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

by Jim Frederick

  EPILOGUE

  The Triangle of Death Today and Trials at Home

  EVEN BEFORE THE broad-scale troop increases in early 2007 known as the surge, there was an awareness among military planners that one U.S. battalion in the Triangle of Death was not enough. Although the 1-502nd had trained two Iraqi battalions (one in Lutufiyah and one in Mahmudiyah) to the point that they could operate with substantial autonomy, when the 2nd Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division (the 2-10th) arrived in the area in August and September of 2006 to relieve the 101st Airborne’s Second Brigade, they dispatched two battalions to occupy the same space that First Strike had held down on its own.

  The 10th Mountain Division arrived, as units usually do, with a certain arrogance. In an October 2006 interview with Stars and Stripes, brigade commander Colonel Mike Kershaw downplayed the mythic stature that the Triangle had taken on, saying it was “not the worst place I’ve ever been in the war on terror.” He likewise claimed that the rape-murders of March 12, 2006, hardly came up in his discussions with the locals. One of his officers affirmed, “I ask, but they don’t want to talk about it. They’re just not dwelling on that.” Perhaps no one wanted to discuss the crime with the U.S. Army. But locals were, in fact, dwelling on the desecration and humiliation, and insurgent groups continued to extract as much propaganda value from the atrocity as possible. In November 2006, for example, the Islamic Army in Iraq (IAI) broadcast a video unveiling a homemade rocket it named “The Abeer,” which it said had a range of 12.4 miles and carried 44 pounds of explosives.

  With an extra battalion in the Triangle, the 2-10th could do things First Strike had only dreamt of. In late October, for example, the 10th Mountain took over the Yusufiyah Power Plant in a massive (though largely unopposed) attack and turned it into a large American base. Likewise, the unit started building permanent patrol bases in Rushdi Mullah, along Route Malibu, and at other locations that the 1-502nd, with 700 to 1,000 fewer men, had barely been able to patrol, let alone occupy for extended periods of time.

  As the 2-10th was settling in during the fall of 2006, however, Washington was finally coming to terms with the fact that America was losing the war. During the winter of 2005-2006, for example, there had been about 500 attacks a week on U.S. and allied forces. By late summer 2006, there were almost 800 every week. Roadside bombs were at an all-time high, and 1,000 civilians were dying in Baghdad alone every month.

  In late 2006, a small coterie of exasperated civilian and military planners had broken through to President George W. Bush with a new message: The current strategy was doomed. Drastic steps had to be taken. Too much emphasis, they said, had been placed on killing enemies and handing over power to Iraqi troops, most of whom were not prepared to operate independently. Right now, they asserted, Iraq needed more, not fewer, U.S. troops and the Americans needed to pay more attention to the paramount imperative of keeping the Iraqi population safe. An insurgency needs the people’s support to thrive, and a secure, confident populace is more likely to quash an insurgency than nurture it.

  In November 2006, Bush fired Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and in January he replaced General George Casey, the top general in Iraq, with General David Petraeus. As part of the new strategy, Petraeus was authorized to deploy an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to augment the 130,000 already in the country, and he ordered strict adherence to the doctrines contained in U.S. Army Field Manual 3-24: Counterinsurgency, the new handbook he had just finished editing. The counterinsurgency dicta contained in the book, many of which are intentionally paradoxical, were communicated down to the lowest private: “Sometimes, the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be;” “Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is;” and “Sometimes, doing nothing is the best reaction.”

  Despite the fresh approach, the situation on the ground got worse before it got better, and violence increased steadily through the first half of 2007. As Thomas E. Ricks chronicled in The Gamble, “The period from mid-2006 to mid-2007 would prove to be the bloodiest twelve months that Americans had seen thus far in the war, with 1,105 killed.”

  Despite the extra troops and the optimism with which the 2-10th Mountain arrived, they had their share of setbacks during this bloody year as well. Ultimately, the brigade lost sixty-nine men and suffered the most infamous soldier abduction since the Alamo incident. Before dawn on May 12, a group of up to twenty insurgents attacked a 10th Mountain convoy on Route Malibu—less than five miles from the Alamo ambush site. After at least one IED detonated and after a barrage of small-arms and grenade fire, four American soldiers and one Iraqi soldier were dead, and three Americans were missing.

  As thousands of U.S. forces scoured the area, the Al Qaeda–affiliated Islamic State of Iraq released a communiqué over the Internet, taunting, “Searching for your soldiers will lead to nothing but exhaustion and headaches. You should remember what you have done to our sister Abeer in the same area.” On May 23, Private First Class Joseph Anzack was found dead, floating in the Euphrates about a mile from the attack site, but the remains of the two others, Sergeant Alex Jimenez and Private First Class Byron Fouty, were not recovered for more than a year.

  While a devastating and demoralizing event, this abduction proved to be a coda for one of the war’s darkest periods, not a harbinger of more to come. Beginning in the summer of 2007, the weekly violence tallies across much of the country started to drop. And they kept dropping. And dropping, and dropping. Within a few months, violence had dipped to levels not seen since early 2006. No doubt the increased American troop presence helped, but so dramatic and persistent a decline could not be attributed to 30,000 extra U.S. soldiers alone.

  In fact, several other factors were at play. First was the grim reality that after four years of constant sectarian conflict and low-grade civil war, the country had, effectively, been ethnically cleansed. Entire towns and regions had been re-sorted and segregated into religiously homogeneous enclaves. The demographics of Mahmudiyah, for example, had been changing dramatically from a mixed city to a Shi’ite bastion even while the 1-502nd was there, and although Sunnis managed to carve out select strongholds for themselves, the years-long process of murder and migration was finally hitting its stasis.

  Second, what would become known as the “Sons of Iraq” programs began taking hold nationwide. They started during the fall of 2006 in Anbar, when, with the blessing and financial support of local U.S. commanders, a grouping of twenty-five tribes formed the Anbar Salvation Council to fight off Al Qaeda. The success of that grassroots project inspired American senior commanders to nurture and promote similar ones across the country. Seeing the Sunnis’ increasing schism with Al Qaeda as an opportunity to bring disaffected tribes back into the fold, the United States began paying Sunni tribes (and some Shi’ite tribes) $300 per man, per month, to run checkpoints, scout for IEDs, and otherwise accept responsibility for the safety of their own neighborhoods. Cynics said this amounted to little more than the Army paying its enemies not to fight. Most commanders needed little prodding to agree that this was true, but they recited more counterinsurgency koans to assert that the payoffs were, if anything, long overdue rather than misguided. “The best weapons do not shoot,” they would say, or, another favorite: “Money is ammunition.” At the program’s peak, there were more than 100,000 such Sons of Iraq on the American payroll, and they had a profoundly positive impact on safety.

  The third factor contributing to the dramatic drop in violence was Muqtada al-Sadr’s relative withdrawal from constant, violent confrontation. Ever since 2004, he had been an unpredictable irritant to the United States. For years he declared unilateral cease-fires and then canceled them; he’d go quiet or even disappear for months, only to return with more fiery speeches and rabble-rousing. He could never seem to decide if he wanted to be a revolutionary or a part of the mainstream political process. With significant exceptions—such as the Shi’ite uprising in March 2008 that came to be known among American soldiers as �
�March Madness”—al-Sadr seemed to settle on a long-term policy of avoiding rather than provoking violence. Some commentators insisted that al-Sadr was merely biding his time until the United States withdrew from Iraq entirely to make a full-scale violent bid. Others maintained that al-Sadr had simply missed his window of opportunity and he and his movement were suffering from a long, steady, and permanent erosion of power and prestige. Either way, his relative dormancy has kept Iraqi and American body counts far lower than they might have been.

  The decreases in violence continued well into 2008. In November 2007, the 101st Airborne Division’s 187th Infantry Regiment relieved the 2-10th Mountain Division. Upon their arrival in South Baghdad, the 187th was astonished at how much safer the area was than what they had expected. The operations officer from one 187th battalion told me that while planning for the deployment at Fort Campbell, he’d anticipated that his unit would live the entire year “off the hook,” meaning they would travel absolutely everywhere by helicopter. But, he said, the 187th soon discovered to their delight they could drive virtually everywhere they wanted with impunity.

  When I arrived to embed with the 187th in May 2008, I, too, was bewildered by how non-deadly the “Triangle of Death” had become. Rides down Sportster or Fat Boy were not terror-inducing tempts of fate. They were routine, and routinely uneventful. The Sons of Iraq were in full swing here, and there were tribal checkpoints on almost every piece of road in the region. Some roads, such as Sportster, seemed to have a checkpoint every quarter mile or so. The AK-47-toting men manning the gates and moving the pylons waved the Americans through with wide smiles.

  There were dangers, of course, big ones, and nighttime raids on suspected insurgents were a frequent occurrence. But the soldiers of the 187th clearly did not fear that every day might be their last. They were in excellent spirits. Their biggest complaint was boredom. Commanders often told me that combating complacency was their primary soldier-management problem. Considering the alternatives, they added, it was a very good problem to have.

  Daytime foot patrols were breezy, casual affairs. Entire squads or platoons would head out into Mahmudiyah or Yusufiyah amid streets filled with people and markets offering a hodgepodge of modest but colorful wares. Junior officers spent a lot of time meeting and negotiating with local sheikhs about what materials they needed to improve their own security.

  “You need a tower?” one U.S. officer asked a Sons of Iraq leader. “HESCO baskets? Sandbags? If this lieutenant over here doesn’t get you the sandbags you need within a week,” the American said, pointing to one of his own men, “you can shoot him.” Laughs all around.

  The soldiers were fully aware that their new allies were former insurgents who had, until very recently, attempted to kill them or their predecessors, yet they remained surprisingly nonchalant and resigned, saying if that’s what the mission now required, if that’s what will get us home faster, then so be it.

  The détente was working. The captain whose company occupied FOB Yusufiyah (and who was, in fact, a good friend of Captain John Goodwin) told me in June 2008 that his company had not suffered a serious IED in months and that no one in his company had fired a weapon, or been fired at, in more than six weeks.

  When I asked the men about their staffing situation, they had few complaints. When I questioned a group of them if they ever went on three-, four-, or five-person patrols (as Bravo, 1-502nd, often had), they looked at me like I was insane and delivered a mini-lecture on the Army’s philosophy of troop maneuver.

  “We never go anywhere with less than a squad,” one staff sergeant told me, as if I was the dumbest civilian on the planet.

  “If you are running around with three or four people,” chimed in a lieutenant, “then you got a leadership problem somewhere.”

  The men of the 187th were extremely respectful of the hardships that previous units had suffered. Once, I was standing atop several stories of scaffolding that still surrounds the five-story turbine hall of the Yusufiyah Power Plant, which was now called COP (Coalition Outpost) Dragon. The views of the Euphrates and the surrounding countryside were majestic. One of the battalion’s senior officers used the opportunity to offer poetic praise about those who had come before.

  “If peace is a structure,” he said, “then maybe we topped it off, installed the roof, and here we are, enjoying the view. And the 10th Mountain put in the beams and built most of the floors. But don’t let anyone tell you that the 502nd didn’t clear the brush and lay the foundation. If it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t be here now.”

  As we were standing atop the power plant, the 502nd was actually less than twenty miles away. During the same deployment cycle in which the 187th was in South Baghdad, the Black Heart Brigade was in Baghdad proper, in a largely Shi’ite neighborhood of the city called Kadhimiyah. They had experienced a spike in violence during the March Madness uprising, but otherwise this tour had been far, far quieter than their previous rotation. “It took a while to adjust, to realize that your life isn’t always in danger,” one unidentified Bravo sergeant who had been on the 2005–2006 deployment told a reporter from the Long War Journal, a blog about terrorism and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when speaking about the difference he saw in 2007–2008.

  While the fast, drastic reduction in violence that occurred in Iraq in late 2007 was a tremendous milestone and achievement, there is a tendency among the military and American politicians to triumphantly overstate the gains. The mere absence of rampant murder does not produce a stable, healthy society on its own, and Iraq was and is a very long way from being a free, fair, prosperous, and democratic civil society.

  During my visit to the area, sectarian resentments were festering and tribal harmony remained a long way off. Though slowly sputtering back to life, the economy was still barely functioning. Public services remained woefully inadequate or nonexistent. Sewage flowed into the street and the hum of generators to supplement the pitiful electric service was ever present. Courts, government offices, and schools were underfunded and understaffed, if they were open at all.

  With the multipartite cease-fire hardening into the norm, however, and violence at four-year lows across the nation, the United States began in late 2008 dismantling much of the surge it had begun less than two years before. With attacks down over 80 percent in Babil province (where much of the Triangle of Death is located), U.S. forces handed full responsibility for the territory back to the Iraqis in October 2008. By January 2009, there were only one-third the U.S. troops in the Triangle than had been there a year before.

  In June 2009, the United States further withdrew across Iraq, retrenching to large bases and largely staying out of day-to-day security operations except in a few restive areas. For some months before, the United States had likewise begun scaling back on the Sons of Iraq initiative, a move that has not, as many predicted, resulted in a wholesale return among former insurgents to their murderous ways. There are still bombings in Iraq, sometimes very lethal ones, but they remain, for now, fairly isolated incidents.

  While Iraq may never become the model of Middle Eastern democracy and capitalism that the Bush administration envisioned, the current consensus among military chiefs as well as politicians and planners of every political affiliation is that the situation there is stable enough to allow the United States to withdraw completely without considering it a defeat. With the war in Afghanistan deteriorating rapidly and taking on a renewed urgency with the Obama administration, the United States remains on schedule to remove all American troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.

  For some, however, the war will never be over.

  Although there was virtually zero usable forensic evidence from the March 12, 2006, rape-murder crime scene (the AK-47 was never recovered, attempts to tie trace sample evidence from the scene to the DNA of the coconspirators were inconclusive, and the Janabi family forbade investigators from exhuming the victims to search for more clues), the Army’s cases against James Barker and Paul Cortez were partic
ularly strong. The two men’s confessions and the confessions of others so thoroughly implicated them both that their defense teams concluded that saving them from execution was the overwhelming priority. Both soldiers offered to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit rape and murder and other charges, as well as to cooperate with all subsequent trials, in exchange for a term of years if the Army agreed not to pursue the death penalty. The Army accepted, and it sentenced Barker and Cortez to 90 years and 100 years, respectively, at Fort Leavenworth’s Disciplinary Barracks, the military’s only maximum-security prison.

  During his one-day court-martial in November 2006, Barker told the court, “I have tried so many times to understand how I was able to do something so mean, so horrible. I simply have no answer when I think of why. When I think about my last deployment to Iraq, I see only darkness in my heart. Though I was never killed, I can see that part of me had died.” Both Barker and Cortez will be eligible for parole after 10 years, and every year after that.