Grunts (71 page)

As mutual trust accrued, the locals began passing along good information. Over 90 percent of the battalion’s intelligence data eventually came from such sources. As the Americans got better information, it minimized one major by-product of poor intelligence: the disruption, and popular resentment, caused by raids on the wrong houses, or the incarceration of innocent people. “I would say that maybe half of the IEDs we found was because a local . . . would say ‘Ali Baba’ and actually point out where it was,” Lieutenant James Cantrell, a platoon leader in Delta Company, said. One friendly local kid, whom the soldiers called Johnny, regularly pointed out the location of IEDs. “Every [weapons] cache we found was from somebody calling in the information,” Lieutenant Follansbee said. Before long, tips began pouring in by phone and personal contact. The majority of the time, the information was correct. One of Follansbee’s squad leaders, Staff Sergeant Michael Muci, found that acting with restraint, even on raids, counted for a lot with the Iraqis. “We knocked on the door. We didn’t go crashing in. That saved a lot of hassle. You’re a foreigner and you come into these people’s house because someone said something . . . so our platoon always knocked. The people liked that. We gave ’em courtesy” and respect. They also made sure to give any women in the house plenty of privacy. As a result, the platoon’s area was usually very quiet.

Like their regimental brothers in Tikrit, the Cottonbalers of 3-7 also worked closely with the Iraqi Army and the local police. In a way, the Americans felt sorry for them because they were in so much danger from insurgent reprisals. “It took a lot of guts for them to be in the military,” Sergeant Jason Wayment said. “They would stay in their compound for three or four days and then go home for two days. If anybody saw ’em leaving the place, going to their house, then they’d get killed.” Wayment personally knew of several soldiers whom insurgents killed while they were on leave. Specialist Herrera knew one NCO who was so concerned for his safety and that of his family that he did not go home for six months.

The army compounds and the police stations were sometimes attacked by insurgents. By and large, the ISF men were brave, but not very skilled or savvy. “They’re not very disciplined people,” Specialist Joshua Macias, a mortar platoon soldier who often worked with the Iraqi soldiers, opined. “You’d try and tell ’em something and they’d go off and do something else.” They did not pull guard duty and maintain security the way the Americans knew they must. The grunts had to be careful about correcting them, especially in front of their peers, because this would cause them to lose face. It was also shameful for them to admit that they did not know something. In response to questions, they would often shrug and say “Insha’Allah,” a fatalistic phrase that means “God willing.” The expression was a source of great frustration for the proactive, blunt-speaking Americans. “If you ask an Iraqi if he’s gonna do something, if he says yes, it might get done,” Lieutenant Colonel Funk commented drily. “If he says no, obviously, it won’t get done. If he says Insha’Allah that means it ain’t gonna get done. It’s the universal Arabic way to say if God wills it, it will get done but don’t count on me, buddy.”

Soldiers and Ministry of the Interior (MOI) commandos often participated in American raids and patrols. The police maintained traffic control points (TCPs). By and large, the quality of all these security people got better as the months wore on, but they were still not all that good or as reliable as they needed to be. Most of the Americans did not completely trust them. More important, many of the locals did not like or trust them. Often, the Americans found themselves trying to persuade residents to change their negative perceptions of the ISF and their own government. Still, in a larger sense, they were an asset because, as Lieutenant Colonel Funk pointed out, “[they] don’t have to be as good as us. They just have to be better than the insurgents they’re fighting.” In southwest Baghdad, by the fall of 2005, they were significantly better than most of the guerrillas.
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In spite of 3-7’s wise approach to counterinsurgency in Rashid, there was no way a battalion of eight hundred soldiers could hope to truly control such a densely populated area. The danger of IEDs and suicide bombers was always profound. For the troops, this urban environment was stressful and unforgiving. The 3-7 Infantry spent many months intensively patrolling Route Irish, a stretch of road that had gotten out of control over the course of the previous year (reporters routinely referred to it as the most dangerous road on Earth). The highway bristled with IEDs of all varieties. The most common were drop-and-go types. Insurgents would cut a hole in a van, slow down a bit, and simply drop the IED on or alongside the road. Others were hidden in trash or buried in curbs or in the grassy median between the eastbound and westbound lanes. The Cottonbalers found and detonated countless IEDs on Route Irish. They also outlived all too many explosions. “We were on Route Irish a lot,” Lieutenant Cantrell said. “We realized that you can survive IEDs.” The soldiers weathered many near misses. “We saw a flash,” one Alpha Company soldier remembered about an IED that exploded near his Humvee one night. “The IED went off . . . about four or five feet in front of our vehicle. Thank God . . . I stopped in the middle of the road and it blew up about four or five feet in front of us.”

Eventually, new technology and new tactics took Route Irish away from the insurgents. The Americans began to equip most of their Humvees with the Warlock system, a piece of equipment capable of jamming the signals of cell phones and garage door openers that the terrorists used to detonate IEDs. Even more than Warlock, though, new tactics secured Route Irish. Not only did they saturate the road with patrols night and day, but they began to restrict access to the road. Engineers built concrete barriers and wire screens to prevent pedestrians from walking along the road. Then the Iraqi Army maintained checkpoints at every possible vehicular access route. To top it all off,

SEAL and Cottonbaler sniper teams performed overwatch missions, shooting anyone they could positively establish as planting an IED. Before long, Route Irish got dramatically better, to the point of almost complete safety. “That’s why you really don’t hear about Route Irish anymore,” one soldier said, with disgust dripping from his voice.

Throughout the rest of Rashid, the best way to defeat IEDs was to know the area. Over time, the Cottonbalers got to know their neighborhoods so well that they could spot anything that was amiss. “You have to patrol the same area over and over,” Lieutenant Peter Robinson, a platoon leader in Easy Company, said. “My guys could look at the curb and tell you the cinder block’s been moved.” They came to know instinctively what was normal and what was threatening. “There’s absolutely no way to replicate that except by patrolling over and over.” The only problem was that, once the Americans came to dominate one part of Rashid, the insurgents would simply relocate to another, creating a whack-a-mole scenario. There simply were not anywhere near enough soldiers in the battalion to control the whole AO.

The battalion’s worst incident occurred on April 19 when a suicide bomber attacked a dismounted patrol from Alpha Company’s 1st Platoon. The grunts had just dismounted from their vehicles and were on their way to a school in the Jihad neighborhood when a car drove into the middle of their formation and detonated. The hellish blast instantly killed Corporal Jacob Pfister and Specialist Kevin Wessel. Four other soldiers were wounded, two of whom had to be evacuated out of Iraq. Just moments after the blast, the platoon’s vehicles turned around and roared back to the terrible scene. “People in the buildings around us were shooting at us,” Sergeant James Malugin, a gunner on one of the Humvees, recalled. The gunners returned fire. As they did, medics did everything they could for the wounded and other soldiers policed up the remains of the two dead soldiers.

Several other Cottonbaler patrols, and many Iraqi policemen, scrambled to the scene. The standard procedure in these tragic instances was to seal off the entire site. Eventually, the shooting from the buildings petered out. “Once we got there, quickly everything was cordoned off,” Staff Sergeant Gerard Leo, a gunner from Charlie Company, recalled. “We were watching the buildings. We weren’t letting anyone walk near. The kids were trying to come out and play and we were chasing ’em back into their homes. The . . . guys were medevacked and gone within minutes.” In addition to Pfister and Wessel, two other battalion soldiers lost their lives during the year in Iraq—Corporal Stanley Lapinski of Bravo Company and Corporal Manuel Lopez from Delta Company.

In another harrowing incident, a suicide car bomber attacked a Charlie Company traffic control point. The soldiers had set up barbed wire and orange traffic cones to maintain at least one hundred meters of standoff between themselves and the traffic. The troops were in the process of questioning a man whom they suspected of selling illegal gasoline. All of a sudden a white car veered around the cones. “I’ll never forget it until the day I die,” Staff Sergeant Michael Baroni said. He was standing several yards away from his Humvee, watching the terrible scene unfold, as if in a dream. “As soon as he swerved around the cones, it was all like slow motion. You could just hear the vehicle just gassing down [accelerating]. He hit the wire. As soon as he hit the wire . . . we pulled our weapons. By that time my gunner and my loader just started opening up on him. I remember just seeing the guy [suicide bomber] go down . . . on the windshield and then the fireball, and feeling the heat. It detonated . . . about fifteen feet or ten feet behind my Humvee . . . so close, the wreckage was . . . underneath my Humvee.”

At that moment, Baroni could think of little else except the welfare of his men. He had promised their families that he would bring them home safely. Amid the smoke and flames, not to mention the concussion from the explosion, he had trouble figuring out where they were. One man was lying on the ground, shaken but okay. Another was inside the Humvee, slumped over. For a horrible instant, Staff Sergeant Baroni thought he was dead. The NCO began screaming for him to wake up and get out of the vehicle. “He gets out of the Humvee and he’s okay. He said he was waiting for a second one [suicide bomber] so he ducked down. You could see the whole back of his helmet from his neck and his IBA [interceptor body armor] was all burnt up. Debris was all over the Humvee. He got out and grabbed his weapon. You get mad because now they’ve attacked
you
.” Fortunately no Americans were hurt in this near miss.
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Suicide bombings spiked in May and June. Most of them were carried out by foreign jihadis or, in a few instances, Iraqis handcuffed to the steering wheel (the terrorists would threaten to kill the person’s family if they did not carry out the attack). In one day alone, fourteen of them detonated in the brigade’s area of operations (3-7 Infantry was attached to the 4th Brigade Combat Team of the 3rd Infantry Division). From that point onward, though, they diminished substantially. Nonetheless, in response to the threat of such attacks, the Americans began implementing a greater standoff distance between themselves, local vehicles, and even the people they encountered on dismounted patrols.

For the average grunt, the life-and-death pressure of preventing the bombings was nearly overwhelming. That pressure was especially heavy on Humvee and Bradley gunners and dismounted soldiers. “There’s a kind of courage that you don’t really think about when you talk about combat operations,” Staff Sergeant Keith Orr, a Bravo Company rifle squad leader and veteran of the Gulf War, said. “You’ve got these gunners up there and they’re young and Iraqis are the stupidest drivers. I mean, they’d just do some dumb shit and you’ve got this kid . . . on the trigger. He’s watching this car come up. Is that a VBIED? Is that a bad guy doing something or is that a family of five . . . not paying attention. It takes a lot of discipline and courage to hold your fire for that extra second to verify before you put . . . a half a pound of lead into a car.”

At the exact same time, the gunner was responsible not only for the lives of his friends but also the Iraqis around him. On the one hand, the soldiers always knew that if they made the wrong choice, they could be court-martialed. On the other hand, if they held their fire too long, it could cost their lives and the lives of their buddies. Their momentous decisions had to be made in seconds. Every incident, no matter how small, could be a strategic event. Most of the gunners were not even twenty-one yet. “We literally are asking more of our soldiers today than ever in history,” Lieutenant Colonel Funk asserted. “I have corporals on the ground literally making strategic decisions. There are young corporals and sergeants on the ground who are learning to interact with people, who are learning to determine very quickly the essence of a military problem and work their way through it. I know when I was a young man coming up, I wasn’t nearly as talented as we ask our young platoon leaders and captains to be nowadays.”

Truly, the stakes were immense. When they made the wrong choices, it poisoned relations with the locals and, often as not, it turned into a media event. One ugly tragedy could undo months of good relations. For instance, in June, at the height of the suicide bombings, a Cottonbaler opened fire at a car in the Sadiyah neighborhood and killed an innocent fifty-seven-year-old woman who was a local teacher. “To them, killing a human being is nothing,” a furious bystander said of the soldiers. “When an American soldier gets killed, they make a big fuss. When an Iraqi gets killed in the street, it means nothing to them.” Unfair though this perception certainly was, it resonated with many people in the wake of this incident.

The scathing media coverage that resulted from the tragic shooting only exacerbated bad feelings all the way around. The Cottonbalers respected reporters who would embed themselves with the unit and patrol with them, but they were few and far between. Truthfully, though, most of the soldiers were predisposed to distrust and dislike reporters. Negative coverage only fueled their disdain all the more. They would return to the FOB, watch television, and be amazed at what they believed was completely inaccurate, slanted reporting of the war. By their estimate, only 10 to 20 percent of what they saw was accurate or fair. “The media is a business,” Lieutenant Follansbee said. “It’s not really so much the pursuit of truth as meeting the bottom line as a lively institution. Blood is sexy. That’s what sells so that’s what they show. They don’t show the MEDCAPs [medical patrols that dispensed free health care throughout Rashid] or the food distros [distributions] or us walking around talking to people, dropping off school supplies . . . because that’s not sexy.”