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

by Jim Frederick

“How about this?” Diem asked, thinking of Howard. “If you will give me twenty-four hours, I think I can get one of the soldiers Watt talked to to come and talk to you.”

  “Yes,” Fenlason said, without hesitation. “Do it.” The closer they could get to firsthand sources, he thought, the better off everybody would be. The rest of the afternoon, Fenlason and Norton worked quietly, trying to make sense of what they had just heard. At dinner that night, they separated themselves from the rest of the platoon as they ate, and Fenlason broke the silence. He had been thinking about it, and he wasn’t sure they should be doing any waiting, firsthand source or not. He looked at Norton and said, “Hey, boss, we can’t do this. We gotta get this booger off of our plate. We need to make this motherfucker someone else’s problem and quick.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” Norton replied. Fenlason called Goodwin over the radio.

  “Sir, I think you need to put together a patrol and get back down here as soon as possible.”

  “Why?”

  “Sir, I’d rather not say over the open radio network,” Fenlason responded, “but trust me, you need to get down here.”

  “You’re going to have to give me something a bit better than that, Sergeant,” an annoyed Goodwin replied.

  “Sir, let’s just say that it is worse than what just happened down here this week.”

  “There are soldiers missing?” Goodwin asked, alarmed.

  “No! Negative! N. O. No. No, sir. It is different entirely, but it is serious.”

  “I am not going to play Twenty Questions with you, Sergeant.”

  “Let me just say one word, sir,” Fenlason said. “Haditha.” Haditha is a town in western Iraq, but the name had become shorthand for an international media scandal involving a group of Marines who had killed twenty-four men, women, and children there in November 2005. A Time magazine article in March 2006 cast doubt on the military’s version of events, which initially claimed no one but insurgents had been killed, and an investigation of that incident had been ongoing ever since.

  “Haditha?”

  “Haditha, sir. It makes Haditha look like child’s play.” This was driving Fenlason crazy. Anyone who was listening would know something serious was going down.

  “Haditha?”

  “Sir, I’d rather not go into this over the radio. Just, really, sir, you need to get down here.”

  “All right,” Goodwin responded, still baffled, “I’m on my way.”

  Several soldiers, of various levels, who heard the exchange asked each other, “What the fuck was that all about?”

  Goodwin arrived a few hours later with 3rd Platoon, and Blaisdell was pissed. It sounded a lot like more of Fenlason’s me-first dramatics, as if 3rd Platoon had nothing better to do than cater to Fenlason’s histrionics. As soon as they pulled in, Blaisdell whipped out of the truck.

  “Dude, who in the fuck do you think you are?” Blaisdell yelled. “This had better be fucking good, ’cause you got a lot of balls.”

  “You need to calm down and back down,” Fenlason said. “Sit down and shut up. This is bigger than anything you can fucking possibly fathom. So you don’t say a goddamn thing right now. Just sit down and be quiet and listen.”

  And Blaisdell did, because he could see in Fenlason’s eyes that this was as serious as he said. Fenlason and Norton briefed Goodwin and Blaisdell. They actually went through it two or three times. The first time, Goodwin just listened, eyes wide and mouth open. After that, he was taking notes and asking questions.

  Just after midnight on the 24th, Goodwin called Kunk and told him what he thought had happened. The connection was bad and Goodwin was emotional, but Kunk got the gist, that some of the soldiers may have committed a very serious crime. He said he would be down there in the morning. After briefing Majors Wintrich and Salome and calling the deputy brigade commander up at Camp Striker, he departed Mahmudiyah with Edwards just before 9:30 a.m. They hit an IED near TCP3, which delayed their arrival until after 11:00. After meeting with Norton, Fenlason, Goodwin, Blaisdell, Davis, and Edwards, to get as full a story as anyone had at the time, Kunk decided to question each of the soldiers whose names had come out so far individually.

  Yribe was at TCP4, helping with the now drastically understaffed 1st Platoon, so Blaisdell went to fetch him. Kunk told Yribe, as he did each soldier he spoke to that day, that he was there conducting a Commander’s Inquiry to investigate a rape and murder that may have been committed by U.S. soldiers. The purpose of the Commander’s Inquiry was to see if he thought that there was any basis for further investigation by the Army’s law enforcement officers. He read them their rights, and all agreed to talk to him freely and none asked for a lawyer. Before questioning each of them, he also gave them a little speech. In a statement he later filed, Kunk wrote, “I explained to them that the most important thing a man can go to his grave with is his own honor and integrity. How serious and the possible effects of these alleged allegations could have on the mission in Iraq and our own soldiers in First Strike. That bad news does not get better with time and that being honest and going the harder right were the most important things now.”

  With varying degrees of vehemence and evasiveness, each soldier whom Watt implicated claimed to have no knowledge of what Kunk was talking about. Yribe said he had heard some rumors about Green being involved, but he didn’t have any knowledge of that, and he denied finding a shotgun shell at the crime scene.

  When Yribe returned to TCP4 after being questioned, as he got out of the Humvee he gave Watt a look like “What the fuck?”

  “What?” Watt said.

  “What the fuck did you say?” Yribe asked.

  “Nothing. What are you talking about?”

  “Kunk is asking about that night, that family. Did you fucking tell them?”

  “No!”

  “Then who did?”

  “I don’t know,” said Watt, scrambling to push the heat off of him. “Maybe Howard?”

  “Well, I think I am okay. I was able to catch Barker and talk to him, to make sure of what we were saying. I hope Cortez doesn’t talk.”

  Watt was terrified for his safety. This had all gotten rolling very quickly. Were they going to leave him out here? he wondered. If these dudes would kill a kid, he thought, why wouldn’t they kill the soldier who snitched? Everyone had grenades. It would be the simplest thing to just pull the pin on his vest as he was sleeping, and then say, stupid private doesn’t even know how to keep his frags taped.

  Howard was the second person to be questioned, and he told Kunk that Green laughingly said he had done it. But Howard didn’t believe him and dismissed it. Howard did, however, admit to drinking alcohol down at the TCPs, along with Barker, Cortez, and Green. Barker, when questioned, was insolent and uncooperative to the point of being insubordinate. He denied any involvement, although, he repeatedly said, he had heard some “names” of people who were involved. Whenever he was asked “What names?” he just replied, “You know, guys talk, just names.” Kunk and Edwards traveled to the AVLB, where Cortez was stationed. Cortez told Kunk that the crime scene was gruesome, but he didn’t know anything about Americans having a hand in it.

  Kunk and Edwards then went to TCP4 to talk to Watt. At that moment, Kunk didn’t think there was anything to the allegations. It boggled the imagination, what Watt was alleging. As he spoke to Watt, Kunk was increasingly frustrated because Watt didn’t have command of even the most basic facts. “His story made no sense,” Kunk said. “None whatsoever. There was no logic, any rhyme or reason to it.”

  Watt was flustered and scared. He wanted to know if Kunk was going to keep the soldiers segregated, because he was concerned they would talk and get their stories straight. Kunk thought Watt was getting way ahead of himself. He was making some serious allegations and Watt didn’t even have his own story straight.

  “Do you understand what you are doing here?” Kunk thundered.

  Kunk was far from convinced that there was anything to Wat
t’s tale, but there was enough doubt and confusion that he decided to recommend a fuller investigation. He would take Watt with him to Mahmudiyah for the time being. Kunk was close to doing nothing at all about the allegations, but, he said, “I either had to prove that this happened, or prove that it didn’t happen. Because I could not allow there to be a lingering rumor that something like that happened.”

  Kunk notified the brigade, and the brigade notified the division. At 4:20 p.m. on June 24, General Thurman informed the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID), and at 7:40 p.m. they got their first briefing from Kunk about the rape and quadruple murders that American soldiers may have committed.

  On June 25, 1st Platoon rotated from the JSB to Yusufiyah and then went to Mahmudiyah the next day for the memorial for Tucker, Menchaca, and Babineau. Second Platoon took over at the JSB. A lieutenant colonel down there from brigade headquarters asked the platoon leader, Lieutenant Paul Fisher, why none of his men had shaved. Fisher, after the Alamo bridge incident, after all of the work and all of the loss, couldn’t hide his exasperation.

  “We drink all the water we have, sir, so that we don’t dehydrate,” he said. “We have been running nonstop since our guys got abducted. We are not really concerned about our looks right now.”

  “I am just trying to keep the heat off of you, Lieutenant,” the lieutenant colonel said. “You guys are not looked upon too favorably these days.”

  By June 26, all of 1st Platoon had moved to Mahmudiyah, ostensibly for the Tucker, Menchaca, and Babineau memorial. But the commanders were also taking a wait-and-see approach on whether any of the investigations led to something concrete. During this time, the rumor mill among the men of 1st Platoon was working overtime, and many had pieced together the broad outlines. Watt had pretty much disappeared, and one by one Cortez, Barker, Yribe, and Howard were all being yanked from their duties. Agents from CID interviewed Watt twice on the morning of the 25th. At 5:30 p.m., separate agents began interrogating Yribe and Howard simultaneously. After nearly five hours, Howard had confessed the major elements of what happened on March 12, implicating all of the other parties, including, for the first time, Spielman. He too was yanked from duties. Over the next five days, and over multiple interrogation sessions (none of which were filmed or recorded by CID agents, despite the agency’s manual urging them to “strongly consider” doing so in cases of violent crime), Barker, Cortez, and Spielman all corroborated Howard’s overall narrative, but each, in various ways, resisted fully implicating himself.* They would disagree, and lawyers would argue, about some of those details at their trials, and after, for years to come.

  Simultaneously, CID and battalion staff were working to find family members related to the murdered family, to inquire about exhuming the bodies to retrieve evidence and to make financial reparations and offer condolences for the crime. The Janabi family was only mildly cooperative. On the advice of their imam, they forbade digging up the corpses, and only a few family members (including Abu Muhammad) could be convinced to testify in various court proceedings. The U.S. Army paid the Janabi family $30,000 for the murders of Qassim, Fakhriah, Abeer, and Hadeel.

  The memorial service for Tucker, Menchaca, and Babineau was held on June 26. It is standard for one soldier, usually a close friend, to eulogize each of the deceased. The men came to Fenlason to say they wanted Yribe to speak for Babineau. Fenlason hesitated. Yribe, after all, was under investigation for some sort of role in the crimes that wasn’t yet clear. Fenlason ultimately decided not to make an issue of it. “I remember thinking, Tony being Tony, and the personality and the reverence that some of the soldiers still look at Tony with, that it might actually be helpful,” he recalled. “If Tony can bring it closure, then we’re going to do it that way. I didn’t like it, but I believe it was the right decision for the soldiers.”

  In his remarks, Tony said, “We have endured much pain and many losses throughout this deployment. Babs and I talked several times while we were on guard about what we would like to have said if something were to happen to one of us. He told me that he would want 1st Platoon to know, and I quote, ‘If I were to go, it would be on my own terms. They will never take me alive.’” Many men said it was one of the most wrenching memorials they had ever experienced.

  Fenlason had gotten word earlier in the day that 1st Platoon was not going to go back to Yusufiyah. They were staying in Mahmudiyah. Almost exactly nine months into year-long deployment, 1st Platoon’s war was effectively over.

  Captain Goodwin and First Sergeant Skidis were discussing how and when to tell the platoon about their fate when Fenlason lost it.

  “Fuck you,” he told Skidis. “Nobody is telling anybody about what’s going to happen with my platoon except me.” After the memorial, Fenlason gathered all of his men in a tent and delivered the news. “We are not going back home to Yusufiyah,” he told them. “I don’t know why. My guess is, with all the people being investigated, and all the interviews that are going to have to be done, it has been deemed impractical. I don’t know what we are going to do here. That is all I know at the moment.” He left on his midtour leave the next morning.

  The men were bewildered. Some of them were upset that they were not able to go back and “finish the job,” as Army vernacular puts it, but most were so emotionally and physically exhausted that they had ceased to care what happened to them. But a few realized right away: They were almost certainly going home alive.

  A few days after the memorial, the men of 1st Platoon were summoned to the chapel tent for a meeting with Lieutenant Colonel Kunk and some other senior leaders. It was apparently designed as a kind of town hall meeting, to bring everybody up to speed on what was happening to the platoon and why.

  He began by telling them, with complete unconcern for the men who spoke up, “You are right to think that there is a lot of suspicion and finger-pointing going on, because Diem and Watt came forward to tell the chain of command that five of your shitbag friends probably raped a girl and killed her whole family. And these guys are cracking, it looks like they are guilty.” But the meeting quickly degenerated into the Kunk Gun unloading on the whole platoon.

  “We thought we were going to get the ‘Keep your heads up’ speech,” said one soldier. “We thought we were going to be told, ‘We’re going to keep you here in Mahmudiyah now because we don’t want anything else to happen to you,’ or something like that. Well, it wasn’t that at all. It was an ass chewing. He just crushed us.” It was, said the men of 1st Platoon, the culmination of all of the vilifications and disparagements they had ever received from Kunk. It was a tirade of abuse, scorn, and personal attack. And the message was clear: 1st Platoon was to blame for 1st Platoon’s problems.

  “You, 1st Platoon, are fucked up! Fucked up! Every single one of you!” he yelled as he scowled across the room. “When did I say it was okay to have one vehicle at the Alamo?” he demanded to know. When someone pointed out the number of times he had driven past when there was only one truck there, he exploded. In a torrent of profanities and at top decibel, Kunk told them that their friends were dead because of their failings; he told them they were quitters, crybabies, and complainers; and he told them they were a disgrace and were being kept at Mahmudiyah because they could not be trusted outside the wire.

  Some men tried to protest how little support and how few men they had, others asked not to be judged by a criminal few in their midst. But the session soon devolved completely into a cacophony of shouts and accusations. Several men broke down in tears.

  Kunk later maintained that he did not remember specifics of what was said that day, but he agreed that it was contentious. “Being honest and being forthright, it’s tough sometimes but that’s what we have to do in this business.”

  After it was all over and Kunk and the senior leaders left, the chaplain came in and said, “I don’t agree with what just happened in here, but if you guys need any help, you can come and see me.”

  “That was one of the defining emot
ional moments of the tour for me,” observed Sergeant John Diem. “If you talk to others about it, they will most likely say, ‘We just got done with the memorial, and they were telling us how fucked up we were,’ and they will leave it at that. But nobody will step back and look at it like, ‘Wait a second. Did they maybe have a point? Were they trying to say something that was important? That maybe we had become something monstrous?’ Now, the one thing that was absent was if Colonel Kunk had gotten up there and said, ‘I fucked up too. I have allowed you guys to turn into monsters. And I had completely forsaken you when you needed the support that only I had the power to provide. But I lacked the character to do it. All of you have failed. Me, and we, as a family, as 1st Battalion, Bravo Company, 1st Platoon, all the way down the line, have failed. At some point we failed to have the character to make the right decisions to make it so that this never happened. Mine was the crowning failure, but not the only one.’ If, at any point, that had come out of his mouth, a lot of people would have snapped out of it, like that. But nobody’s got the grit to say that. Everybody wants to say, ‘But it wasn’t my fault.’ Including him.”

  In the aftermath of 1st Platoon’s back-to-back debacles, in addition to the criminal investigations against Cortez, Barker, Spielman, Yribe, and Howard, there were two AR 15-6 investigations conducted. The first, begun on June 18, centered on “the decisions made and guidance given” about staffing at the AVLB. That investigation was finished in eleven days.

  During his interview with the investigating officer, Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Daugherty, First Lieutenant Norton explained his predicament: “I had twenty-three individuals at the JSB, including the medic. With all the IEDs going off on Sportster, I am not sending less than three vehicles back to the FOB. That takes nine guys out of the fight. That leaves guards on guard for six to eight hours. As much as I push up requests, the response is, ‘Just go out and get after it.’ In order to do all those missions, still make trips to the FOB, and switch out the guards, it wasn’t enough bodies. It was pushed up and they acknowledged it, but it was just one of those things you had to do. I am 100 percent sure that I would have done nothing different that day. As a leader, you’ve got to look at what you’ve got and where you can put it. That was the best I could do at the time, sir. I have no regrets of my decisions or anything I did that day.”