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

by Charles W. Sasser

  Armored humvees were double-edged swords in that while they protected occupants, they could also turn and become traps. Men surprised inside at close quarters found themselves at a supreme disadvantage in which they had to either shoot through open windows or leave the vehicle in order to engage. Sergeant Connell and Sabah Barak in the front seat had no chance to do either. Both were either dead or near death from the grenades landing on the seat between them.

  The backs of the front seats partly shielded the back seat from the explosions, but the confined concussion knocked Byron Fouty to the floorboard. Through a slow motion haze of pain, confusion, and terror, he saw the back doors flung open. Dark forms glared at him. Monsters! He screamed as rough hands reached in. Live Americans were of far greater propaganda value than dead ones.

  Through opened doors, automatic rifle fire riddled the two soldiers in the front seat, splashing blood and flesh, making sure they were dead. As an added insult, some of the hostiles turned the interpreter’s body upside down in his seat as an expression of contempt. Others torched the truck. It burst into flames that lit up the road and exposed frenetic shadows dragging two comatose GIs toward a nearby house.

  In the meantime, a similar scene was playing itself out around the other humvee. As with Sergeant Connell and Sabah Barak, Schober and Courneya in the front seat were either killed outright by grenade explosions or knocked unconscious, to be finished off with bullets. PFC Murphy somehow broke free from the back seat. Terrified and suffering from concussion and shrapnel injuries, he bolted up the road toward Inchon, shedding his armor and helmet as he ran in order to run faster.

  Jeering insurgents shouting their “God is great!” war cry picked off the former high school football star with a barrage of rifle fire. He fell hard, his legs shot out from underneath him, flesh shredded and bones shattered. Paralyzed from the waist down, he rolled off the macadam into the ditch, desperately trying to get away. He continued to pull himself across the grass and weeds with his hands until he became entangled in concertina.

  Behind him, a fireball engulfed his truck as insurgents set it afire. Both hummers were now blazing. Flames whipped by the savage wind leaped and danced against the black sky. Murphy might still have managed to hide in the darkness and escape except for the firelight. Masked Jihadists stalking up the road after him spotted him struggling in the wire. They yelled. Murphy rolled over, covering his face with his hands.

  The last sounds he heard were the mocking laughter of his enemy and the cracking of their rifles.

  That left big Joe Anzak. A skilled martial artist, he wasn’t going down easy. Having been extracted from the turret of his hummer, he was giving a good accounting of himself in a hand-to-hand fight with a pair of Jihadists on the road. A mighty American right hook busted one hajji’s jaw and put him momentarily out of commission. He was working on the other, getting the better of it, when a third man ran up and rifle-stroked him in the back of the head below his helmet.

  Anzak crumpled. Even though only semiconscious, he continued to resist. All three Jihadists jumped on him, kicking and pummeling him into submission.

  The attack lasted less than five minutes from start to finish. A flat-bedded bongo truck, lights out, pulled up on the dirt road in front of the residence to which Fouty and Jimenez had been dragged. There were no lights on inside the house. Having completed their mission, insurgents rushed toward the getaway truck. Incredibly enough, Anzak revived enough to resume his struggles, albeit feebly, until his captors threw him up onto the truck bed and somebody slugged him again with a rifle. Other insurgents tossed up the limp bodies of Jimenez and Fouty like so many bags of wheat.

  Loaded with twenty or so enemy fighters and three unconscious American prisoners, the bongo truck turned around at the house and took off along the dirt road, vanishing into the night. Twin bonfires consuming the bodies of three GIs and one IA interpreter marked its departure.

  “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!” floated back on the wind.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Staff Sergeant Alan Ecle, forty, of mixed Guamanian-Filipino ancestry, had been transferred out of Bravo Company to Delta only a week before. Originally from Guam, he had enlisted in the army in 1983 while living in the Philippines. His father was in the U.S. Navy. Going airborne, he served in Germany, Fort Hood, Texas, and then in Panama during Operation Just Cause against Manuel Noriega in 1989. He accepted a discharge in 1995 to enter the Army Reserve program in Guam, but requested active duty again in 2006. He deployed straight to Iraq with the 10th Mountain Division’s 2nd BCT.

  As First Platoon’s newest section sergeant, he awoke at midnight when Sergeant Connell and the other Joes of the platoon were preparing to leave Inchon to relieve crater watch in the S-curves. A cautious man who fretted over the younger soldiers, Ecle warned them in his clear, precise English to stay awake and not let down their guard. “Use your night-vision devices.”

  “Yes, Mommy Dearest,” Anzak joked. “Have some warm milk for me when I come in?”

  “I have some warm milk for you.” Jimenez caught him in a headlock, and they wrestled and sparred their way toward the waiting trucks.

  Sergeant Connell, the Iraqi interpreter, and six members of First Platoon left Inchon. Everybody expected to see them again the next morning.

  Like most soldiers on Malibu Road, Ecle slept fitfully in stretches of three or four hours at a time. His eyes sprang open at 0400. It was still dark in the bunkroom. He heard snoring. Specialist Dan Seitz and Shaun Gopaul, and sometimes others, occasionally talked in their sleep. Someone was mumbling now, thrashing about on his bunk.

  The little sergeant glanced at his watch and made his way downstairs to get a bottle of water from the cooler. Brenda the Bitch lay indecently sprawled half-dressed on the old sofa.

  He got his water. Then—Boom! Boom! Boom! Like that. Muffled, thudding explosions in quick sequence, followed immediately by the unmistakable, deep-throated chuckle of AK-47 assault rifles. His first thought was of the crater watch. He ran toward the radio room. Sergeant Allen Wilson, the company RTO on radio watch, was already on his feet.

  As with all bad news, word spread rapidly throughout the FOBs and patrol bases whenever anything happened in the AO. Radios were already starting to heat up from Yusufiyah to Rushdi Mulla to Mahmudiyah. First to break on the air were Specialist James Cook and Sergeant Tony Smith, who were pulling road security south of Inchon toward the S-curves. Sitting in the dark in their hummer, watching, they heard three or four grenades go off almost in sync, followed by automatic rifle fire. It came from further south.

  Fire broke out almost immediately, casting an ugly orange glow against the dark sky that whipped back and forth in the wind. It had to be the crater watch. Cook keyed his mike.

  “Delta X-Ray, something’s going on down there. I’m pretty sure it’s our trucks. Something’s not right.”

  “Do you have a visual?”

  “Negative. But there’s a lot of shooting.”

  “Stand by for Delta X-Ray-Six.”

  Delta X-Ray-Six was Captain Gilbreath, the company commander. Sergeant Wilson left one of the other soldiers on the radio and ran to the CO’s room. Captain Gilbreath was already up, having heard the sounds of contact. Only half-dressed, he ordered Wilson to spread the alert. By the time Gilbreath reached his CP/radio room, still only half-dressed, trucks and battle positions all along Malibu were chattering excitedly.

  Wilson hit the lights in the enlisted bunkrooms. First and Fourth Platoons were currently manning Inchon, along with Company HQ.

  “We got to go,” Wilson exclaimed. “We got to go right now.”

  Fourth Platoon Section Leader Chris Kunert threw himself out of his bunk and started lacing on his boots while Wilson explained, pale-faced, that 152 and road security were reporting loud blasts and gunfire from the area of the crater watch. Nobody could make commo with Sergeant Connell.

  “Maybe they dropped a cell,” Wilson added hopefully.

  Every soldie
r at Inchon was up and pulling on boots and armor. Nobody knew what the hell was going on. Everything was confused. Joes crowded the radio room or they ran upstairs and out onto the roof to stare down toward the glow of burning trucks. Wilson kept trying to raise somebody at the crater, but nothing came back except dead air. The distant pop-pop-pop of rifle fire subsided quickly.

  Lieutenant Tomasello rounded up everyone in Fourth Platoon not on watch and set out from Inchon with Mayhem, Sergeant Parrish, and six or seven others in a shuffling, anxious trot down the road. Threatening shadows closed in with the black of the night all around and only the pale moon and the glow of fire to guide by. Mayhem’s guts tied in a knot. They could all be walking into a trap, another ambush, lured into a kill zone as they had that time with the downed Raven. But they had no other choice but to rush to their soldiers’ aid. Maybe it was already too late.

  Down past the crater at 152, Lieutenant Dudish’s Second Platoon was dressed, armed, and ready to go. Dudish ordered trucks brought out of the motor pool and lined up at the gate to be ready for when they were needed. Sergeant Montgomery stood on the roof and watched the distant flicker of fire. Position 152 was twice the distance from the scene of the attack as soldiers at Inchon.

  Lieutenant Darrell Fawley’s Third Platoon was even further away, having been temporarily chopped over to work with the 3rd Infantry Division over toward Anbar Province. Sergeant Victor Chavez was just being relieved from stationary guard duty on the roof of 3rd ID’s battle position 132 when he heard distant detonations. Faraway and indistinct, they sounded like they came from Malibu Road. Chavez thought one of the other platoons had called in Battalion mortars on an enemy target, or that a weapons cache might be blowing in-place. It never occurred to him from such a brief contact sound that some outfit might be in deep shit.

  Exhausted, he made his way downstairs and, fully clothed except for boots, helmet, and armor, crawled into an empty bunk. He dozed off immediately. The next thing he knew, somebody was shaking him.

  “Sergeant Chavez! Sergeant Chavez, you got to get up, man.”

  Chavez opened his eyes. PFC Matt Moran continued to shake him.

  “What the fuck, over?” Chavez grumbled.

  “Get up,” Moran insisted. “First Platoon is gone.”

  “Whattya mean, they’re gone?”

  “I don’t know. They’re just gone. They’re gone.”

  In Yusufiyah at the Battalion TOC, Lieutenant Colonel Infanti still suffered from his undiagnosed fractured spine, which meant he slept little. He had retired to his quarters inside the old shipping container at midnight, just about the time Sergeant Connell’s crater detail relieved the previous watch. He awoke before 0400.

  He dressed and stepped from the shipping container directly into the tent that served as his TOC. Desert winds moaned around the steel box he called home and flapped the tent’s loose folds. He poured himself a cup of coffee, black, and settled down with his XO, Major Mark Manns, to be briefed by Operations Officer Major Bob Griggs, who would now try to get some sleep.

  The night had been uneventful, so far, Major Griggs reported. That was just about to change.

  Captain John Gilbreath’s voice suddenly burst from the radio monitoring Delta Company’s net, asking for the Battalion Six. That was Infanti. Something big must be going down. Tersely, Gilbreath explained that explosions and gunfire had erupted at one of his observation posts on Malibu. The OP had gone off the radio.

  “Delta X-Ray, start moving,” Colonel Infanti decided.

  “I have troops on the way to investigate.”

  “Roger. We’ll get air and a QRF on the way. Keep me posted.”

  A TOC can get hectic during an action, what with radios blaring in stacks, sergeants and officers trying to keep up with movements on maps and charts, and everybody trying to coordinate responses. That was when a commander earned his pay. Although still in the dark about what had happened, Infanti placed 4th Battalion on full alert; it was obvious by this time that something big was going on. He began moving elements of his three other companies toward Malibu Road to block off enemy escape routes. Helicopters were grounded because of high winds, but it didn’t take long to get a UAV in the air and flying over the site.

  First images from the unmanned aircraft’s nose camera weren’t very encouraging. Two HMMWVs on Malibu Road were fully ablaze. Flames whipped by wind leaped twenty to thirty feet into the air and played shadows off against roadside palms and underbrush. The UAV’s camera picked up no other movement.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Lieutenant Morgan Springlace and what was left of First Platoon, about seven soldiers, crammed into a single hummer and headed for the curve, all anxious, on the prod, and fearing the worst. As soon as the truck exited the walls of Inchon, PFC Sammy Rhodes in the turret spotted the flickering glow of fire, twin match flames in the black night. The truck passed Lieutenant Tomasello and his bunch running on the road toward the scene and reached the curve first, slowing down cautiously as it approached.

  The fight was over, had been over for long minutes. Spare ammo in the two trucks was starting to cook off. Machine-gun tracers speared the darkness in all directions, streaking harmlessly toward the stars, bouncing off the road, or ripping through palms and eucalyptus. M19 grenades detonated in showers of sparks that turned the burning hummers into a great big pair of Fourth of July Roman candles.

  “Jesus!”

  No one could be sure whether it was a prayer or a curse.

  The sickening stench of burnt flesh mixed with the odor of burning wires, battery acid, gas, and oil to make the air toxic. In the north truck facing them, platoon members saw two human forms in what had once been the front seat. They were blackened and shriveled and reminded Rhodes of candle wicks in the center of a flame. None caught inside the conflagration could have survived it. There was no way to tell from this distance if any of the occupants had survived and managed to escape. Trying to get too much closer was out of the question. It was too hazardous, what with all the fireworks.

  The truck inched a bit closer. A cooked-off bullet ricocheted off the hood. Rhodes ducked.

  “Look out!” he shouted.

  From the turret, he spotted a 155mm howitzer shell casing illuminated by the fires. It lay on top of the asphalt directly in the middle of the road. Crush wire running off either end toward the ditches identified it as an IED. To the right of it lay another homemade IED constructed from a length of pipe. Tomasello guessed they were either timer explosives or pressure-activated rather than command-detonated. Either way, venturing any nearer from this direction was not only foolhardy, it could be suicidal.

  At a safe distance from the cook off and the IEDs, soldiers piled out of the vehicle to set up a hasty perimeter, using the hummer as cover. Lieutenant Springlace kept in constant running radio contact with Battalion, Company HQ, and other platoons. Sergeant Ronnie Montgomery reported that Second Platoon coming north from 152 had reached the south truck, only to be stopped by another pair of IEDs lying on the road. There appeared to be other bodies burning inside this truck, but he couldn’t tell how many.

  The attack on the crater watch had obviously been well planned and executed, the IEDs laid out well to isolate the targets in the kill zone and prevent reinforcements from reaching them.

  “L.T., we can’t just stand here with our thumbs up our asses,” Springlace’s soldiers raged. “They’re burning alive!”

  “Calm down. It’s too late. There’s nothing we can do for them.”

  “Some of them might have got away and are hiding.”

  No one sounded too hopeful.

  “Our orders are to get to them,” Springlace said. “That’s what we’re going to do.”

  Soldiers were direct action types, like cops and firefighters and others of the breed who ran toward danger while others ran away. They were also riled up, some near to tears from shock, grief, and frustration. Patience, hell! Let’s go kill something.

  Firelight reflected from
the front of a house a short distance off the road. Otherwise, it lay in darkness. If one or more of the crater watch, God willing, had survived, the most logical place they would seek to fort up was at the house. With the road blocked, the only way to reach it was to take to the bush on foot. That entailed a huge risk from other IEDs, snipers, or possibly an ambush.

  PFC Rhodes had already discerned the option. “Sir, point me in the direction and I’ll go.”

  Springlace and his men were interested in only one thing—finding their platoon mates if any were still alive and rescuing them from the bad guys. The Joes were in a killing mood, and in a hurry. Rhodes took point as the patrol abandoned its truck and skirted off the road toward the north and east through the shape-shifting woodlands and reeds. He almost hoped somebody, anybody, popped up and offered resistance. There wouldn’t be enough left of the son-of-a-bitch to bury.

  The patrol’s goal, the house nearest the site, appeared deserted. It was a typical one-story, flat-roofed, adobe-type structure, small and compact and square. Rhodes glanced back through his NVs and received a signal from Springlace to go ahead. Soldiers warily approached, crossing the front yard to the door in practiced overwatch, half of the patrol kneeling with weapons ready, the other half rushing.

  Rhodes and Brandon Gray flattened themselves against the walls to either side of the closed door. Sergeant Alan Ecle, Shaun Gopaul, and several others crouched behind the L.T., waiting for the word to stack and go. Springlace called out a warning to any civilian residents, which also served to identify themselves as GIs in the event Americans were hiding inside.

  There was no response. The lieutenant nodded at Gray, who sprang back and stiff-legged the door, banging it open. That was the critical moment when entering the houses of suspected Jihadists. First guys in were the most vulnerable.