None Left Behind (19 page)

“I think it must be possible. Do you want me to tell the platoon?”

“We'll tell 'em,” Lieutenant Dudish volunteered. “They're our boys.”

Montgomery didn't know what to think, what to feel. But he knew he had to hold it together. He kept hearing Colonel Infanti's words: “How you react when you lose a soldier—and it
will
happen—sets the tone for the rest of your men for the remainder of the war. If they see you fall apart, they will fall apart.”

Relaying bad news to the platoon without breaking down was the hardest thing either Lieutenant Dudish or Sergeant Montgomery had ever done. Sergeant Messer was liked and respected. So was Nathan Given once he got himself squared away and stopped playing the company shitbird. Now they were gone. They had people waiting for them at home, people who would now wait forever.

Delta Company took the deaths hard. Soldiers in the new company formed at Fort Drum only months before out of misfits and castoffs from other units had gotten tight. Emotions of bewilderment, survivor's guilt, rage, and despair painted themselves large on drawn faces filled with shock. There was a lot of quiet time, a lot of mourning. Many of the guys, like Specialist Brandon Gray, went off to themselves and wept, throwing themselves on their bunks or crouching with their faces in corners. Others sought each other out to talk, to be close, to touch each other.

“Messer
knew
it was coming. How can someone dream the future?” Sergeant Victor Chavez lamented.

“He
knew
.”

Soldiers looked at each other as the fears crept in deep. Hadn't they all dreamed of dying in Iraq at one time or another? Which of the dreams might be considered precognitive?

Specialist Jared Isbell was particularly distraught, feeling like Given had died in his place.

“Nathan was supposed to be in the truck instead of me,” he agonized. “He took
my
place on the ground.”

“You can't blame yourself, Isbell. None of us could have known.”

“Maybe this wouldn't have happened if we hadn't switched. That could have been me instead of him. Everything might have changed. He might still be alive!”

Sergeant Montgomery maintained his composure for the sake of the platoon. He walked among the mourners, attempting to engage them in conversation, to talk it out. Some were willing. Others were not. Hostile expressions implied that the platoon sergeant, Lieutenant Dudish, Captain Jamoles, Battalion, the army, America, or some other faceless and collective entity was to blame. That was understandable. They didn't want leaders comforting them as they grieved; they had each other for that.

Other officers and NCOs approached Lieutenant Dudish and Sergeant Montgomery to offer their condolences. The sympathetic looks on their faces communicated the same thought: these could have been their men.

The character of the platoon began to change from that day. Life was expendable. The Joes always told each other that, but now they were facing its reality. A certain grimness set in. It leached away the boyishness, the sense of adventure that had accompanied Delta Company to Malibu Road. Faces became harder, older.
Manticore
was no longer only a scifi movie, not in The Triangle of Death.

There was a lot of hatred. Sergeant John Herne called it a “hate fest.” Guys wanted to go out and seek revenge by burning everything in the AO to the ground. Others plotted to start with Crazy Legs, especially after they learned he had been spotted nearby before Messer and Given triggered their IED. Hearts and minds, hell yes. But a bullet through the head and a stake through the heart.
Fuck these miserable, murdering rag-heads!

Men who had never had the habit took up smoking or chewing tobacco as part of the company's general sense of fatalism. After all, they had a better chance of dying here than from cancer or heart disease years from now. Life shifted into increments of one day at a time. The future no longer existed. Life was lived according to the next patrol, the next run on Malibu Road.

The Joes built a little memorial to the fallen warriors at Inchon. Above
Messer's photo on the wall hung the machete he always carried. Above Given's was the unit coin the general awarded him. Below on the floor, according to tradition, sat their boots and helmets.

“Soldiers die with honor,” Chaplain Bryan eulogized. He swallowed the lump in his throat as he glanced at Messer's laminated prayer card he held in his hand. “Sergeant Messer and Specialist Given died on enemy soil here a long way from home. They died with honor and belief in America and its people. They died for a just cause to ensure freedom does not become lost in a world where evil attempts to conquer by force . . . They will not be forgotten. Not by their families, not by you, and they will not be forgotten by God . . .”

A tightness formed in Sergeant Montgomery's chest. The last thing he needed was a lecture about the sacrifices men make during war. He had a hollow feeling that his two soldiers would not be the last men in Delta to lose their lives in The Triangle of Death. Insurgents seemed to be cranking up the violence, as though desperate not to let the Americans reach that turning point in the war that Colonel Infanti was always talking about.

In The Triangle of Death, the normal drama of Iraqi life continued to unfold on the periphery of the war: families working and growing; laughing students on their way to a recently reopened school; boys courting girls in a genteel manner reminiscent of eighteenth-century America; farmers bent over hoes and rakes and scythes in their tiny fields along the river; coy young women in black burkas slipping down their veils to reveal flashing smiles in brown faces; the rush of kids across a rubble-strewn lot toward a convoy passing through, most waving madly, some plucking up chunks of concrete to fling at the American soldiers.

Sometimes PFC William “Big Willy” Hendrickson of Bravo Company saw himself as more of an observer of the war than a participant, a small cog in a big machine creating one of history's turning points in Iraq's long and sometimes tragic saga. When other soldiers could be found in their off-time watching movies on their PCs or playing video games or cards, Hendrickson had his nose stuck deep in a book somewhere, generally a history. A budding intellectual at twenty years old, he envisioned himself in some future academic career where ivy replaced IEDs, and rational discourse took the place of violence. Service in the Cradle of Civilization, for him, was an opportunity to expand his knowledge about the oldest piece of continuously occupied real estate on earth.

If any soldier was out of place in the military, miscast as a grunt, it was Big Willy Hendrickson. He enlisted from curiosity and a deep sense of duty. After completing basic training, he was assigned to the 10
^th
Mountain Division only weeks before the 2
^nd
BCT deployed. Missing out on most of the unit's combat up-training left him nervous and apprehensive, worried that he wouldn't have any more knowledge about army stuff
when he reached the war zone than when he got out of boot camp. He soon met another misfit after his arrival in Iraq—the chaplain.

He and another soldier were manning a security post at Battalion HQ in Yusufiyah when they saw two other soldiers walking around on the grounds, one of whom was short and rather stocky and unarmed.

“Look at that idiot,” Hendrickson observed. “What the hell is with that retard, goofing around out here like that without a weapon?”

A few minutes later, the stocky soldier walked up to him. Hendrickson saw the crosses on the soldier's uniform.
Oh, crap! It's the chaplain!

Hendrickson relished long intellectual discourse. So did Chaplain Jeff Bryan. On that basis, they developed a relationship and made a point of getting together whenever duty permitted. It was the chaplain who encouraged the private from Bravo to expand his knowledge not only into the secular history of the region but also into its historical period in the Bible.

During its five thousand years of hosting empires, of invading and being invaded, the fertile valley between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers had suffered many tyrannical rulers—Sumerian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Mongol, Turk, British, and, more recently, Saddam Hussein. Between the seventh and thirteenth centuries when few in Europe could read, much less write, Baghdad was renowned for its scholars and artists.

In 1258, however, a Mongol invasion from the east cast the region back into the Dark Ages, a collapse from which it had never fully recovered. In more than a millennium of conflict between Christianity and Islam, Islam had been the aggressor most of the time. Scholars generally agreed that the problem of Islamic terrorism had its roots in the Mongol invasion and the fall of the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley. History was asking the Islamic world to adjust to modernity in less than a century, a condition it took the West nearly six centuries to achieve.

Hendrickson discovered the prominence of the River Euphrates in the Bible to be extraordinary. It was mentioned in Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament, and in Revelation, the last book of the New Testament—and twenty-five times in-between.

“Israel is mentioned more times in the Bible than any other nation,”
Chaplain Bryan pointed out. “But Iraq is a close second place, although that's not the name used in the Bible. It's called Babylon, Land of Shinar, and Mesopotamia.”

“Mesopotamia” meant “between the two rivers.” Its later name of Iraq meant “country with deep roots.” Indeed, Iraq had deep roots. If the Bible was believed, mankind began in the region of Iraq—and mankind would end there.

Iraq was the approximate location of the Garden of Eden, where God created Adam and Eve in the beginning. The Greatest Story Ever Told unfolded from there step by step, event by event.

Satan made his first recorded appearance in Iraq. The Tower of Babel was built in Iraq, followed by the confusion of languages. Abraham hailed from a city in Iraq, as did Isaac's wife. Jacob spent twenty years between the two rivers. Iraq was the site of Persia, the world's first empire. The greatest Christian revival in history occurred in Nineveh, now the city of Mosul. The events in the book of Esther took place in Iraq. The book of Nahum prophesied against a city in Iraq. The Euphrates River was the far eastern border of the land God promised Abraham. Finally, the book of Revelation warned against the resurrection of Babylon.

The Euphrates River was 1,800 miles long. According to Revelation, it would dry up after a full-scale invasion of the West coming from the East. And blood would rise to the level of a horse's bridle.

“America has invaded the Garden of Eden,” Hendrickson speculated. “Does that mean we are to be a part of the Battle of Armageddon in the end times?”

Chaplain Bryan looked up somberly and shrugged. “We may be in the right place at the right time,” he said.

“Or in the wrong place at the right time.”

Command Sergeant Major (CSM) Alexander Jimenez, the highest-ranking NCO in 4
^th
Battalion, was the enlisted equivalent of Lieutenant Colonel Infanti. He was a dark, solidly built Hispanic of forty-five with a professional bearing and a son and daughter back home, both of whom were in their twenties. Although he knew most of the more than eight hundred men in the battalion by sight and last name, knew all of their names on rosters and manning tables, he seldom got to know any of them well. There were three men in the battalion other than those occupying staff positions who stood out in his mind above others, each for a different reason.

It was obvious why the first should be Specialist Alexander Jimenez, the gunner in Delta Company's First Platoon. They shared the exact same name, even though they were not related. Both were career soldiers from similar working-class backgrounds. Their mothers even bore the same name: Maria.

Specialist Jimenez had a reputation for being a good machine gunner, a hard-charging soldier, and the only non-Arabian soldier in the battalion who spoke Arabic. Down in Delta, he took a great deal of good-natured ribbing about his “daddy,” all of which he laughed off with his enormous sense of humor.

“Jimenez,” CSM Jimenez once said to him, “I'm proud to lend you my name. Don't sully it.”

The second soldier was a skinny little private named Harold Fields, who was only seventeen years old when he deployed to Iraq. U.S. law forbade any soldier under the age of eighteen from combat theater assignments. Fields somehow slipped through the cracks and wasn't discovered
until he reached Baghdad. The CSM had to send him back to Fort Drum, even though his birthday was only a month away. Fields begged to stay.

“Sergeant Major, don't you understand? My outfit needs me. They're the only family I've ever really had.”

“I have no choice, son. We'll send for you next month as soon as you turn eighteen.”

“Promise, Sergeant Major?”

These kids were amazing people. They were asked to do things most civilians would never do. Not only that, they pleaded to be allowed to do them. The sergeant major kept his word and brought the private back to Iraq. Fields was now back with Bravo Company. Jimenez hoped he never regretted his decision. He would blame himself should anything happen to the kid.

The third man was Sergeant First Class James D. Connell from the same Tennessee hills that produced World War I's Sergeant Alvin York. Connell, the divorced father of three and, at forty, beginning to bald and build a thicker waist, had enlisted in the army in 1989 and spent much of his subsequent military career serving as a paratrooper with the 75
^th
Ranger Division and the 101
^st
Airborne Division. He received orders to the 10
^th
Mountain in July 2004 and deployed with the 2
^nd
BCT as assistant operations sergeant in Colonel Infanti's TOC.

CSM Jimenez knew Connell well, since they worked together almost daily. Connell chafed at the inaction of his desk job.