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

by Jim Frederick

  “That was it for me,” said one 1st Platoon Bravo soldier. “I was done after that. I didn’t give a fuck about anybody but my platoon. Other platoons, I didn’t give a fuck. I didn’t talk to anybody else after that. Other platoons were looking at us: no sympathy. They were looking at us like it was all our fault, giving us the ‘Do you know how much pain you caused?’ routine. It was just bad.”

  24

  Dilemma and Discovery

  MULTIPLE SWEEP AND SEARCH operations were conducted simultaneously throughout the next forty-eight hours on both sides of the Euphrates, but physical clues and human intelligence kept leading back to the vicinity of the power plant. As that was happening, Watt was obsessively mulling over everything Yribe had told him, even after they made it up to Striker the next day. It continued to nag at him. He weighed all the scenarios, he tried to evaluate all possibilities, and it just didn’t compute, that one guy could get into a house and control an entire family in that situation. There was no way Green could have done it alone. No way. There just had to have been more people. He brought it up with Yribe several times, and each time Yribe refused to entertain the notion. Yes, Yribe said, he took Green’s word on how it went down. No, he never asked Barker and Cortez about it. Why not? Tons of reasons, Yribe said: Because he didn’t really want to know, because God would sort it out in the end, because the last thing 1st Platoon needed was more trouble, because it was already ancient history. And because it was none of his business—and it was none of Watt’s business either.

  The search for Tucker and Menchaca was continuing. There were TVs in the Striker chow hall tuned to Fox News or CNN and people would just keep on feeding their faces. Watt couldn’t believe it. He was so angry at these soft, smug rear-echelon motherfuckers. Look at them, he thought. Two missing soldiers were not going to get in the way of their sundae with sprinkles. He wanted to get up on a table and scream at them about how this entire room of fat, pasty fuckfaces was not worth a single one of those guys.

  Going to Striker was like going to a different planet, he thought. Anytime any soldiers from 1st Platoon were up there, some NCO from the finance corps or quartermaster corps could be virtually guaranteed to stop them in the chow hall and get on their case for wearing the old green patches on their uniforms rather than the ones designed for new ACU digital pattern uniforms. First Platoon’s fury would be hard to contain. “Eat my balls, dude,” they would say. “You’re lucky I even have a fucking patch. This is the one patch that got handed down to me through twelve people so you could check what division I am from before deciding it was cool to be a cocksucker. I don’t have any other fucking patches because all of my other fucking uniforms got toasted when our fucking FOB burned down.”

  Even worse was when the “Fobbits” from Striker, as they were called, would be forced to come to Yusufiyah. They would arrive in their crisp uniforms and their shiny Humvees and bust out their cameras taking pictures of all the combat squalor. The piles of wreckage, the mangled Humvees, the scruffy soldiers. Watt couldn’t stand it. It was like it was all a show for them, all a story they could tell their friends back home about how they had really seen some shit back in Iraq, man. And Watt knew these rear-echelon retards’ friends would then all buy them rounds of drinks and toast their buddies, the war heroes. It made him seethe.

  Just yesterday he nearly murdered someone. A female NCO in line at the Green Beans coffee shop was complaining about the communications blackout in effect because the names of the missing soldiers had not yet been released. She was irritated that she couldn’t turn in a paper for an online correspondence course she was taking. Watt exploded.

  “Are you fucking serious, you fucking bitch?” he yelled. “I’ll tell my friends to die at a more convenient time for you, you fucking piece of shit.” He physically went for her, intending to do her some sort of harm he wasn’t even in control of, and he had to be dragged out of the place. Luckily, there were a bunch of infantry NCOs there, so they let Watt’s outburst slide as long as he just got out of there. As he reluctantly slinked off, he was glad to hear them tell her, in a much more polite manner, that she really should shut the hell up.

  Around lunchtime on June 19, Watt ran into Bryan Howard and Justin Cross. They were returning from leave and appreciated the chance to commiserate with a guy going through the same thing they were. Tucker and Menchaca had still not been found, but all around Striker, it seemed like just another day to everyone else. Since Watt spent much of the deployment as the platoon’s radioman, he had a better memory for where people were located on particular days than the average soldier. As they were talking, Watt remembered that while both guys were members of 3rd Squad at the time, Howard had been a part of the group at TCP2 that day back in March.

  Cross wandered off at one point, and Watt tried to get Howard to talk about that day. But he decided he had to do it craftily, as if he knew more than he actually did. They discussed all of the messed-up stuff they had seen, and Watt insinuated something about, well, the really messed-up stuff that had happened in March. What are you talking about? Howard asked. You know, Watt said, behind TCP2, with the family, the ones that got waxed that day. And the girl, the girl that got burned? Convinced that Watt did indeed know the whole story, Howard talked about it all, at length. He filled in many of the missing pieces about Cortez and Barker and even the extent of Howard’s own involvement. He had had to hold down the TCP with just Scheller—and the radio that the others down at the girl’s house weren’t responding to anyway. He told Watt about how he still didn’t really believe them until they returned, with the blood-stained clothes.

  That night, Watt recounted to Yribe what Howard had relayed to him. Yribe said he couldn’t really believe it, but he didn’t see what good was going to come from digging it up. While it was bothering Watt to the point of obsession, Yribe’s philosophy was it had nothing to do with him.

  “Watt, dude, were you there?” Yribe asked.

  “No.”

  “Have you talked to anybody who was personally there, at the house, when it happened?”

  “No.”

  “What you know is what somebody heard from somebody else. That’s what you know, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you don’t really know a lot, do you?”

  “I guess not.”

  Watt didn’t know much, but he just knew it was true. For a while, he did try to forget about it. But he kept coming back to the father, that was the thing that kept him up at night. He couldn’t sleep at all anymore, and that was the image that haunted him. It was horrible, what happened to them all, especially the girl, but Watt kept focusing on the father. Watt wasn’t a parent, he wasn’t even married, but he supposed it was simply because he was a man that the father was the one he identified with the most. He imagined the powerlessness, the literal impotence, of having armed men break into your house and there being nothing you could do to protect your family. Watt ran it over in his mind again and again. What would that feel like, to realize that you and the people you love were about to be blown away? When did all hope vanish? When did the Iraqi man realize that he, and his whole family, were going to die? When the gun started going off, or before? When the bullet slammed into his skull, or before? “I’d just imagine what it would be like to spend my last moments on Earth like that,” he said. “And I couldn’t think of a worse way to go.”

  Watt called his father, who had been an airborne combat engineer in the late 1970s. He asked his dad what he would do if his brothers in arms had done something really bad.

  “What is it?” his father asked.

  “I really shouldn’t say,” Watt told him, “but it is bad beyond anything you could imagine. What would you do?” Watt asked.

  “You should let your conscience be your guide,” his father said. “If it is as heinous as you say, you can’t let your loyalty to your men get in the way of doing what is right.”

  Watt resolved that he couldn’t just let this pass. “If I kill s
omeone in combat,” he reasoned, “that’s the risk that the other guy involved has agreed to take. And I stand just as much of a chance of getting my ticket punched as the guy I am trying to kill. But civilians are different. The guys who did this had to pay. Not to say that if I never turned them in, they wouldn’t be paying for it, in their own heads. Your own conscience is worse than any punishment that anyone else can lay on you. I think that’s part of why Yribe was saying he wouldn’t turn them in. But that’s not good enough. Not for that shit. Not after I and all the rest of us busted our balls the entire time. I didn’t get to go out on a kill spree because I was hurting. We all sucked up the same bullshit and we didn’t get to wig out.”

  Finally, after a midafternoon sweep through Rushdi Mullah on Sunday the 18th, two detainees helped pinpoint the location of Tucker’s and Menchaca’s bodies, which were located on Monday, June 19, just before 8:00 p.m., about two miles northeast of the power plant. Because it was possible they had been booby-trapped with IEDs, they had to be examined by an Iron Claw team and it took another several hours before their remains could be recovered.

  Judging from a video shot by the insurgents, this seems to be the vicinity where the bodies were mutilated. There were about a dozen men milling around the already dead and desecrated bodies. Both soldiers appeared eviscerated and half-naked, dirty with caked blood and mud, just as one would appear after being dragged behind a truck. Tucker was decapitated, and a man, after holding his severed head aloft like a trophy, placed it on Tucker’s own body. Another set of hands at-temped to light both soldiers’ ACUs on fire. The tape is particularly revolting because the men are so nonchalant. They are slightly agitated but don’t seem worried, hurried, or anxious. As dusk appears to be falling in the background, they are in a subdued yet celebratory mood, half-singing, half-shouting “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!”

  According to a briefing by Major General William Caldwell and an appearance on Larry King Live, coalition forces conducted over twenty-five combat operations, cleared twelve villages, and conducted eleven air assaults over seventy-two hours. The Air Force logged about four hundred flight hours of fixed-wing and about two hundred hours of unmanned drone flight time. One coalition force member died and twelve were wounded. One armored vehicle was destroyed and another seven were damaged. They encountered a total of twenty-nine IEDs, of which they discovered seventeen, and twelve detonated. They killed two Al Qaeda operatives, questioned dozens of people, and detained thirty-six.

  Before the bodies were found, the Mujahideen Shura Council (MSC) had issued a statement saying the men had been captured and more information would be forthcoming in a few days. The day after, another statement appeared, also purportedly from the MSC, stating that the new leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq had slaughtered the two himself. Significantly, considering insurgents would later claim they mounted this attack as revenge for the rape of Abeer and the murder of her and her family, neither communiqué made any mention of the March atrocity.

  In keeping with the pattern of making changes only after a tragedy had occurred, or, as 1st Squad leader Sergeant Chaz Allen put it, “Nothing is taken seriously until something serious happens,” tons of defensive equipment flooded down to the JSB and the TCPs, and a new staffing directive was issued: Every TCP needed to have at least eight men and two trucks at all times, no exceptions. Rather than this being welcome news, virtually everyone in Bravo despised the new manning constraints because, without more troops, too, just conforming to the regulation was nearly impossible. “It was killing people on sleep. It was exhausting them even more,” said one platoon leader.

  25

  “Remember That Murder of That Iraqi Family?”

  A COUPLE OF days after Tucker and Menchaca had been found, Fenlason and Norton were still decompressing. They had just lived through the most intense emotional and professional experiences of their lives. Simply dealing with the loss of three guys was enough, but to be the constant focus of, and focus of abuse from, Kunk and Edwards and Ebel and who knows who else all the way up to Division had been hard to take. No doubt, there would be investigations. The knives were going to come out, that was certain. They welcomed it in some regards. At one point, Fenlason was so fed up with Edwards’s riding him that he told him that he just wasn’t going to talk to him until the investigating officer showed up. When Edwards and Kunk had finally moved their TOC back to Mahmudiyah, Fenlason and Norton could try to focus—again—on getting the platoon back on its feet. They honestly didn’t know if it could be done this time.

  Watt had looked at it from every angle. He had searched for all the ways to avoid it, but he knew he had to tell. Why did he track down Howard, trick him into revealing everything? He wished he hadn’t. He wished he could un-know what he knew. But now that he was convinced that Barker, Cortez, and Green had raped that girl and killed her and her family, there was no way he couldn’t tell. He was worried. Paranoid is not too strong a word. This was serious stuff and he was choosing to put himself in the middle of it. He was accusing his own brothers in arms of murder. The way everyone was tweaked—everybody had become borderline insane to begin with over the course of the last eight months, and now they were all grieving over Tucker, Menchaca, and Babineau—he truly could not predict how anyone was going to react to what he had to say. He wanted to keep it out of his immediate chain of command. He was worried that the reflexive impulse among junior leaders would be to protect the unit, either to dismiss what Watt was saying without investigating it or to cover it up. But he was also worried that those he was accusing might try to hurt or even kill him. He wanted to get the information in the hands of someone with the authority to actually do something about it, yet outside the regular battalion structure.

  On June 23, as Watt was finally heading back from Striker to the JSB, the convoy stopped at FOB Yusufiyah to pick up Staff Sergeant Bob Davis from the Combat Stress team. After the catastrophic loss to the platoon, he was heading down to the JSB too, to visit the men.

  Watt made a beeline for Davis, pulled him aside, and said, “Hey, I need to talk to you.” Once Davis had gotten the broadest outline—that Watt was not involved and had no evidence, but that he had heard a plausible story that some 1st Platoon members had committed a very serious crime and that he wanted Davis’s help in reporting it—he told Watt to stop right there. This was neither a confession nor a counseling session. He was required to report any crime a soldier told him he had committed or had firsthand knowledge of. But all Watt was telling him was hearsay, so Davis wasn’t sure how to handle the matter.

  “I need to check with my own XO [executive officer] on how to proceed, and I don’t have a way to contact my own chain of command right now,” he told Watt. “I am not blowing this off, but I am gonna have to get back to you.”

  This was not the response Watt was looking for. Now that he had committed to telling, he was bursting the whole ride down to the JSB. His mind was racing. He needed to talk to someone he could trust. Upon his arrival at the JSB, he got sent to TCP4 as part of an element to relieve a team headed by Sergeant John Diem. Watt was so happy to see Diem. There was literally no one in the world Watt trusted more than Diem. No one had their head screwed on straighter than Diem. No one’s moral compass was truer.

  As they were doing the handoff, Watt said to Diem, “Things might get hairy in the next couple of days, so I want you to have my back. I need you to promise me that you’ll protect me.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Diem asked.

  “I have some information about some fucked-up stuff that guys in this unit did, I can’t tell you about it now, but in a couple of days, some people might have it in for me, so you need to protect me.”

  “Bullshit. You are going to tell me—now—what in the fuck you are talking about.”

  And Watt did.

  Diem went back to the JSB and immediately went on four hours of guard. While on guard, Diem decided he could not honor the promise Watt had extracted from him not to t
ell anyone. This was too serious. Watt’s head was not in the game, for starters, and distracted soldiers make mistakes. Plus, if Watt was in danger from some of the men, he would be more so if rumors started leaking. The only option was to get the whole mess right in front of the chain of command’s nose as soon as possible. Four hours later, as soon as he came off guard, he went straight to Fenlason’s office. Norton was there, and the two were talking.

  “What’s up, Diem?” one of them asked. He said he needed to talk to them. Sure, they said.

  “You remember that murder of that Iraqi family? Back behind TCP2 that happened several months ago?” Diem asked.

  Vaguely, they said. Rings a bell. What about it?

  Well, Diem continued, it had just come to his attention, but he had good reason to believe that the perpetrators might not have been Iraqis.

  “What?” they said. “What exactly are you saying here?”

  Diem said that Watt had just come to him. Watt was not involved, but he had spoken to two soldiers with firsthand knowledge of that day who said that Green, Cortez, and Barker killed that family. He didn’t have any evidence and this was all thirdhand, Diem said, but he thought Fenlason and Norton should take it seriously. They said they would, but Diem had to tell them everything he knew. And he did, describing everything Watt had told him. He acknowledged his info was sketchy, and he wasn’t even sure exactly how many soldiers were involved. They talked for a while and tried to consider all angles, including what the best next step was.