None Left Behind: The 10th Mountain Division and the Triangle of Death

by Charles W. Sasser

  NONE LEFT BEHIND

  ALSO BY CHARLES W. SASSER

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  Charles W. Sasser

  NONE LEFT BEHIND

  THE 10TH MOUNTAIN DIVISION AND THE TRIANGLE OF DEATH

  ST. MARTIN’S PRESS NEW YORK

  NONE LEFT BEHIND. Copyright © 2009 by Charles W. Sasser. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sasser, Charles W.

  None left behind : the 10th Mountain Division and the triangle of death / Charles W. Sasser.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-312-55544-3

  1. Iraq War, 2003—Campaigns—Iraq—Baghdad Region. 2. United States. Army. Mountain Division, 10th. 3. Counterinsurgency—Iraq—Baghdad Region—History—21st century. 4. Battles—Iraq—Baghdad Region—History—21st century. 5. Iraq War, 2003—Regimental histories—United States. I. Title.

  DS79.764.U6S37 2009

  956.7044'342—dc22

  2009028680

  First Edition: December 2009

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To the brave soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the fine soldiers who participated in sharing their experiences, filling in the gaps of history, and re-living with me the drama that appears in these pages. I am particularly grateful to Lieutenant Colonel Paul Swiergosz, who paved the way for my research and in the process became a friend; to Lieutenant Colonel Richard Greene, current commander of the 4/31st, who so graciously accepted me back into the Army fold and opened doors to greater understanding of his men and the 10th Mountain Division; to Mr. Benjamin Abel, 10th Mountain Division Public Affairs Office, who helped me begin the process; and to Mr. Harrison L. Sarles, Director, Army Public Affairs, for his understanding and stamp of approval.

  While the core of this book is built around interviews with soldiers of the 10th Mountain, a variety of other sources also contributed: official U.S. Army military documents and After Action Reports; diaries; newspapers, books, and other published accounts; interviews with witnesses other than members of the unit and with other authorities. I wish to thank all these sources for helping make this book possible.

  Thanks yet again to Mr. Marc Resnick, my editor at St. Martin’s Press, who launched this project by sending me a news clipping; and to my longtime agent and friend, Mr. Ethan Ellenberg.

  I would also like to express my gratitude to the following authors and published works, from which I drew inspiration and guidance in writing this book: Warrior King, by Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman (w/Joe Layden, St. Martin’s Press, 2008); The Iraq War: A Military History, by Williamson Murray and Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales, Jr. (Harvard University Press, 2003); Digital Soldiers: The Evolution of High-Tech Weaponry and Tomorrow’s Brave New Battlefield, by James F. Dunnigan (St. Martin’s Press, 1996); The Highway War, by Maj. Seth W.B. Folsom (Potomac Books, 2006); The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell, by John Crawford (Riverhead Books, 2005); Dawn over Baghdad: How the U.S. Military Is Using Bullets and Ballots to Remake Iraq, by Karl Zinsmeister (Encounter Books, 2004); Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare, edited by Daniel Marston and Carter Malkasian (Osprey Publishing, 2008); Baghdad at Sunrise, by Peter R. Mansoor (Yale University Press, 2008); “Iraq’s Forbidding ‘Triangle of Death,’ ” by Anthony Shadid, Washington Post Foreign Service, Nov. 23, 2004; “5 Soldiers Named in Rape Case,” CBS News, July 10, 2006; “The Massacre of Mahmudiya—The Rape and Murder of Abeer Quassim Hamsa,” expose-the-war-profiteers.org, Dec. 22, 2008; “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Concerns,” ABC News, Dec. 15, 2004; “Army Changes Tack in Treating Combat Stress,” by Ryan Lenz, AP, June 4, 2006; “Final Rites for a Humble Kid,” by Mark Berman, Washington Post, May 30, 2007; “Abducted Soldier Found Dead,” McClatchy Newspapers, July 12, 2008; “Byron W. Fouty,” Yahoo News, May 16, 2007; “Luck Runs out in ‘Triangle of Death,’ ” by Cal Perry, CNN, Oct. 31, 2005; and the “Sermon by Reverend Jimmy Layne on Biblical History of Iraq, June 2007.”

  Finally, an extra special thanks to my wife, Donna Sue, who has suffered my writing of books throughout the years.

  NONE LEFT BEHIND

  INTRODUCTION

  In the late spring of 2008, I rode my motorcycle from Oklahoma to the U.S. Army Military Academy at West Point, New York, where soldiers of the famed 10th Mountain Division were instructing officer cadets in the skills of warfare at a remote training area known as Camp Natural Bridge. The 2nd BCT (Brigade Combat Team) of the 10th Mountain had recently returned (November 2007) from a fifteen-month extended tour of duty in Iraq. It was the 10th’s fourth combat deployment since 2001—three to Iraq, one to Afghanistan.

  While interviewing soldiers at Natural Bridge for this book, I began to hear incredible and horrifying tales about the S-curves on Malibu Road. The 4/31st (4th Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment) of the 2nd BCT had been assigned to pacify an area about twenty miles south of Baghdad known, appropriately, as “The Triangle of Death.” The AO (Area of Operations) along the Euphrates River adjoined Anbar Province, the most violent and dangerous in Iraq. Of the more than 3,000 fatal casualties suffered by the United States in Iraq since 2003 and the start of the war, over 1,000 had died in this region. Chaos, anarchy, violence, and fear ruled.

  To date, no Coalition troops had permanently penetrated all parts of The Triangle of Death. Delta Company of the 4/31st, roughly 150 infantrymen at full strength, assaulted into the AO to establish a Company FOB (Forward Operating Base) and two smaller patrol bases along a twisted four-mile length of Route Malibu that soon became known as the “S-curves.” The gauntlet had been cast; the enemy immediately picked it up.

  The courage and warrior fortitude of Delta and the 4th Battalion would be tried and tried again in The Triangle of Death wher
e the hard, dirty, exhausted infantrymen of the 10th became a macrocosm of the war in Iraq. As one soldier put it, “We don’t commute to work, it commutes to us.”

  The core of the book is built around dozens of interviews I conducted at Camp Natural Bridge and elsewhere with officers and soldiers of the 4/31st. As they shared their experiences with me, they made a single concordant request: “Please tell the story the way it really was.” That I have tried to do.

  It has often been noted that a thousand different stories may emerge from even a single shared event. Therefore, the recounting of events in this book may not correspond precisely in all instances with the memories of everyone involved. I have necessarily filled in narrative gaps by utilizing my own knowledge and experience with war and with men at war to recreate certain scenes and dialogue. After all, few of us remember past conversations word for word or past events in detail, especially if they occur under the stress and confusion of combat. Where re-creation occurs, I strived to match personalities with the situation while maintaining factual content. Where conflict, doubt, or hazy recollection arose, I selected the general consensus and went with that.

  Actual names are used throughout except in those rare instances where names were lost due to imperfect memory or lack of documentation, where privacy was requested, or where public identification would serve no useful purpose and might cause embarrassment. In addition, all data has been filtered through the author. I am certain to have made errors in a work of this broad scope with so many men involved. While such errors may be understandable, I nonetheless take full responsibility and ask to be forgiven for them.

  I apologize to anyone omitted, neglected, or somehow slighted in the preparation of this book. I do not intend to diminish your accomplishments or war records. It is merely that I had to focus on a smaller number of you in order to make this book manageable.

  I am an old Army veteran, having served twenty-nine years (active and reserve), including a deployment as a Military Police First Sergeant during the 1991 Iraqi war, Operation Desert Storm. I thought I knew American soldiers, beginning with the Vietnam War era. What I encountered in the officers and soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division reinforced my faith in America. If we can field such magnificent men as these in times of peril, then all is still well with the nation.

  ONE

  Sergeant First Class Ronnie Montgomery never passed the large glass case at 4th Battalion headquarters on Fort Drum without stopping. Framed photographs of young men in uniform looked back at him, some smiling, others wearing the sober expressions of youth just out of high school and boot camp who were starting to realize that decisions have consequences. The memorial case had been almost empty fifteen months ago when the 2nd BCT (Brigade Combat Team) of the 10th Mountain Division deployed to Iraq. Now it was nearly full.

  Montgomery, thirty-six, was a career six-footer with a broad face burned by the Iraqi sun and hair so high and tight that he hardly had any. His company alone, Delta, had contributed nine faces to the case. Not that they needed to be framed and displayed to be remembered. Who they were, what they were, was forever branded on the souls of those who survived the S-curves on Malibu Road in Iraq’s Triangle of Death.

  Manticore, as Montgomery recalled, was playing on the SciFi Channel in 2006 when the 10th Mountain began preparations to deploy its BCT to the Sandbox. The B movie proved popular among Fort Drum soldiers primarily because it featured a U.S. Army squad from the 10th. Tasked to locate and recover a missing news crew in a small Iraqi town, the squad arrives to find locals slaughtered by a mythical winged creature awakened from its long slumber by a terrorist leader determined to drive Americans from his land by any means. From the movie sprang a kind of dark proverb circulated among the soldiers: “In Iraq, monsters come out at night.”

  Fort Drum, the military post, home of the 10th Mountain Division, sprawled across a wide swath of real estate in the Thousand Island region of northern New York state thirty miles from the Canadian border, with the Great Lakes to the west and the Adirondack Mountains to the east. It was an old fort dating back to the early eighteenth century, but had been modernized over the years, even to include a runway for jet aircraft.

  Montgomery began his army career here with the 10th fourteen years ago. Since then he had moved around a lot to other outfits and places—Panama, Belize, peacekeeping in Haiti, a combat tour in Kosovo. Along the way he gained a few stripes and lost a wife. What the hell. If the army wanted him to have a wife, it would have issued him one, as the old saying went.

  It was good to be back at Drum. It was almost like coming home, even if for only six weeks before it, and he with it, moved out to the war zone. Things didn’t seem to have changed much over the years. The 10th was still a plain light infantry outfit specializing in shooting and walking long distances carrying heavy loads. It maintained little connection with its old traditions as a “mountain” unit, other than for streets named after its World War II exploits at Anzio, Riva Ridge, and Mount Belvedere.

  It had taken him three years to get this far. He had been assigned to a support platoon with the 101st Airborne when Operation Iraqi Freedom kicked off in 2003. The platoon was getting ready to deploy when he received a call from Brigade Schools.

  “Sergeant Montgomery, you’re going to drill sergeant duty.”

  “Don’t tell me that. I got a forty-man platoon here and we’re going to Iraq.”

  “Sorry, Drill Sergeant Montgomery.”

  The ultimate test for a soldier was combat duty. Most soldiers secretly wanted to be tested.

  Montgomery hoisted the duffel bag containing most of his belongings to his shoulder—a rolling stone in the army collected little moss—and dropped it off at the NCO quarters before reporting in. It was a hot July afternoon when he took his papers and checked in at Personnel. A staff sergeant behind the desk looked down a list.

  “You’re going to Delta Company, Fourth Battalion,” he said. “It’s a new company just now forming. Looks like you’ll be a plank owner.” He grinned. “Good luck, Sergeant. And watch out for monsters.”

  Montgomery groaned. The way things usually happened, a new company received green boots right out of basic training and rejects from other units in the division required to contribute manpower. Trouble makers, sad sacks, shitbirds. No sergeant major or first sergeant worth his stripes shitcanned his best soldiers to another outfit.

  “Delta has a few problems,” was how First Sergeant Aldo Galliano put it when Montgomery reported for duty. He was a short, wiry-built Hispanic of about forty who looked like he knew his way around the army. “Sergeant Montgomery, your 201 file shows you served your last tour as a drill. I think that makes you enough of a son-of-a-bitch to whip Second Platoon into shape before we emplane for Iraq in six weeks. They’re good boys. They just need direction.”

  It was Montgomery’s experience as well that most guys just needed a push. Since he had been a drill, the Joes in Second Platoon expected things to tighten up—and they did. He took over as platoon sergeant hard-assed and no-slack hard. A soldier had to have discipline, especially in combat. He had to be the kind of guy who would be right there when he was needed.

  “Get with the program, people,” Montgomery warned. “We have to look out for each other. That’s all we got, is each other. You remember that when you start acting like a bunch of shitbirds.”

  Private First Class Nathan Given, twenty-one, came to Second with an attitude. A tall, slab-sided kid from near Houston who never let anyone forget that everything grew bigger and better in Texas, he was forever neglecting to bring his pen to mandatory classes, showing up late for formations, and generally just all-around goldbricking and not taking up his share of the slack. Montgomery and the platoon leader, Lieutenant John Dudish, counseled him and turned him back into the platoon.

  There were a few others like him in the company. Joes who either didn’t give a shit, who had a chip on their shoulders, or who had rather be somewhere else, anywhere else. Corporal Be
gin Menahem over in Fourth Platoon had a legitimate beef. He had already served one combat tour in Iraq during the 10th’s 2004–2005 deployment. He had had twenty-eight days remaining on his enlistment when the army’s Stop-Loss policy barred him from being discharged. And now he was headed back to The Sandbox one more time.

  “I was this close to getting out, man. This close,” he said, holding up as emphasis a thumb and forefinger pinched together with hardly any space between them.

  In spite of it all, Montgomery sometimes admitted to himself in moments of honesty how much he loved the army and its pig-headed, boisterous, irreverent soldiers. Infantrymen—the grunt, the ground-pounder, the mud-eaters—were markedly different from any other arm of the military. They were like guard dogs protecting the master’s house—brash men, proud, sometimes reckless, quick to take action and always ready to defend each other against the brass or the enemy.

  They came in a variety of shapes, sizes, colors, creeds, and religions. Hard street kids from the concrete jungles of New York and Los Angeles; cynical suburbanites from Chicago; tough hillbillies from the Ozarks and the Appalachians; trust fund babies from Park Place and poverty-stricken bros from the ghettos; farm kids, computer nerds, jocks; from high society or low society or no society at all. A cross-section of all that was America.

  Once they came together and jelled, they were like no other army in the world in their devotion to each other, in a brotherhood of arms that no outsider could ever understand. It was that sense of shared danger to come that formed Delta Company, new that it was, into the close-knit camaraderie of warriors about to ply their skills. Sergeant Montgomery could think of no other place he had rather be than about to lead a platoon in combat.