Route Sportster and Bradley Bridge.
ON OCTOBER 29, a 3rd Platoon Bravo patrol was heading down Route Peggy on the way back to FOB Yusufiyah. Only a few hundred yards from the intersection with Sportster, one of the Humvees. .h.i.t an IED that blew the front of the vehicle clean off. The triggerman miscalculated by a split second. If the blast had been a belly shot, everyone in the vehicle would have been vaporized. The truckas cha.s.sis skidded to a stop and everyone checked themselves over. Amazingly, no one was hurt.
After toying with the Sportster problem since the moment they got there, Goodwin and Kunk decided the time had come to secure it for good. On October 30, 2nd Platoon, which had been sent out as the original Quick Reaction Force (QRF) for the IED hit, took over a house on the northwest corner of Sportster and Peggy. It was a large, square, two-story home on the southeast corner of Mullah Fayyad with storefronts on the two street-facing sides and living areas in the back and on the second floor. This house would come to be known as TCP (traffic control point) 1.
A day or two after that, with the help of an Iron Claw IED-sniffing team, Bravo mounted an all-day clearing mission of Sportster. But everybody already knew that once you cleared something, if you turned your back, insurgents could reseed a road in a matter of hours. In order to keep Sportster clear, they had to hold it. So Goodwin started dropping Humvees with fire teams at one- or two-mile intervals down the stretch.
aWe just started parking vehicles on the road, telling them, aStay here until properly relieved,aa said Goodwin. But the ideal relief, in the form of Iraqi soldiers manning the checkpoints, never came. Kunk intended the TCPs to be a way for the Iraqi Army to take more responsibility for this sector, but, especially this early in the deployment, they simply refused to operate in so dangerous an area. In Mahmudiyah and Lutufiyah, Kunk had more success persuading the Iraqi Army to partic.i.p.ate, but, he says, aanything on the west side, Yusufiyah, Mullah Fayyad, Sportster, they would say, aAli Baba is there. The bad guy is there.aa Kunkas idea thus became to use the TCPs as a stairstep. Build them with U.S. forces and then, as the IA gained confidence, slowly hand them over.
The vehicle drop positions, over time, would evolve and harden into TCP positions 2, 3, and 4. aWe thought it was going to be a seventy-two-hour mission,a said 3rd Platoonas platoon sergeant, Phil Blaisdell. aSeventy-two hours turned into like six days. I had a beard. And all of a sudden it was permanent. We started getting concertina wire down there. And Iam like, aGood G.o.d, what are we doing?aa The numerical designations and configurations of the TCPs would vary slightly throughout the year. A fifth TCP would open on the northwest corner of Mullah Fayyad, and a TCP6 would ultimately open between TCP2 and TCP3. Bravo Company was now in the road checkpoint business, and by the end of the deployment, the stairstep strategy had resulted in the Iraqi Army claiming full control of only one checkpoint on Sportster.
Across the battalion, the TCPs were controversial. It was far from unanimous that they were a good idea. The TCPs were static positions, and they were not well defended. They were not patrol bases, but outposts in true enemy territory with no morea"and usually far lessa"than a squad manning each one. TCP1 and TCP4 had buildings where troops could eat and have some form of downtime, while TCP3 had not so much a building but, as Goodwin put it, aa bunch of cinder blocks piled together in an organized manner.a In the first incarnation of TCP2, troops lived out of two Humvees, including trying to sleep in them, for days at a time. Early on, there were no HEs...o...b..rriers, large six-foot cubed mesh baskets that when filled with dirt by a backhoe provided admirable protection from gunfire but when empty were no better than a chain-link fence. When HESCOs did arrive, there was no heavy equipment to fill them.
Even with each one so thinly manned, the TCPs were also a drain on the companyas combat power. Manning the TCPs consumed a whole platoon. Bravoas initial staffing philosophya"one platoon at the JSB and two platoons at Yusufiyah, with one to be home guard and one to run maneuver operationsa"was out the window. Goodwin worried about the staffing pressures the TCPs were putting on his company. Between guard rotations, scheduled and unscheduled patrols, and sleep, the atroops-to-taska math was already not adding up. aThe first time I requested more men in November, I was, I donat want to say joking, but wead sit down at a Commandersa Update Brief, and it would be like, aWhat do you need?a And I would say, aI need a platoon,aa Goodwin remembered. aaNo, really, what do you need?a aWell, I need water, and I need this, and I need that. And a platoon would be nice.a I know the battalion is short on manpower. The brigade is short. But I need another squad or four to keep doing what Iam doing, to give my guys a break.a This frustration was echoed at every level. aBefore,a said 2nd Platoonas platoon sergeant, Jeremy Gebhardt, aif you were a platoon back at the FOB, you rotated with another platoon, so when they patrolled, you got some downtime to catch your breath. Once a platoonas on TCPs, youave lost that completely. You look at it on paper, and youare like, aOkay, this can work.a But even when guys are just sitting at the TCP, thereas several hours per day just doing patrols around your area that arenat factored into whatas on paper. Then, at that point, you start seeing guys getting strung out, and you start getting concerned for how they are holding up. That was a yearlong struggle trying to convince the battalion level of this. But it all came back to, aHey, youave got this many guys. It takes this many to do this.a And that was it.a Second Platoonas platoon leader, Lieutenant Jerry Eidson, said his faith in his superiors evaporated once he took stock of the TCP mission. aIt was ridiculous,a he said. aWe were a company spread out trying to operate like we were a battalion. n.o.body in my platoon had any confidence in our command structure at all after that.a Kunk maintained that the strategic importance of Sportster left him no choice. aIt had become a superhighway for the insurgents to get into Baghdad, so we had to take it back,a he proclaimed. In that regard, the Sportster plan fit with Ebelas strategy for the brigade as well. Sportster, in Ebelas words, became athe base of the anvila upon which the rest of the brigade, and special operations forces, would continue to hammer the insurgent hideouts to the west. aThe risk was, if we gave that up, we would have released an avenue where the enemy would skirt around,a he said.
But many others dismiss the idea that Sportster, when open, was an insurgent superhighway or, when occupied, acted as a barrier to infiltration. They point to a number of routes on a map that circ.u.mvent Sportster on the way to Baghdad or Mahmudiyah. aIt was obvious they were still coming into my AO across Sportster,a said Alpha commander Jared Bordwell. aThey just didnat have T-shirts that said aInsurgenta on them when they did. I donat think we needed to own Sportster. It didnat do anything except give the insurgents a static target and allow soldiers to get complacent and do stupid things.a Others maintain that even if securing Sportster as a resupply route to the JSB was important, it could not be done with so few men. Charlie Company First Sergeant Dennis Largent believed this was obvious from the beginning. aBravo couldnat do s.h.i.t in their own sector because they were tied down to those TCPs,a he said. aAs early as November we saw that Bravo Company was getting attrited. They needed some help. Thatas where the f.u.c.king fight was. It wasnat in Mahmudiyah with the sewer project or whatever. The focus of that battalion sector should have been clearing out Yusufiyah. Cleaning house in there so that that company would stop getting attrited.a A major component of the Sportster effort was psychological, an affirmation that the enemy never tells the U.S. Army where it can and cannot go. aThe taking of Sportster was a big moment, because that sent a clear message to the enemy that we were not going away,a Kunk explained. aWe said early on, aWe are taking it back and we are keeping it. And we are going to own it. And not only are we going to own that, we are going to go anywhere we want to go because we are going to dictate everything.aa But some officers wondered if this idea of freedom became too much of a priority for its own sake than one that served a larger mission. aColonel Kunk put his name out there by saying aWe will own that road,aa explained Bordwell. aWell, in Iraq when you say aI am going to own something,a that means your feet are on it ninety-nine percent of the time. So he bought something by saying that. And no one did the math on what it was going to take and what we were going to sacrifice in order to own that piece of property.a On November 2, Sergeant Major Edwards was making a routine battlefield circulation. First Strike had been in theater just over a month. One of Edwardsas priority stops, on the orders of Ebel, was to go to the JSB and impress upon Miller the seriousness of the burn-pit incident. The Personal Security Detachment (PSD), the convoy unit that escorted Kunk or Edwards wherever they went, was another battalion-wide tasking, and each company had to provide a handful of soldiers for the effort. Bravo had detailed several, including Specialist Josh Munger and Private First Cla.s.s Tyler MacKenzie.
As Edwards was chewing out Miller, the guys from 1st Platoon had a chance to catch up with Munger and MacKenzie and the rest of the PSD hanging out at the motor pool, just to gab and get the scoop on what life was like for the rest of the battalion. MacKenzie was Justin Wattas roommate back in the barracks at Fort Campbell and one of his best friends. Once, before deployment, MacKenzie told Watt that he was confident he wouldnat die in Iraq because he had never won anything in his life, even a raffle, so why should he win the biggest, baddest, anti-lottery of them all? Nah, he a.s.sured Watt, head be fine.
Heading back to Mahmudiyah, the PSD traveled along Route Temple in Charlieas area. Around 12:45 p.m., the lead vehicle of the four-truck convoy crossed a large earthen bridge known as Bradley Bridge, so named because it was where a catastrophic IED had hit a Bradley Fighting Vehicle during a previous unitas deployment. Here, the lead Humvee met the same fate. An intelligence report later said that insurgents had posed as contractors and dug in a gigantic IED with heavy construction equipment months before. The explosion was enormous, completely obliterating the Humvee, leaving it a smoking and twisted heap of metal.
First Lieutenant Tim Norton was on patrol with a group of Charlie Company soldiers when they heard the explosion. Norton was a.s.signed to the Lutufiyah MiTT team, but before deployment he had been a Charlie platoon leader. Since Charlie was based out of Lutufiyah, and Norton was a devoted child of the Peopleas Army, he would hang out with, and patrol with, his old Charlie guys every chance he got.
The twenty-three-year-old from Mansfield, Ma.s.sachussetts, was the Distinguished Military Graduate ROTC cadet at Providence College in 2004, a history buff, and a proficient violinist who could identify most songs on a cla.s.sical radio station within a few seconds. Straight out of Ranger School, he headed to Charlie, where he benefited enormously from the mentoring of his platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Cla.s.s Lonnie Hayes, one of the best NCOs in the battalion. Norton was a.s.signed to the MiTT team when somebody discovered he had studied Arabic in college. He had vigorously resisted being moved away from his men on the eve of battle, but it was futile. He was making the best of the MiTT beat, but he far preferred what he was doing now, out patrolling with the Cobras, and he did it every chance he got.
With the explosion only a few miles away, the Charlie soldiers got a call to head straight there. Reports from the scene were fragmented, but it was clear there were dead and wounded, and medevac choppers started spinning up. Munger, along with Specialist Benjamin Smith, had been thrown more than twenty feet from the vehicle and were likely killed instantly. Sergeant Cory Collins was injured but MacKenzie was missing: he was simply gone.
Norton and the Charlie guys arrived about ten minutes later. This was Nortonas first experience of combat, and he was surprised at how disorienting it was. The Humvee was obliterated. The entire engine block had been detached and thrown clear of the rest of the a.s.sembly. The cha.s.sis looked like a scale model of a roller coaster that had been set ablaze. A door had been tossed more than three hundred feet. The roof and gun turret landed in the ca.n.a.l and there were no tires left, just fist-sized sc.r.a.ps of rubber.
Most of the men in the other three vehicles had taken up defensive positions, while the medic and a few others ran to the ca.n.a.l to try to find their men and treat any survivors. Some seemed to be walking around almost aimlessly in a state of shock. Sergeant Major Edwards himself was in a daze. Several men were firing on suspected trigger locations to the north and west. A .50-caliber machine gun, which fires rounds several inches long that can rip through solid concrete, started banging away at the houses from atop one of the intact Humvees. Its barrage lasted probably only a minute or two but it seemed like an hour, with soldiers tearing through ammo. Once the fire stopped, Norton coordinated with the PSD leaders and sent some patrols out, sweeping the area. Soldiers started picking up smaller pieces of remains and searching for MacKenzie.
Other soldiers followed the IEDas still-intact command wires back to a chicken coop about three hundred yards away. In the coop was a sand-table model of the area for the triggerman to plan his detonation. In a nearby house, they found four Iraqis and they sprayed their hands with Expray, an aerosol-based field test that diagnoses a range of explosives chemicals depending on what color the spray turns upon contact with a surface. Two of the men apopped,a in the soldiersa parlance, for a positive reading. (Later, there would be serious doubts about Exprayas reliability in some contexts. Specifically, the spray turns pink in the presence of nitrates, which are a common ingredient in explosives. But in Iraq, fertilizer also has a heavy nitrate content. So, getting caught literally ared-handeda here might mean that a person had been working on a bomba"or was an innocent farmer. The margin of error is so large, for example, that Expray test results are not admissible in U.S. courts. At the time, however, apoppinga during an Expray test was considered ironclad proof of being an insurgent.) Using the PSDas interpreter, a couple of NCOs began to question the suspects. The Charlie guys had to pull one of the PSD soldiers away from the detainees. He was shouting, hysterically upset, going for his pistol, screaming and swearing at them about his dead friends. Whoa, dude, you gotta back up, they told him. All you guys gotta back up, or youare gonna do something you regret. A wrecker convoy and QRF that had been dispatched to recover the Humvee carca.s.s. .h.i.t a pressure-plate-triggered IED just fifty feet from the original blast site around 3:00 p.m. The explosion lifted the thirty-ton wreckeras rear end several feet into the air. This time, a gun battle erupted as the Americans started taking fire from several buildings to the west. Two fire teams headed out to flank the new shooting positions, and Norton and Hayes and a couple of other soldiers, trapped just off the bridge and out in the open, started unloading their weapons in counterfire.
Time slowed down drastically for Norton. While he was fighting, he had time to contemplate the bullets landing all around him. Each one kicked up a pool of dust just like a raindrop did. If he didnat know any better, he mused, he would swear it was raining. And then he thought that this was a moment they tell you only happens in Hollywood, but here they were, and it was happening. Norton and Hayes were standing back to back and completely exposed, blazing away with their guns like they were Butch and Sundance, taking fire from three, maybe four shootersa"and they werenat getting hit. It was surreal. The combined firepower of their position and the flanking soldiers ran the shooters off.
Ebel and Kunk and a variety of relief elements arrived shortly after, not that anyone was happy to see them. It is a universal complaint: No matter how much soldiers and junior officers lament the lack of senior leadership presence on the ground during day-to-day operations, the one time when they are uniformly not wanted is the one time they can be guaranteed to show upa"in the aftermath of a catastrophic loss. The search for MacKenzie continued. It was Ebel, chest high in the ca.n.a.l water, who pointed to the culvert where his body had likely gotten caught and pulled underwater. At about 6:00 p.m., they finally recovered his remains.
With many relief units now in place or on their way, Charlie and the PSD got sent back to their bases. Nortonas adrenaline flush was receding, and it was a hollowing experience, a bottomless pit of exhaustion. Not despair or sadness, elation, relief, or any other emotion, just exhaustion. He had a shower and headed to the chow hall. They were serving chicken wings. He had never looked, really looked, at them before. Flesh. Bones. Red sauce. All in a pile. He stared at them, dozens of heaped little carca.s.ses. He decided to have a granola bar instead.
After the cleanup was finished, Charlie commander Captain Dougherty was ordered to guard that intersection. The insurgents, Kunk maintained, were counting on the 101st to do what the 48th would doa"withdraw. Itas great to make that kind of stand, Dougherty replied, but whoas going to provide the men to staff it safely? He and Kunk fought hard about this position. Dougherty believed in force demonstration as a deterrent. He put fifteen men in three trucks on it. aItas the difference between looking like a chuck wagon and a war wagon,a Dougherty said. When he then complained that he did not have enough soldiers for regular missions, and battalion leadership told him to pull some men off the bridge, he and First Sergeant Largent dug through the thousands of regulations from division headquarters and pointed to the one saying that all convoys had to have three vehicles. aThat was the last we heard about it for a while,a recalled Largent. This impa.s.se was laid to rest within a few months without a full confrontation, however, because the Iraqi soldiers in Lutufiyah were more competent than any in the rest of the region, and they were able to take over the Bradley Bridge position fairly early.
Since the Personal Security Detachment had been pulled from every company, the deaths of Bravoas MacKenzie and Munger and Alpha Companyas Smith hit the entire battalion hard. Most soldiers can pinpoint three times when their war began. The first is the day they arrived in theater, the second is the day when the enemy first did violence to them, and the third is the day they lost their first comrade. For many in 1st Battalion, November 2 was their entre to the third and most painful day of waras stutter-step beginning. aIt affected everybody differently,a said Private First Cla.s.s Chris Barnes. aI was pretty angry. It scared a lot of people. Some people were mad. Some people were in tears.a Two days later, Charlie was dealt a blow. At about 8:45 p.m. on November 4, Charlieas executive officer, First Lieutenant Matt Shoaf, was leading a three-truck convoy from MacKenzie, Munger, and Smithas memorial service on FOB Mahmudiyah back to Lutufiyah along Route Jackson. He was in the front pa.s.senger seat and Staff Sergeant Jason Fegler was driving. Most of the soldiers were having trouble seeing; their night-vision goggles were whiting out due to the oncoming headlights.
Shoaf saw a spotlight flicked on up ahead and Fegler flashed his back. One of the trucks behind him reported receiving small-arms fire from the right. Others would later say the fire was coming from the left. In sworn statements, several men were very specific about the color of the tracer rounds or the angle of fire they witnessed from rooftops on both sides of them. Shoafas gunner saw some flashes to the left and fired at the rooftops. Shoaf was waiting for a report back, leaning down to grab something off the floor or adjust a dial, when rounds, big ones, started hitting his truck from straight ahead. Even though Humvee windshields have bulletproof gla.s.s, these large-caliber rounds smashed straight through. Shoaf, already leaning over, ducked under the windshield as best he could as the bullets riddled the truckas interior, shredding metal, gla.s.s, and canvas. Shoafas gunner dove into the belly of the truck as bullets penetrated the turret shield. One bullet nicked the lip of the chest plate of Fegleras body armor but kept going straight to his heart. The two Humvees behind Shoafas got hit as well. One bullet hit the gunner of a rear Humvee and he slumped over. Another soldier, Sergeant Juan Hernandez, pulled the hit gunner down and took his place. Hernandez got one burst of rounds off before he too was. .h.i.t in the left shoulder. The lead truck, pocked with no fewer than three dozen bullet holes, rolled to a stop off the side of the road. Fegler managed to put the truck into park before he fell face-first unconscious into the steering wheel. Shoaf was wounded and in shock. He had been hit in the shoulder and his face had been torn up by flying gla.s.s.
In a mad blur to get out of the kill zone, the back Humvees didnat realize that their lead truck had pulled off. They floored it, speeding the final few miles to get to FOB Lutufiyah. The two Humvees pulled into the FOB. Both gunners were badly hurt, bleeding profusely. Captain Dougherty called in a medevac to the FOB and tried to figure out what was going on. Where was Shoaf? Where was the lead vehicle? The men in the Humvees didnat know.
Left out on Route Jackson, Shoaf and the other soldiers in the truck were having trouble piecing together what had happened to them and what they were going to do. Four of them were slightly or seriously injured, but Fegler was in critical condition. They tried to treat him, but they didnat have anything but a small first aid kit and though he still had a pulse, Fegler was completely nonresponsive and quickly bleeding to death. Their Humvee didnat work, the radio was out, it was pitch-black, and they were injured and alone on the side of a large but lightly traveled highway due to a nighttime curfew. Shoaf spotted an Iraqi checkpoint two hundred yards away and started running for it.
The leader of an Iron Claw platoon from the 2-502nd was listening to the radio network, which had just erupted with chatter. His crew had come south from Camp Striker several hours ago and was checking Jackson for IEDs. It was weird, though, they had just had a very close call not a minute or two ago. The gunner of his rear vehicle had spotted a couple of pairs of headlights coming up fast on him and he tried to elicit a friendly response by signaling with a flashlight twice. When he got no response, he fired a warning burst with his M249 machine gun. When the headlights still kept coming, he switched to his heavier .50-cal machine gun. He aired one more burst of warning shots and then opened fire with shots to kill right between the headlights, tearing through all of his .50-cal ammo. The headlights receded, the threat was neutralized, and they kept driving.
There was a rush of confusing cross talk on the various radio networks. A Charlie Company Humvee had hit an IED, one transmission said. There is a disabled Iraqi vehicle on the side of the road, said another. An Iraqi checkpoint was protesting that coalition forces were firing on them, said a third. It took a while for people in company and battalion headquarters to work out what one soldier from the Iron Claw convoy had been telling his truck commander from the beginning: They had just shot up an American Humvee.
aThe two Humvees that just sped past us,a he said. aThey were part of the U.S. convoy we just fired on.a Shoaf ran toward the Iraqi Army checkpoint, yelling in English as he approached, hoping that he wouldnat get shot. In pidgin Arabic and hand gestures, Shoaf, soaked in Fegleras blood, convinced the Iraqis to load up a truck and return with him to pick up Fegler. Bleeding himself, and struggling to remain lucid, Shoaf somehow got the radio working again long enough to contact Charlie headquarters. An air medevac to the site of the shooting was denied because they did not have a precise location, so Dougherty launched a Quick Reaction Force to go find them. Shoaf and Dougherty decided they should get the Iraqis to drive to Mahmudiyah instead of Lutufiyah because the two bases were almost equidistant and the larger FOB had better medical care.
But they could not leave without an American escort. aIt was one of the hardest things Iave ever had to do,a said Shoaf. aIf I sent an unmarked Iraqi civilian truck with no radio to the gates of Mahmudiyah, it wouldave been destroyed. I had to sit there and wait and watch Sergeant Fegler bleed more while our guys came to get us.a After what seemed like an eternity, but was really only fifteen or twenty minutes, the QRF unit rolled up. Fegler no longer had a pulse. In the meantime, Dougherty called Mahmudiyah to tell them that a U.S.-Iraqi convoy was going to be barreling up to the gate soon.
aOne truck is an IA truck,a he told Mahmudiyah. aIt has multiple litter-urgent [critical] U.S. pax [pa.s.sengers] aboard. Do not, repeat, do not shoot that truck.a The good news was that no one tried to shoot up the evacuation convoy. The bad news was there was no one to escort them to the aid station. There was no one manning the front gate whatsoever. The lead evacuation vehicle drove around the FOB for a few minutes trying to figure out where to go. Finally, the driver stopped to ask for directions. Thinking that they had arrived at the aid station, the soldiers in the back vehicle began unloading Fegler. Not knowing what the rear vehicle was doing, and with accurate directions in hand, the lead truck then drove off, leaving the soldiers in the rear to carry Fegler the final seventy-five yards to the medics. Although an autopsy ruled that no amount of medical attention could have saved Fegleras life, it took, in all, about forty minutes to get him the four miles from the accident site to Mahmudiyah.
Around this time, the Iron Claw convoy arrived at FOB Lutufiyah. Word was circulating at all levels about what had happened, and some of the Charlie men were getting heated.
aThey f.u.c.king shot up our guys!a some of them yelled. aThey killed our own dudes!a Dougherty called the Iron Claw platoon leader into his office and said to him between deep breaths, aI know this was an accident, but there is a lot of anger here right now. So you and all of your guys need to be out of here and out of the way. You guys need to go to your trucks and stay there.a In all, six Charlie Company soldiers were hurt and Staff Sergeant Jason Fegler died. Extensive investigations followed. The Iron Claw gunner was exonerated for following proper escalation of force procedures even though there was no standard, brigade-wide night recognition signal in place at that time. If anything, the reports found areas of fault with the Charlie convoy for using closed radio frequencies and because they had taped their Humveesa headlights square to look more like Iraqi vehiclesa"a tactic that has obvious benefits and drawbacks. The investigating officer found only U.S. sh.e.l.l casings along the route and did not find any bullet holes on the vehiclesa sides and rear, concluding that there had not been any insurgent fire that night. Kunk refused to recommend any of the Charlie men for Bronze Stars with Valor medals or any other awards for their actions because he concurred that there was no enemy fire at all that nighta"something that the Charlie men involved in that incident pa.s.sionately claim there was. aAll the written reports saying there were no enemies involved? Thatas bulls.h.i.t,a said Shoaf. aWe started shooting because there were some dudes shooting in our direction before any of this occurred.a Fegleras memorial was held on November 11 at FOB Mahmudiyah. The battalion typically held a memorial service within a week after a soldier died. They were simple but emotional affairs. Kunk would say a few words, the company commander would say a few words, there would be a few Bible readings, a few hymns, a friend would give a remembrance, and the chaplain would give a homily. Soldiers, two by two, would pay their respects to the cla.s.sic soldier memorial erected on a daisa"the soldieras helmet perched atop his rifle, its barrel stuck to the ground, with his dog tags hanging from it and his boots in front. The hardest part for most soldiers was the final roll call, when the first sergeant would call the names of the platoonas soldiers and they would shout back, aHere, Sergeant!a Until he got to aFegler! a Staff Sergeant Fegler! a Staff Sergeant Jason Fegler!a Anyone who had resisted crying until now was usually in tears.
Transportation from MacKenzie, Munger, and Smithas memorial had been the occasion of Fegleras death. And, like a daisy chain of carnage, transportation from Fegleras memorial became the setting for another major casualty. As the Bravo Company convoy mounted up following the memorial, Executive Officer Habash asked First Sergeant Skidis if his truck had an extra slot. Sure, get in, Skidis said. Habash headed for the front right pa.s.senger seat, the customary place for the man with the highest rank. But the left rear door on this truck didnat open, he remembered, so he climbed across the truckas interior to that seat. Skidis took the front right spot.
Just before 10:00 p.m., the Humvee hit an IED on Route Fat Boy just north of Yusufiyah. There was heat, flash, and confusion. Habash remembers everything going white and then black, and, for a moment, none of his senses were working. Unable to process any data, he asked himself, aAm I dead?a Reality rea.s.serted itself within seconds, however, as he saw and smelled the cab, which was filled with smoke.
The driver was yelling, aWhat do I do? What do I do?a Between his screams of pain, Skidis yelled, aJust go! Go! Just drive!a Safely past the kill zone, they a.s.sessed quickly that no one was mortally wounded, but the truck was on fire. They stopped and extinguished the flames, pulled security, and a QRF from Yusufiyah came to relieve them. One soldier had a sprained wrist, but the blast had pulverized Skidisas calf. He was in excruciating pain. The explosion had not penetrated the door, but the concussive force of the shock wave was so powerful, the door wall hit Skidisas leg like a hammer, and now his lower leg was swelling fast. The head medic diagnosed it as compartment syndrome, a serious condition in which so much blood is pouring into the relatively inelastic leg muscles that surgery is required to relieve the pressure. Skidis was medevaced to Baghdad and then home, where he would endure seven surgeries to regain almost 100 percent use of his leg. Less than three weeks after Bravo had lost one of its platoon leaders, its senior enlisted man was out of the fight too.
8.
Communication Breakdowns.
THE MOUNTING PRESSURES of combat made encounters with Kunk even more stressful than they had been in garrison. Kunk had three meetings with company leadership every week, one each with the company commanders, company first sergeants, and company executive officers. Many attendees loathed them since so much of them involved Kunk yelling erratically at various people for a variety of reasons. aHis reaction to everything was the same,a remarked Charlieas first sergeant, Dennis Largent. aIf you lost a soldier, or if you had cigarette b.u.t.ts on the FOB, it was the same reaction. He would explode on you. He would just lose his mind, which made his whole leadership style just totally ineffective.a The meetings frequently started with the tedious but necessary minutiae of war fighting: How many trucks were running? How many suspected insurgents had been detained? How many weapons caches had been found? But something along the way would set Kunk off. The company commanders would joke among themselves before the meetings started: Did you hear that sound? Whoas the Kunk Gun traversing on today? Everybody got Kunked once in a while, but early on a pattern was established: Goodwin and Dougherty got Kunked all the time. It was very direct and very negative. Kunk yelled that they were s.h.i.tbags; everything they did was f.u.c.ked up. Sometimes, after the meeting, he would haul one or the other of them into his office to yell at them privately, although it wasnat really private because the whole episode could be heard down the hall. Bordwell, who started the deployment on such shaky ground, had quickly rehabilitated himself into the battalion star, while the predeployment favorites suddenly became the problem cases. The company commanders routinely had small debriefing sessions among themselves afterward, just to decompress and a.s.sess what had happened in there. aWe would sit down with Goodwin and just let him vent, the guy was just beat down,a remembered Bordwell. aEvery time he went up there, it was a public whipping session.a Many of the company commanders and first sergeants didnat see Sergeant Major Edwards as any help in turning the battalion into a well-run unit. In many battalions, intentionally or not, the lieutenant colonel and the sergeant major usually a.s.sume a good cop/bad cop act. One half of the duo is the hard guy, and the other balances as the more approachable one. In this battalion, however, both were bad cops. aBoth a.s.sumed the negative role,a explained Bordwell. Many of the lower-ranking soldiers found Edwards to be an ineffectual yes-man. aThe battalion sergeant major is supposed to be the guy that when I have a problem, and my first sergeant canat fix it, I can go to the sergeant major, and he will go to the commander and say, aThis is a problem. This needs to be fixed,aa said Bravo 1st Platoonas Chris Payne. aAnd that did not happen. Or, if it did happen, he wasnat any good at it.a Kunk threatened to fire both Dougherty and Goodwin within the first few months of arrival and several times before the year was through. These were not idle, motivational threats. He made moves. He pa.s.sed the recommendations up to Ebel, but Ebel would always say no, there was no reason to fire them, and there were no captains in reserve anyway, so you had to work with what you had. When Kunk made his first serious attempt to fire Goodwin, because he perceived that the captain was not moving fast enough to install a piece of radio-relay equipment at the JSB, Goodwin decided he now had three enemies on his hands. aI had Al Qaeda, and I had the Iraqis. Not so much as an enemy, but I had to deal with them on a daily basis,a he said. aAnd I had Battalion. Thatas who my enemies were.a Many company-level leaders were concerned about the command climate, and Headquarters and Headquarters Company commander Shawn Umbrell continued to try to mediate between the captains and Kunk, but those efforts were frustrating. aI couldnat understand why a battalion commander would have such a hard time building a team,a he said. aIf you continuously crush their spirit, they are going to be timid, wondering if everything they do will earn them another a.s.s chewing. It had an impact on the way those guys operated.a But Kunk did not see any problem with the battalion atmosphere. aI believe it was an open, honest command climate where you could come if you needed help. I thought there was an open and honest dialogue back and forth. I mean, could it be contentious? Yes. But trying to understand the whole environment there and the complexities of it was very challenging.a Delta commander Lou Kangas felt that was truea"for him, anyway. aI personally felt like I had support. I would go to the boss with bad news and tell him what I was doing about it, and I was treated positively,a he said. aColonel Kunk and the sergeant major supported me and my first sergeant for the most part. Now, other companies are guaranteed to say something dramatically different.a Umbrell tried to convince Kunk to reconsider some of his perceptions of his other subordinates, but Kunk frequently ended discussions with one of his favorite phrases: aSometimes perception is reality, Shawn.a Umbrell found there wasnat much he could say once Kunk had rested on that position; the way Kunk saw things equaled reality.
As the battalionas operations officer, the man who actually wrote the orders, Major Rob Salome contended that Kunkas intentions were clear; Charlie and Bravo simply failed to meet them, and that was the problem. aEveryone got a Task and Purpose,a he explained. aSome people can look at the Mission Statement and the Commanderas Intent, and then the Task and Purpose, and tie all those things together to see how it achieves the mission. Some guys didnat have the ability to make those critical links. One thing that you learn in Ranger School is how it all ties together. And John didnat have that experience to lean on, so I had to become more and more descriptive as we went through the year. To the point where I was writing extremely descriptive Mission Statements where I put not only Task and Purpose, but a full Who, What, When, Where, and Why so there was no misunderstanding about what I was trying to say.a As he tried to manage both Goodwin and Dougherty, however, Salome discerned a distinct difference between them. aIf I saw that John had done something that I thought was just wrong, and I said, aJohn, what were you thinking, man? Thatas just dumb,a head reply, aSir, I know. Iam screwed up. I shouldnat have done it that way. What can I do to fix it?a Very apologetic and very submissive. But if I called Bill and had the same discussion, it was, aNo, sir. We are not screwed up. Weave never been screwed up. We did the right thing and Iall tell you why.aa With this pressure bearing down on him, Goodwin became increasingly filled with self-doubt. He was not the most confident leader to begin with. According to Salome, Goodwin needed to have his every decision validated, which was fine when everyone shared a headquarters. But being physically removed from the battalion, and with battalion-Bravo relations going poorly from day one, Goodwin frequently seemed at a loss, without initiative, or even a firm grasp of what was going on in his sector.
First Sergeant Skidis and First Lieutenant Habash had supported Goodwin the best they could. They not only had run a big portion of the companyas affairs, they had become his sounding board and confidants. Now, however, with Skidis hurt, Goodwin was even more at sea. Sergeant First Cla.s.s Andrew Laskoski, who had been the battalionas scout platoon sergeant, came in to replace Skidis, but it was hard to match the degree to which Skidis had run things and the degree to which Goodwin had relied upon him.
Soldiers loathed the traffic control points for a variety of reasons. They hated the very idea of them because they despised being tied down to a fixed position. Everything they had ever been trained to do, every piece of Army doctrine they had internalized, told them that the key to the Armyas lethality was its ability to maneuver and fire, maneuver and fire. If this was the heart of bad-guy country, they wanted to actually go hunt bad guys, not play crossing guard. As Squad Leader Eric Lauzier put it, aIf we were supposed to control the area, we said letas go seize control of it, not sit around waiting to get hit. Letas do patrols, set up ambushes and observation positions, do recon, control the tempo. Letas put the pressure on them, instead of the reverse.a But not only were the TCPs static, they were undermanned. There was never any consensus about just how many men there should be at each position. Before late June 2006, Kunk issued no written guidance to the companies on staffing requirements at the TCPs, and Goodwin never issued written guidance to the platoons. Recollections of what the verbal guidance was varies widely. A squad at each position was the preference, but with four or five TCPs to cover, and with the company depleted through casualties and mandatory midtour leaves, that almost never happened. Add in missions that spontaneously arosea"whether BDAs (battle damage a.s.sessments), Quick Reaction Forces, or investigating something suspicious that somebody at Bravoas headquarters had seen on the J-Lensa"and it was not uncommon for a TCP to have just three or four soldiers for an extended period of time.
Squad leaders routinely received ad hoc mission a.s.signments over the radio. The sergeant would frequently radio back to say that he only had five, or six, or seven guys total, and that he was the only NCO there. He would ask: Do you really want me to leave three guys at the TCP, and none of them a sergeant? Affirmative, would come the response. Do the mission. aNow you are going a click and a half to two clicks out in the bush with four guys,a Lauzier said. aYou need four guys just to carry one casualty. What am I going to do if we get hit out there? Or the TCP gets. .h.i.t and there are three guys there? You are screwed.a The TCPs were also shockingly underfortified. After 1st Platoonas initial several-day rotation at the TCPs, platoon sergeant Phil Miller went to Goodwin to complain. Specifically, he wanted to get rid of TCP2, which he thought was a death trap. aI told Captain Goodwin that itas in the open, thereas no cover, itas only a click from TCP1,a he recalled. aSo what do I gotta do? What would you like to see happen at that TCP to get rid of it?a Goodwin told Miller that he was worried about the ca.n.a.l running under the TCP. If it was undefended, insurgents could lay an IED big enough to make the road completely impa.s.sable. aSo, the next time we went out to the TCPs, I took seventy-five strands of wire down there and told Sergeant Nelson, aYou need to make sure no one can get anywhere near this ca.n.a.l.aa Nelson and his squad did as they were told. aWe got it all done, and I told Goodwin, TCP2as good to go. You canat get anywhere near that f.u.c.king ca.n.a.l now, that b.i.t.c.h is locked down.a But TCP2 stayed. aWell, then I was p.i.s.sed,a Miller said. aBecause I was told one thing, and now Iam being told another. I donat know whose call it was, but my big thing is if youare fighting on the ground, it should be your decision.a The overwhelming majority of interactions with locals at the TCPs were routine, just men and women and kids trying to get wherever they were going and be on their way. But there were enough odd or disconcerting interchanges from the start to make the whole experience tense and unnerving, all the time. Sometimes it was like the Iraqis were testing them. Sometimes it seemed like a car would pa.s.s the stop signs or disobey a stop order from a soldier just to see how fast the soldier would resort to a warning shot. When they were back at the FOB, the soldiers loved reading in the news about how Iraqis were being terrorized at checkpoints because they were unfamiliar with how roadblocks worked or, since so many Iraqis were illiterate, they couldnat read the warning signs. What utter bulls.h.i.t, they would exclaim. After two and a half years, every single f.u.c.king Iraqi knows exactly what a checkpoint is, they would shout, and exactly how they work. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they said, if there was a car speeding for the no-go line, that Iraqi was doing it on purpose.
Iraqi men would loiter around the TCPs. It was obvious to the soldiers that they were doing recon on how the checkpoint operated. If you sent someone out to go talk to them, they would slink away, or if you happened to sidle up to them before they could get away, they would turn as friendly as could be.
aOh, h.e.l.lo, Meester. Very good. USA, number one!a they would say, all smiles. Likewise, it was common for a car or truck that had been waiting in line to pull out of the queue and speed away as soon as the driver could verify that full searches were in effect. That is exactly the kind of car that sergeants would love to send a team to follow, but there were rarely enough guys at a TCP to do that, so they just had to let them drive off. Other times, the soldiers would get scowls and get into scuffles with men pulled from cars, obviously humiliated, obviously p.i.s.sed off, either about the rough way they were being handled or perhaps about the fact that their women were being looked at, commented on, talked to, ogled. Sometimes an Iraqi man would actually push a soldier. Sometimes there would be an interpreter to try to smooth emotions on each side, but often not. Soldiers couldnat figure out why they got any resistance at all. The power dynamic at that moment was not exactly equal. But when they did get att.i.tude, many soldiers found that a swift and solid jab to the kidney was very useful in extracting maximum compliance.
By far the biggest complaint the men had with the Sportster TCPs was the way they were forced to look for IEDs. Every morning around dawn, soldiers had to conduct adismounted IED sweeps,a essentially walking from their post to the next TCP and back looking for makeshift bombs. The policy was to walk in a V formation, with the tips of the V well off of the road looking inward, but Sportster was so narrow, with built-up areas or other features such as reeds or ca.n.a.ls coming all the way up to the shoulder, that soldiers had to do the sweeps basically walking on top of the street. For many, this was almost unbearably stressful. aEvery morning before conducting an IED sweep, you truly felt that this was the day that you were going to die,a Lauzier once wrote. The fear and the mental stress were c.u.mulative. It was not so much that the men were asked to do something hazardous, it was the daily, grinding awareness that tomorrow they would have to do it all over again.
aLet me put it to you this way,a explained Private Justin Watt. aTake something you do every day, like go to the mailbox. Every day, you go to the mailbox. Now say that every time you go to the mailbox, there was, say, a 25 percent chance that the mailbox was going to blow up in your face. The explosion might not be big enough to kill you. But it could be. You just donat know. Either way, you do know that there was a one-in-four chance that it was going to blow right the f.u.c.k up in your face. But you have to go to the mailbox. There is no way you cannot go to the mailbox. So, I ask you: How many times do you think you could go to the mailbox before you started going crazy?a The strain, for some, was debilitating. aHow many times can you wake up in the morning knowing you have to do this death walk?a wondered Private Justin Cross, an eighteen-year-old from Richmond, Virginia. aHow many times can you walk down the road saying, aI might die this timea before youare like, af.u.c.k it, I hope the next one does just f.u.c.king kill me, because Iam tired of this s.h.i.ta?a Lauzier, as one of the leaders, did his best to keep his fear hidden, but he could not understand why the Army would make him do this. They found a lot of IEDs this way, no doubt, but they also got blown up a lot too. aMen would be engulfed by the smoke and you would lose visual,a Lauzier wrote. aDebris from the explosion would be hitting you.a Once the postexplosion fear subsided, the headaches, ringing ears, or deafness might last for hours or into the next day. But no matter how fatalistic Lauzier and his men became, and how convinced that the battalion and the brigade valued their Humvees more than their men, he took pride in the fact that they kept getting up in the morning and kept doing what they were told. aIt is amazing that these men, mostly boys, did their duty and conducted themselves with such courage and constantly put themselves in harmas way to preserve the lives of their fellow soldiers, with total disregard for their own personal safety,a he wrote.
Ebel understood that the men disliked the TCPs, but he mistook the primary emotion they inspired, and he argued that it really wasnat that bad out there anyway. aThe thing is that it gets boring,a he said. aThatas the reality. And it doesnat matter how effective you are, for the individual soldier heas just seeing his job as aIam in the Humvee, Iam in this hut, I donat have the best food, my other guys are out there on base camps. They donat have to live like that.aa The NCOs would constantly ask to do IED sweeps using the Humvees, but the requests were always denied because the human eyeball is, in fact, one of the best IED-finding devices on Earth. Some of the squad leaders devised workarounds. Lauzier would study a map and plot a route the morning before. On the morning of the patrol, his men would take over a house, head to the roof, scout a stretch of road with their binoculars, and then move forward. Scout, move forward to the next building. Scout, move forward to the next building. It was a completely unauthorized way of doing business, but it was effective.
The TCPs never eliminated IEDs on Sportster. People still got blown up all the time, though the IEDs did decrease in deadliness over the year. With American eyes on the road fairly regularly, insurgents could not lay in hundred-pound bombs anymore. But they could drop small package bombs out of a hole cut in a caras floorboard or quickly bury one while pretending to change a tire. Even so, the staffing rotations were exhausting the men. aMy vehicle got hit on Sportster once,a related Alpha commander Bordwell, aand I could see the eyes of the dude in the tower from where I got hit with the IED. I went to that tower, and I looked back and I could see the hole, nothing obscuring it. So I asked the soldier, aWhat the h.e.l.l, man?a He was like, aAh, sir, Iave been on guard for eight hours.a So, you canat really yell at the soldier. Well, you can. But how does anybody stay sharp for that long a time when thereas no one to replace him?a Staffing became a constant and contentious topic of discussion at battalion-wide meetings as well as during one-on-one consultations between battalion staff officers and company-level leaders. These discussions rarely deviated from this: The companies routinely declared they did not have enough men, and Battalion countered that they did, but they werenat using them efficiently. Kunk always sneered at claims of overtaxed duty rosters.
aBulls.h.i.t!a he would shout. aDo I have to show you how to do it? Do I have to draw it out for you myself?a When presented with compelling shortfalls, he would ask, aWhat are your cooks and mechanics doing?a When told that they were cooking and working on vehicles, he insisted that every specialist in the Army is a rifleman first, and they could soldier too.
aThat was always his big thing, to use them on missions,a said First Lieutenant Tim Norton. aSure, sounds great. So they come with us for a huge operation. And once we come back, everybody is saying aMan, I canat wait for some fried chicken.a Oh, but whoops, the cooks are racked out. Can you really tell them, thanks for coming on that mission with us, and now that we are all taking a break, you need to get cooking?a Operations Officer Salome believed troops-to-task calculations were straightforward mathematics. aI would take the task that we had a.s.signed each of the company commanders, and then I would say, aOkay, this is what they have.a I had been a commander of two companies by that point, and Iad say to myself, aIf I had the resources that they have, could I accomplish the mission that they have?a And, you know, we always felt like they had what they needed.a Executive Officer Fred Wintrich concurred. aIf you had a combat power problem, you always had a sympathetic, attentive audience, but it had to start with a cogent argument. If your math sucked, you got told to pound sand.a Salome conceded that sometimes it took a little creativity to solve an apparent staffing scarcity, but he found Goodwin the least adept at this kind of thinking. aIf a unit from 3rd Platoon was going out to recon a certain area in their Humvees, and 1st Platoon needed chow at TCP1, then why canat 3rd Platoon take the chow out to TCP1 on their way to the other mission?a he asked. aThat is a simplified example, but I donat think that John ever really looked at it like that. He looked at those tasks as discrete things. He didnat mult.i.task anybody. And if you donat mult.i.task everyone, then youare never going to get it done.a Sometimes, Salome said, Goodwin would send three separate patrols to Mahmudiyah in one day, each for a reason as mundane as picking up a spare part, even though a scheduled supply run the next day could have accommodated all four trips.
aHey, man,a Salome would say. aYou just wasted a patrol, and you didnat get the mission done that I had given you because you were running supplies back and forth all day long. Help me help you, okay?a But others maintain that 1st Battalionas quests for efficiencies didnat just stretch the staffing models to their limits; they started violating them. aSeveral times, Kunk tried to tell me I could do something when my troop-to-task roster said I couldnat,a a.s.serted one of the companiesa first sergeants. aHe said, aYou got this amount, and you can do this.a I said that was possible only if I plan on letting this guy who just came in from a twenty-four-hour mission sleep for five hours before rolling him out for another twenty-four-hour mission. And you can do thata"for a day or two. But for a week or longer? To have that be the normal duty rotation? No. Someoneas going to get hurt.a Charlieas First Sergeant Largent a.s.serted that not only was the math not working, the battalion was playing loose on their reports to brigade. aThey would call three guys a squad,a he said. aBut you canat turn three guys into nine unless you are lying. They were bulls.h.i.tting brigade. They were sending up reports saying this checkpoint is manned, but if the guidance is you got to have at least a squad out there with two vehicles, and if youare not doing that, then you are bulls.h.i.tting them.a Charlieas Executive Officer Shoaf had similar convictions that information was getting distorted as it got pa.s.sed up. aI saw reports that I had written myself misquoted by the time they got up just to the brigade level,a he said. aItas not like that one little piece of information is going to lose the war, but when you see the c.u.mulative effect of information becoming washed in order to tell a story that a battalion or brigade commander wants to tell to their highers, then you got real problems. Thatas the more sinister side of it.a
9.
The Mean Squad.
IN THE EARLY days of the deployment, whenever Bravoas 1st Platoon was on a TCP rotation, Lauzieras 3rd Squad usually volunteered to occupy TCP3, because thatas where shootouts were most likely. They preferred to be out hunting bad guys rather than sitting on their b.u.t.ts waving through cars all day. Whenever they had enough men, they would do patrols, search houses, see if they could draw fire. The Army phrase for this is amoving to contact,a and, until they got sick of absolutely everything about the war, including killing, that is what 3rd Squad liked to do best. They were always up for a missiona"especially if the answer to their questions aWill we get to shoot something? Will we get to kill people?a was yes. Lieutenant Britt called 3rd Squad aTask Force Lauzier.a It was a designation Lauzier loved.
The Arabic interpreters (called aterpsa by the soldiers) who worked with the company told them that the locals knew who everybody was. It did not take the locals long, they said, to know which platoons were which. And if the locals knew you all, they told the men, it was an easy bet that the insurgents knew you guys too. One interpreter told them that the locals even knew which squads were which, and that 3rd Squad was known as the Mean Squad. Third Squad did not mind this at all. They took a kind of pride in it.
They ran their checkpoints ruthlessly. If they were stopping and checking cars, it could be a slow process, with only one car allowed through the barbed-wire serpentine at a time. Long traffic jams were common, and the soldiers were impatient with Iraqi impatience. aTheyall push your b.u.t.tons,a Watt said. aThey will play a game of chicken with you. Theyad get impatient, pull out of line, and gun the engine to the front of the line. Wead say, aStop!a and, bang, put a shot through their engine block. I donat know who they are. Iam not going to let a VBIED [vehicle-borne IED] roll up on me.a When the battlion put out orders to stop firing warning shots at the cars themselves, they would fire into the dirt and find other ways to teach a lesson. aYou didnat come in our wire without my okay,a said Lauzier. aBecause once they are inside your wire, you have already lost. If you came in our wire without my say-so, you got thumped. We would pull them out and rough them up. Check them against the vehicle. Give them a kidney shot, tell them, aIam not f.u.c.king around. Do not come in my perimeter. I own this s.h.i.t. Iam the sheriff here.aa Sometimes the soldiers would sit the offenders in the sun for three or four hours. Not do anything else to them, just sit them in the sun. aI would drink my water in front of them, and go, aMmmmm, so good,aa said Watt. aaAre you f.u.c.king hot, you dumba.s.s? You want to be stupid? If you keep being stupid, Iam going to treat you like an idiot.aa Occasionally, one or the other of the lieutenants would pull Lauzier aside and tell him that he was being too aggressive, that he should tone down the physicality. He would, respectfully, tell the young lieutenant that he didnat know what he was talking about.
aIave been here before,a he told them. aI know how these f.u.c.kers are. You canat show them any kindness, because kindness is weakness. You gotta let them know youare in charge.a If there was an error in judgment regarding the use of force, head rather use too much than too little. Head rather absorb the second-guessing consequences than have more Americans dead.
Yribe and Lauzier were in absolute agreement on this, and they formed a unified front on how the squad conducted itself despite their vastly different personal styles. Lauzier was a bundle of manic energy, excitable, almost hyper, while Yribe was Mr. Chill, self-possessed and laid-back, even when in a firefight.
The constant gunplay bred an intense hostility. aIt is well in excess of a hundred and twenty degrees, you had just been out on a six-hour patrol, and some sort of bug you just caught made you vomit and s.h.i.t yourself with watery diarrhea all at the same time,a described Lauzier. aYou have finally gotten back to the TCP, and you are just starting to clean yourself up, and then somebody starts shooting at you. All you can think after that is aAll right, motherf.u.c.ker. You want to shoot me? Iam going to f.u.c.king kill you.a So you head to the house where you know the shots came from, and you are going to put a lot of hate and discontent out there. We would patrol in there, toss their house, throw their s.h.i.t around and go, aWho the f.u.c.k fired at us? They were from your house. And we know you know. So Iam going to be a pain in your a.s.s until you tell me.aa On November 11, Yribe and members of 3rd Squad went out on their first-ever patrol with Civilian Affairs, the community outreach arm of the Army, to hand out Beanie Babies or pencils or soccer b.a.l.l.s. They left FOB Yusufiyah and hadnat walked more than three hundred yards when Yribe noticed a car speeding toward them too fast for his liking.
He shouted, aStop!a and got no response, so he fired a warning shot into the dirt. Still getting no response, he fired two more shots until the car finally slowed down. One of those shots had ricocheted and hit a teenage boy standing nearby. From the front, it looked like he just had a pinhole wound, but the bullet had blown a crater the size of a grapefruit out his back. The Civilian Affairs patrol was over before it started. aYou canat really go hand out Beanie Babies after you shoot a f.u.c.king kid,a said Watt.
Since Watt had taken an advanced first aid cla.s.s, he was frequently the designated medic whenever Specialist Collin Sharpness, the platoonas real medic, wasnat on patrol. Watt started patching the boy up. It was his first major injury and it was an odd one. On the one hand, much of the kidas back was missing, and Watt had to quickly go through a series of complex procedures: sealing the wound off, deflating the boyas lung. On the other hand, the boy was conscious and alert, it didnat seem like he was in too much pain, and there wasnat a lot of blood. aYouare doing it all wrong!a Lauzier shouted.
aIam nervous. Iave never done this s.h.i.t before!a Watt yelled back. They sent the boy to the local hospital. Back at the FOB, Yribe got yelled at for about thirty minutes but it was ultimately deemed a clean shot.
Six days later, 1st Platoon headed back out to the TCPs to relieve 3rd Platoon, with 3rd Squad taking over TCP3. The next morning, Lauzier woke up Yribe to tell him that somebody had found an IED farther north on Sportster and that he and Miller were going to go check it out. Lauzier was leaving Yribe in charge of Cortez, Barker, Watt, and several other soldiers. Bravo halted all traffic on Sportster until the IED threat was resolved. When Yribe got onto the road, there was a line of cars stacked up, honking, trying to get through, trying to figure out why the traffic was stopped.
Tension was escalating, and Yribe was nervous that he was losing control of the situation. He decided to fire a warning shot to get the locals to disperse. He pa.s.sed by Cortez and Watt, walked over to the front of the wire, and aimed his rifle into the ground near the line of vehicles. He fired one shot but it ricocheted off of a tractor rather than hitting the ground, and pierced the windshield of a pickup truck. There was much commotion. All the other cars that were waiting in line peeled out and sped off. The driver of the pickup started pulling a woman out of the cab.
aYou f.u.c.king shot her in the head,a Cortez said. Yribe yelled to the medic, who was at the other end of the TCP. The medic started running as Watt got his first aid bag and ran over as well. By the time they arrived, the woman was on the ground, her head oozing blood. Watt knelt down and stopped cold. Her brains were coming out of her skull, white and gelatinous, and she was making shallow, rattling breaths, which the medic said meant she was aexpectantaa"medic-speak for aabout to die.a The other woman in the truck had been injured by flying gla.s.s, and the medic started treating her.
Watt did not move. He was watching a woman die and there was nothing he could do about it. A third woman from the truck knelt down next to him, grabbed his hands, and pushed them toward the first aid bag, as if to say, aDo something, do something to save her life.a It was always this way, Watt thought. Sometimes Iraqis seemed not to believe that Americans did not have magical powers. They seemed to think that the Americans were capable of fixing every problema"generate their electricity, make their water run clean, bring their sisters back to lifea"but just chose not to.
Watt didnat know what to do except say to the woman, aI am sorry. I am so sorry.a Yribe called Lauzier on the radio: aDude, you should get down here right away.a aWhy?a aI just killed a woman.a Yribe and Cortez conferred briefly, and Cortez started moving the concertina wire and the stop signs farther out, so that it looked like the truck had driven into the TCPas kill zone. Although the shot had been an accident, the men were scared that no one would believe them. Yribe had been involved in an accidental shooting just days before. By simply moving the wires and fabricating aggressiveness on the part of the driver, it would be far easier to convince the inevitable Army investigator that the death was justifiable.
Within an hour and a half, a lieutenant from one of the battalionas other companies had been a.s.signed to conduct the AR 15-6. Common investigations in the Army, AR 15-6s are routinely ordered up by a commander in the aftermath of a death or other major event. They are usually informal, with an officer a.s.signed to g