think seeing if it could fly is what I had in mind?” Green found this line funny, but Fenlason wasn’t laughing. Fenlason was so dismayed by Green’s cavalier attitude to his own cruelty, he told Combat Stress about the incident. Green, meanwhile, was trying to comply with Yribe’s order to get out of the Army. Between the puppy incident and Sergeant Yribe pushing him to find a way to get discharged, Green headed back to the Combat Stress tent the next time he was at FOB Mahmudiyah. “I got my duffel bags, all my stuff, and took it with me to Mahmudiyah. I was telling everybody I’m not coming back,” Green said. “And they were like, ‘You’ll be back.’ And I was like, ‘Just watch.’”

  Green had not seen Combat Stress since December 21, and a new team had taken over in January, headed by Lieutenant Colonel Elizabeth Bowler, a forensic psychiatrist and reservist who ordinarily worked in the California prison system, and Staff Sergeant Bob Davis, also a reservist. On March 20, Green showed up at the Mahmudiyah Combat Stress office. In the block marked Reason for Visit on his intake form, he wrote: “Anger, dreams, emotions over dead friends.” And in the block marked Who Referred You and Why, he wrote: “Both team leaders Sgt. Diaz and Sgt. Yribe. Don’t know exactly but they just said I needed to go.”

  In his initial interview, however, he told Davis, “I was told to see you because I killed a puppy.” Through the course of the session, Green said he didn’t understand what the big deal was. Everybody was killing dogs down there, he just happened to kill his in ten minutes rather than a couple of seconds. It all ends the same way, so what difference did it make? Seeing a red flag, Davis tried to explain why it made a world of difference. In his intake questionnaire, Green described his mood as “good a lot and then it flips to where I don’t care and I want to kill all the Hadj.” Bowler gave Green some Ambien to help him sleep and a course of antidepressant medication—Lexapro—and she kept him on the FOB for more evaluation.

  Over the next few days, the Combat Stress team met with Green several more times and concluded that he wasn’t registering the moral implications of the incident. “If he had ever said, ‘Look, I was just trying to impress my buddies by showing my capacity for cruelty,’ we would have let him go back to work,” recounted Davis, “because it would have shown understanding of what the fuss was about.” But the conversations progressed into more-troubling territory. Green said that the puppy could have just as easily been an Iraqi and it still wouldn’t have made a bit of difference.

  Bowler told Kunk of her diagnosis of Green: a preexisting antisocial personality disorder, a condition marked by indifference to the suffering of others, habitual lying, and disregard for the safety of self or others. People with this diagnosis are colloquially referred to as sociopaths or psychopaths. The diagnosis of personality disorder carries an immediate expulsion from the Army, and they began the process of removing Green from the service. In fiscal 2005, 1,038 soldiers—or 0.21 percent of those on active duty—were discharged with this classification. Even though Green had committed rape and quadruple homicide just eleven days earlier, Bowler’s mental-health-status evaluation sheet that initiated the personality disorder discharge stated that his current potential for harm to others was “low.” Green’s separation from the Army had begun. He would never return to Bravo Company.

  Green disputed the diagnosis. “I don’t have antisocial personality disorder,” he said. “That’s like a sociopath. In regular day-to-day life, I’m not remotely like that. I don’t even want to hurt people’s feelings. If I say my opinion and someone gets offended, that’s one thing, but intentionally to hurt someone? No, that’s ridiculous. I didn’t agree with the diagnosis, but I didn’t care. It was getting me out of the Army.”

  He remained at Mahmudiyah for a few more weeks for observation and processing. By April 14, he was headed out of Iraq and back to the States, and at Fort Campbell on May 16 he was honorably discharged from the Army and sent back into society.

  As Green was undergoing his psychological evaluations at Mahmudiyah, the rest of 1st Platoon had rotated back from the TCPs to Yusufiyah on March 21. Goodwin couldn’t have been more pleased, but he thought three weeks was the maximum that men could stay out there without a break.

  “I thought it was a great success,” Goodwin said. “After they came back, I talked to the platoon that evening and told them that they did an outstanding job.” Justin Cross had just returned from a week of Freedom Rest and psychological evaluation in Baghdad, but he was there for the pep talk, which he said was the first time most of the platoon had heard why they had all been out there so long. “Finally, after it was over, we finally found out what Sergeant Fen’s master plan was out there. It just pissed everybody off that he didn’t tell us when we were out there what we were doing.”

  Fenlason was pissed too. He wanted 1st Platoon to stay out at the TCPs longer. He was, he felt, just weeks away from making a real breakthrough in Mullah Fayyad. “A third meeting and we could have damn near formed a city government,” he believed.

  When Goodwin told him to move off of the TCPs, his response was “That’s bullshit, we’re close.” When Goodwin said his mind was made up, Fenlason replied, “Well, then, you’ll give back Mullah Fayyad.”

  For the remaining five months of the deployment, TCP rotations never lasted longer than a week, and Bravo Company never organized another community leaders’ meeting in Mullah Fayyad.

  APRIL–JUNE 2006

  22

  “We Had Turned a Corner”

  THE HUNT FOR Zarqawi had begun shortly after the invasion of Iraq, in the summer of 2003, when the U.S. military joined two special operations forces units into what was then called Task Force 6-26. Over the years, the Task Force had gone through several name changes, becoming Task Force 145, then Task Force 121, and then Task Force 77. As the war ground on, and with Zarqawi still on the loose, the unit grew in size and mandate. By early 2006, Task Force 77 had expanded into four subordinate groups with rough geographic areas of responsibility. The Task Force’s members, known as “operators,” averaged at least a mission a day, usually conducted in the small hours of the morning. Task Force Central, which covered the Triangle of Death, was organized around a Delta Force squadron with Army Rangers in support.

  Because of Zarqawi’s feuds with the Anbar sheikhs and other Sunnis revolted by his hyperviolence, his areas of safe operation were narrowing, and the Triangle of Death was one of the last locales where he could find refuge. With information that he was spending more time there, the Task Force picked up its rate of operations in the area accordingly. The Task Force’s methodology of pursuit was simple yet relentless: capture an enemy safe house, detain suspects, and exploit the resulting intelligence to set up a new hit as soon as possible, preferably in just a few hours. The Task Force described this combination of intelligence and action as “the unblinking eye.”

  Task Force 77’s cooperation with the regular Army units holding a particular area was cordial but fairly one-way. The operators did not ask the local commanders’ permission to come in; they usually just notified them that they we
re doing so. If a mission went poorly and men or machines were damaged, the local commander would be expected to have a QRF on standby, but beyond that, the commanders were expected to stay out of the way.

  For the men of Bravo, “the cool guys,” as they called the operators, were an ever-present but mysterious backdrop to their war. In the spring of 2006, the cool guys started zipping in and out of 1st Battalion’s AO with increasing regularity. Unless they were assigned to a rescue mission, most of the men had only a dim awareness of when or even if TF-77 was in the area, but the operators always seemed to be popping up.

  Zarqawi, Al Qaeda, and other terrorist organizations did not go dormant in the face of increased pursuit, however. In fact, they stepped up their activities in the Yusufiyah area and started taking out some very big American targets. Just before 5:00 p.m. on April 1, a rocket or RPG fired from a white Bongo truck shot down an Apache attack helicopter about one mile northwest of Rushdi Mullah. A video posted on Al Qaeda–related Web sites on April 5, complete with jihadi music and the Mujahideen Shura Council logo, depicted a gruesome scene. The helicopter was a mound of twisted rubble, flaming like a lava flow. Several black-clad fighters, with bandoliers, AKs, and covered faces, swarmed upon the wreckage. Some yelled “Allahu Akbar!” as they pulled out the body of one of the pilots and dragged him across the ground. It was the first time a U.S. helicopter had been shot down since January, but for the next few months, Al Qaeda’s Aeisha Brigade, which was headquartered in the Yusufiyah area and specialized in antiaircraft operations, would become particularly successful at bringing down helicopters in the area.

  “There were helicopters falling out of the sky a lot, which isn’t supposed to happen,” said Goodwin. The Aeisha Brigade was well organized, had outstanding concealment tactics, and possessed more sophisticated weaponry than average for an insurgent cell. Their presence was an indication of just how badly Al Qaeda wanted to hold this piece of land. “They started putting antiaircraft guns out there,” remarked First Strike’s intelligence officer, Leo Barron. “Rarely did you see many aircraft getting shot down anywhere else. This was pivotal terrain, and they were willing to expend those kinds of assets.”

  Numerous units from across the division were dispatched to the Apache crash scene, including Bravo Company’s 2nd Platoon. The recovery effort would stretch for two days, hampered by muddy conditions, numerous IEDs, and frequent fire from insurgents. Both pilots would be pronounced dead, the body of one recovered on the scene and the other never found. With roads impassable, and helicopter delays interminable, the salvage effort had all but ground to a halt until 2nd Platoon, desperate not to spend a second night in the bush, carried helicopter wreckage on stretchers across muddy fields to the removal trucks for four hours.

  On April 13, against great odds, contrary to the advice of many doctors, and despite all the unit commanders’ assurances that no one expected him to return or would think less of him if he didn’t, Rick Skidis returned to Iraq and resumed his role as Bravo’s first sergeant. After getting blown up in November, he had battled through numerous surgeries to his leg and went through months of therapy to get back and finish the deployment with his beloved Bravo. Upon returning, Skidis noticed a definite change in his men. They were battle hardened and battle weary. “I saw a lot of stress,” he recalled. “I saw a lot of tired guys, a lot of guys that had done a lot of fighting. They had been honed, they had matured, they had been working their asses off.” And, he noticed, their work had made noticeable gains. “You could drive down Fat Boy. It was okay. You could drive down Sportster and it was pretty much okay.”

  As one first sergeant was returning, however, another was departing. Throughout the winter and into the spring, Kunk’s battles with Charlie Company commander Captain Bill Dougherty and First Sergeant Dennis Largent were frequent and heated. They argued about tactics, priorities, IED sweeps, manning rosters, anything. While both men refused to be intimidated by the Kunk Gun, Largent was particularly emphatic about going back on the attack against Kunk, accusing him of a bull-headedness that was tantamount to incompetence because he insisted on policies that Charlie’s leaders believed were misguided, if not needlessly dangerous. Through it all, however, Dougherty and Largent were concerned that their conflicts with the boss were having an adverse effect on the company, bringing more scrutiny and ultimately more pain down on their guys.

  Others saw this happening as well. “Kunk was starting to have an impact on that company’s performance and morale, because of the way he would treat the CO and the first sergeant,” commented HHC commander Shawn Umbrell. Word had gotten out among Charlie that Kunk had it in for them, that he thought they were jacked up. Like Bravo, they were detaching themselves from the battalion, but unlike Bravo, they had more esprit de corps to carry them through, even if it was borderline mutiny sometimes. Occasionally Charlie soldiers flew a Cobra flag from their crow’s nests and guard towers instead of the American flag. “He just hates us because we’re the People’s Army” became a battle cry among the Cobras. Those gestures of defiance drove a further wedge between the company and the battalion. Both Edwards and Kunk could frequently be heard screaming, “I am sick of this People’s Army bullshit!”

  Largent was in a dilemma. He believed that Kunk was a bad commander and a danger to the soldiers. He had tried reasoning with him, he had tried arguing with him, he had tried ignoring him, and he had tried defying him. As his disillusionment grew, so did his bitterness and hatred of Kunk. And that, he realized, was clouding his judgment and his ability to work in Charlie’s best interests.

  By spring, Charlie’s relationship with the battalion had crumbled to the point that issues such as Internet access, which on the modern battlefield has real morale implications for soldiers, still got blown out of all proportion. Earlier in the year, during a visit from some general down in Lutufiyah, Largent mentioned that FOB Lutufiyah did not have good communications connections. And, as generals do, the general said to his aide, get this unit’s info and get them one of those Internet trailers down here as soon as possible. E-mail addresses were exchanged, promises were made. Largent and the men of Charlie were pumped. Largent, dying to bring anything the men could be excited about into their lives, followed up with the general’s aide like a demon. He inquired frequently: When’s it coming? When’s it coming? During this period of intense anticipation, a Charlie convoy that had been up to Mahmudiyah came back to report: Hey, the battalion has a shiny new Internet trailer that they are using up at their FOB. The outpouring of negative emotions from Charlie was intense, and the backlash back from the battalion was worse.

  “Now, is that my Internet?” said Dougherty. “I don’t know. There are theories that say it was ours because we were tracking the shipment of it, with air bill numbers or whatever. And guys got pissed. There was a tidal wave of ‘They’ve got our Internet.’ Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know. But I had a hard time convincing them of that, and I can’t legislate how my men think. So they got it in their heads that Battalion stole their Internet. Then Colonel Kunk picked up on it and he got mad at me because he thought I was spouting all these terrible, terrible things about Battalion because of it. It just spun out of control.”

  Kunk vehemently denied the accusation that Battalion took first pick of anything. “We always pushed all resources down to Bravo Company or Charlie Company first—be it Internet, big-screen TVs, no matter what it was,” Kunk said. “The Internet and all that had been provided down there and they were not taking advantage of it, and still saying that they didn’t have what everyone had at Mahmudiyah.” HHC commander Umbrell watched the fiasco escalate, powerless to stop it because the relationship between Kunk and Edwards and Dougherty and Largent had degraded so badly. “The relationship had deteriorated to the point where it wouldn’t be improved unless both parties agreed it was going to be improved,” he noted. “And neither one of them was backing down.”

  Largent was desperate for ideas to remedy the situation. He appealed, he
thought in confidence, to an officer from the brigade whom he had always trusted. He approached him and asked, “Sir, we’ve got these problems. What can I do about it? Can you give me some insight here?” Largent believed he was betrayed: not long after, Kunk confronted him about going behind his back. They had a relationship-ending argument, during which Largent told Kunk he couldn’t work for him anymore. He contacted Brigade Sergeant Major Brian Stall, who came down to see Largent in Lutufiyah the next day.

  “I can’t work for this fucking guy anymore,” Largent told Stall. “We are headed down a road to where something bad is going to happen, because he is not listening to anybody. He’s not understanding the tactical situation out here. I’ve done everything I can. This is going to end badly, and there’s nothing more I can do to fix it.” Largent was gone from Lutufiyah and moved to new duties within a week. About Largent’s departure, Kunk said, “He wasn’t getting the job done. The environment was tough. And there’s a thing about enforcing standards and discipline and doing the right things. And it wasn’t getting done. It was time for a change.”