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

by Charles W. Sasser

  Wham! Isbell caught the slug right through the thigh before he heard the rifle shot that nailed him. Panicked, he ducked to the safety of the nearest truck, his leg going numb and blood soaking his ACU bottoms. Platoon gunners hammered the woods across the river with machine guns and M-203s.

  The clean flesh wound put him out of commission for about a week. Doc Luke Bailey, platoon medic, placed him on quarters and bed rest and swabbed out his wound every day with a big Q-tip. Isbell lay around reading and watching movies and waiting for the other guys to come back in. They greeted him with a barrage of good-natured ribbing.

  “He was shooting at your pecker, Isbell, but it was too small to hit.”

  “If that raghead had been a better shot, we’d be calling you Miss Isbell by now and raising the morale of the entire platoon.”

  “Just think of how much cash you could be making as platoon gahob.”

  Like the guy from the 1st Cav who climbed out of his tank to pee and got blown up by the hajji rolling an old tire, Isbell vowed never to take another piss outside for the rest of his life.

  Specialist Dar-rell Whitney experienced the closest call of all.

  Rotation watches on the roofs of the patrol bases were generally long and dull. A soldier could smoke an entire pack of cigarettes. Dar-rell Whitney was team leader for Second Platoon, wiry, twenty-five years old, and on his second enlistment of an army career. He relived O’Neal on the roof of 152 just as an autumn morning was fast warming up. He watched the sun crest over palm trees on the far side of the river and spread bright tentacles upon his little patch of the Fertile Crescent.

  His eyes scanned trees and undergrowth along the river, but detected no movement or anything out of place. His greatest enemy were squadrons of flies that attacked in black droves, seeking moisture from his body. He waved his hands vigorously back and forth in an effort to drive them off. Through the swarms, he noticed that strange kid everybody called Crazy Legs hobbling by on the road.

  Almost at the same instant, a distant rifle shot rang out from the direction of the river. Or at least Whitney thought he heard it. The bullet and the sound of the report reached him simultaneously and knocked him flat on his back, unconscious. The 7.62mm round struck his helmet just above his eyebrow. The tough Kevlar deflected the slug enough that it barely broke the skin along his hairline before blowing out the back of his nitch.

  Stunned but not badly wounded, he was moving around, coming to, by the time Sergeant Montgomery and other platoon members raced onto the roof ready to do battle with monsters. Mere inches had kept him from emptying his brain into his Kevlar. Some of the men brought rags and water to clean up blood that was already attracting more flies, while Specialist Luke “Doc” Bailey patched Whitney’s head.

  Whitney made five GIs, counting Dudish and Herne, whom unseen snipers had picked out of Delta Company in a matter of days, none fatally or even seriously wounded as of yet. Whoever the shooters were, they seemed to know exactly when and where to select their targets in order to allow their escape before the Americans responded. They never showed up at any of the sites where patrols staked out in their range, but they were always back when the Americans withdrew. It was almost as though the insurgents had spotters out constantly watching the patrol bases and the U.S. soldiers who manned them.

  The inability to clearly assess who was a threat and who wasn’t complicated the situation in ways that caused immeasurable stress. It was nearly impossible to keep the players straight, to pick out the farmer by day who turned terrorist by night from the “good ol’ boy” who remained a “good ol’ boy” when the sun went down. The platoons were fed up to the eyeballs, pissed off, what with people getting shot at or blown up all the time while they were impotent to do anything about it.

  It didn’t matter to them that many of the Iraqis might consider them invaders. That wasn’t the issue. Malibu Road had become their block, their home, and it wasn’t right that those Jihad fuckers could come in and blow up their houses and shoot at them.

  “Sarge, what the hell are we accomplishing here?” Montgomery’s soldiers wanted to know.

  “Killing bad guys until they’re all gone.”

  “How many have we killed?”

  “Some,” he said. “The important thing is, how many of us have they killed.”

  “That’s only because they can’t shoot for shit. It’s only a matter of time. We ought to bomb these assholes back to the stone age and let God sort ’em out.”

  “Kids and women too? That’ll wins hearts and minds.”

  “I don’t give a rat’s patootie about their hearts and minds. I want to go home alive. I got a wife and kid.”

  The final straw came when insurgents tried to kill the battalion chaplain. He was the chaplain, for God’s sake!

  TWENTY

  Chaplain Jeff Bryan, in his thirties, was a short, stocky captain with that compassionate, benevolent look that seemed standard issue among military men of God. Every opportunity that came along, he hooked up with a supply convoy to venture out onto the frontier to bring the Word to his flocks. He seldom held Sunday services as such. Instead, he assembled a congregation wherever he happened to be. Sitting on a bottom bunk in one of the battle positions with soldiers gathered around to read the Bible. Perhaps in a tent singing “Amazing Grace” in his clear baritone voice. Wherever one or two gather in My name . . .

  Sergeant Chris Messer of Second Platoon grew especially close to the young chaplain. Chaplain Bryan made a point of stopping by Second Platoon whenever he entered the Malibu AO. Messer and Chaplain Bryan would hold long talks or study Scripture together. Messer carried a machete on his belt. Sometimes he sat sharpening the machete while they talked. The sergeant almost never smiled or laughed anymore; he looked grim and preoccupied and what time he wasn’t out on patrol he was sitting by himself reading his Bible.

  Messer’s closest friend from since Fort Drum, Victor Chavez, thought Messer’s intense piety had something to do with the premonition that he would never see his wife and baby daughter again. This was his second combat tour in the Sandbox.

  “I never thought I would ever have to come back here,” Messer confided in Chavez at the start of the deployment when they climbed off the B-17 at Camp Striker. “Victor,” he said solemnly, looking straight into his friend’s eyes, “I’m going to die here this time.”

  “No, man.”

  “Yeah. I am.”

  He was serious.

  Chavez tried to talk him out of it. “You’ll be good, you’ll see.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s going to happen.”

  “Man, I might die here. Any of us might—but none of us can know.”

  Messer unsheathed his machete and looked at it. “I know,” he said.

  One afternoon when most of Second Platoon had downtime, all except the roof watch, Chaplain Bryan arrived to hold services. Since, as the old saying went, there were no atheists in foxholes, the platoon squatted and sprawled on the floor around the man of God. Afterwards, Messer walked the chaplain out of the house to the resupply convoy preparing to depart for Inchon.

  On guard duty up on the roof, Specialist Joe Merchant happened to notice a rusty old Toyota cruising slowly by on the dusty road that ran parallel to the other side of the river. The vehicle stopped. Merchant focused his binocs on it. Jihadists armed with rifles, RPGs and 60mm tubes piled out of it in a rush, like a clown fire drill in a circus act. Merchant shouted a warning.

  “Incoming!”

  The hajjis had Merchant’s position pinpointed. A couple of them opened fire on him with AKs, whipping and zinging rounds all around to drive him to cover, while the others quickly set up their tubes. Mortar rounds and rockets arced high in the sky, streaming smoke contrails, before they plunged back to earth and exploded in a wide pattern inside the compound. Men scrambled for cover.

  By the time Merchant stuck his head up to unlimber his SAW, the attackers were scrambling back into their van and squealing tires, disappearing
over a hilltop. Chaplain Bryan prayed thanks for his deliverance until his convoy sped out through the gate and headed down the road. Messer looked grimmer than ever.

  Specialist Whitney noticed something unusual about the attack that apparently had escaped everyone else’s attention. Lieutenant Dudish, Sergeant Montgomery, and some of the squad, team, and section leaders held an impromptu council inside 151 to try to come up with a plan to put an end to the harassment from across the river. Whitney spoke up.

  “Do any of you remember the guy Menahem saw when Fourth Platoon first settled 151? The crippled retard?”

  “Crazy Legs? He’s always walking up and down the road. I guess he lives around here.”

  “Sarge, what I’m telling you is, I think he’s not as retarded as he looks. You know how it always seems like we’re being watched and how they know everything we do? We are being watched. Crazy Legs is a spotter. Wait, before you think I’m crazier than he is . . .

  “Mayhem said the guy walked by just before Fourth Platoon got mortared, the day Pitcher and that Iraqi kid got hit. That’s the beginning. Somebody saw him on the road before the IED exploded underneath the Colonel’s humvee. How do you suppose the Baghdads knew which vehicle the Colonel was riding in? Crazy Legs told ’em, okay? Crazy Legs was on the road when I got shot. Now, guess what? Steffan saw him about fifteen minutes before the mortars started falling on the chaplain. That’s how they knew the chaplain was here.”

  Everybody went silent while they thought about it. It made sense to Sergeant Montgomery. The guy was exactly the sort the insurgents tried to recruit as martyrs and accomplices.

  “We need some payback,” Sergeant Herne proposed. “I say we start with Crazy Legs.”

  That couldn’t be done. That would be classified as murder. According to ROE, a GI was allowed to shoot back only if he took direct fire. Even if a guy walked down the road carrying a weapon, you couldn’t light him up unless he made a hostile move. Everyone in this part of the world owned an AK-47. It was a status symbol and as much a part of the culture as men squatting to urinate. Crazy Legs had done nothing overt.

  “So what do we do?” Sergeant Nathan Brooks asked. “Stand around with our thumbs up our butts and let the pukes keep shooting at us? I’m telling you, Lieutenant Dudish, we’re gonna have to waste that traitorous cocksucker.”

  Sergeant Montgomery was already working on a plan. “Look at it like this,” he said. “Crazy Legs can be more help to us than to them. He’s our early warning system as long as we understand that something is going down whenever we see him. The next time, we’ll bring so much shit down they’ll think they’ve fallen into a vat of it.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Crazy Legs weaved past on the road in front of Patrol Base 151. Scrape-thunk! Scrape-thunk! As luck would have it, Second Platoon had just pulled in from an all-day patrol over toward Latifiyah. The guys were still refueling when somebody spotted the odd-gaited Iraqi innocently going by and sounded the alarm. It was time to test the validity of Specialist Whitney’s theory.

  Lieutenant Dudish and Sergeant Montgomery grabbed Second Platoon, as many soldiers as were available of the twenty or so currently at the post, and rushed to the roof, careful not to expose themselves to Crazy Legs’ scrutiny. Soldiers eager for some payback crouched out of sight behind the raised lip that enclosed the roof, every machine gun, grenade-launcher, and rifle cocked and loaded for manticore. The Joes were pissed off and on a hair trigger. It wouldn’t take much to set them off. Excitement and an air of expectation crackled like static electricity through the ranks. For a war in which there was no clear way to measure progress, not even a body count, to finally get a chance to turn the tables on the insurgents marked a clear victory.

  They waited.

  “Crazy Legs must have a way of signaling that there are targets inside and exposed,” Montgomery reasoned. Ordinarily, it took a returning platoon a half-hour or so to refuel and maintenance vehicles, which meant a number of GIs would be out in the yard at the same time. Perfect targets for mortars or rockets lobbed up and over the walls.

  The bad guys should be coming any time now—if Whitney was right about Crazy Legs.

  The dirt country road that hugged the opposite bank of the river lay well within the outer range limits of even M-4s, no more than 350 yards away. Eucalyptus and palms obstructed a perfect sight picture, but all-in-all some very unaware hajjis were going to get the surprise of their miserable lives if they showed up.

  The sun would be down in another ten or fifteen minutes. Shadows were starting to lengthen. Evening mist oozed up from the slow brown waters of the Euphrates. The river was fairly narrow at this point.

  Montgomery served as an observer while the rest of the platoon kept low. Just when he was beginning to conclude that it was a dry hole, that it was only a coincidence that Crazy Legs seemed to appear every time something was about to happen, he spotted a black sedan missing a front fender creep into view. It was full of Iraqis. It eased to a stop directly across the river from 151, almost out of sight in the shadows beneath the spreading branches of a eucalyptus.

  “We got action,” he said. “Stay down. Hold it . . .”

  Men clad in red-and-white shemaghs and grayish robes over trousers and combat boots—the new trademark of the murder squads who once ran around the countryside in black outfits calling themselves Fedayeen Saddam, “Saddam’s Men of Sacrifice,” jumped out of the sedan with RPGs and small M-224 60mm mortars. They ran into the undergrowth near the river bank to set up their weapons.

  “They’re right on the river,” Montgomery relayed. “Twelve o’clock. On my signal, fire these fuckers up . . . Now!”

  The roof of 151 lit up like a Christmas tree with the flickering of rifle and machine-gun fire. The sound trapped inside the walls was deafening, echoing as it crackled and rose into a fierce crescendo. M203 grenades spouted short in the water. Machine-gun rounds racing across the water before they chewed into the riverside foliage resembled schooling piranha.

  It was remarkable. It was exhilarating.

  The Baghdads didn’t get off a single shot. They jumped up and ran for their lives, carrying or dragging their weapons and casualties with them. Two-forties and SAWs riddled the sedan, sparking and shattering, until it careened down the road and into the shadows of the night. A .50-cal would really have done a job on the car had there been time to set one up, leaving the insurgents stranded and at the mercy of the fierce fire from the roof. None of them would have escaped.

  Spontaneous cheers, catcalls, and taunts erupted from 151. “Allahu Akbar that, motherfuckers!”

  It felt good, good, to shove hot lead up their asses after all the Joes had suffered from them during past weeks. Soldiers of Second Platoon swaggered around like gunfighters as they recounted for the other platoons, in detail, how they had finally turned the tables on their tormentors—at least this one time.

  “You should have seen it, man. We lit them fuckers up. They hauled ass like the back-shooting cowards they are. The Colonel’s right. We are going to bring law and order to Malibu Road. Like Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday in Dodge City. There’s a new sheriff in town, boy, and he’s walking tall.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Delta Company soldiers expected something to happen whenever they went out. They kind of got used to it, but at the same time they didn’t. They kept going down that same treacherous stretch of road through and past the S-curves. Specialist Robert Pool got where he lay awake in his bunk and went through in his mind every curve and bend in the road from JSB past Patrol Bases 151, 152, and Inchon, past the 109 Mosque and the old Russian power plant, speculating on where and when he would get it and how bad it would be.

  GIs knew the do’s and don’ts of the war by this time. Platoon leaders and sergeants constantly preached caution. Don’t cross footbridges and high traffic spots. Never take the easy road. Go around. Never let down your guard. Recognize the signs if you wanted to live.

  One hot, windy afternoon, Speci
alist Brandon Gray walking dismounted point for First Platoon came upon a little footbridge spanning a drainage ditch. As he was about to cross, the wind riffled a thread of white cloth knotted on a tree next to the bridge. He jumped back, recognizing that that was how Jihadists marked their booby traps to warn locals to stay away from them.

  Sure enough, there was an all-but-invisible trip wire stretched between two roots and across the approach to the little bridge. One end of the wire was attached to a 155mm artillery shell buried in the ground. It contained enough black powder to blow a crater in the earth big enough to bury the entire squad. One more step, Gray realized, and he would have stepped into eternity.

  Sergeant Montgomery had witnessed his first IED when 2nd BCT initially took over from the 101st. A 1st Cavalry vehicle triggered an explosion that shoved the bottom of the hummer right up through the passenger compartment, igniting a fire and killing one trooper. Since then, three Air Force EODs had been blown up and killed in the AO. One was a female. They responded to check out a suspected site. When they climbed out of their truck to look it over, some turd hiding nearby with an old telephone set off a second explosion almost directly underneath their feet. And, of course, he was there the day Colonel Infanti’s vehicle hit the IED and Scarface died.

  Insurgents never seemed to run short of bomb making ingredients. Prior to 2003, Iraq had actually possessed more conventional munitions than the entire U.S. military, with something like six thousand ammo dumps in the country. Insurgents had carted off the contents of a large number of these before Coalition forces could secure them. Coalition forces had also left a large number of expended 105mm and 155mm howitzer shells lying around. Jihadists policed them up; stuffed them with black powder, ammonia nitrate fertilizer, or even chicken shit mixed with diesel fuel; stuck in blasting caps; and, lo, they had effective and deadly booby trap IEDs that could be set off by pressure plates, crush wires, or command-detonated with a garage door opener, a car alarm, or a wireless telephone.