None Left Behind (27 page)

“I will not excuse murder and that's what happened . . . ,” U.S. Representative John Murtha proclaimed. “I hear one (of the victims) was even in English asking for mercy . . . We cannot allow something like this to fester . . . We've already lost the direction of this war . . . These kinds of things have to be brought out immediately, because if these Marines get away with it, other Marines might think it's okay . . .”

To the Joes in The Triangle of Death, fighting a war unlike any other in U.S. history, the episode illustrated how they would be thrown to the
hyenas if it would score a political point. It sometimes seemed the American GI had as much to fear from his own country as from IEDs and bullets.

Not that atrocities weren't committed, in Iraq as in every other war. In July 2006, one month before the 2
^nd
BCT arrived in Iraq to take over The Triangle of Death AO, five soldiers of the 101
^st
Airborne Division were charged with murdering an entire family in Mahmudiyah, including a five-year-old girl, and raping a fifteen-year-old. The news was hot in the Iraqi streets, sowing distrust and suspicion among citizens and making it more difficult than ever to win them over. It also provided insurgents a justification for their resistance.

The 10
^th
Mountain Division had a lot to overcome. A single outrage painted everyone subsequently with the same brush. Colonel Infanti and his staff constantly reminded officers and noncoms that nothing like this must ever happen in 4
^th
Battalion.

It appeared the 101
^st
Division in The Triangle had reached the same breaking point that now threatened the 10
^th
Mountain. Bravo Company 1/502
^nd
(1
^st
Battalion, 502
^nd
Infantry) of the 101
^st
was being worn ragged by shadowy insurgents who seldom engaged in face-to-face combat. Instead, sniper fire, IEDs, and RPG attacks occurred almost daily, claiming at least one Screaming Eagle soldier every week. Bravo Company alone suffered eight KIAs.

PFC Steven D. Green witnessed two of these casualties. He and five other airborne soldiers were manning a checkpoint when an Iraqi civilian approached them. The troops knew him because of his status as an informant. He greeted the soldiers warmly, then suddenly pulled a pistol and shot two of them at point-blank range. Green was never entirely “right” afterwards.

Three months later, in March 2006, Green's platoon manned another checkpoint in Mahmudiyah, through which pretty 15-year-old Abeer Hamza had to pass almost daily. She complained to her mother that U.S. soldiers were hitting on her, making suggestive remarks. Her mother Fakhriyah was afraid the soldiers would come for her.

“The Americans would not do such a thing,” a neighbor reassured her.

Steven Green was a bony-faced twenty-year-old from Texas, a cocky loner who had been allowed to enlist in the army despite a petty criminal record and a history of drug, alcohol, and emotional problems. On the afternoon of 12 March 2006, after drinking bootleg Iraqi whiskey, Green rounded up some buddies and talked up the idea of raping Abeer, who lived about 300 meters from the checkpoint.

Green, Sergeant Paul Cortez, Specialist James P. Barker, PFC Jesse V. Spielman, and PFC Bryan L. Howard set out, in Green's words, “to kill and hurt a lot of Iraqis.” At Abeer's house, they herded her father, mother and five-year-old sister into one bedroom and forced Abeer into another. Green shot the father in the head several times with a legally owned AK-47 found in the house. Then he riddled the mother and her five-year-old daughter with gunfire, killing them instantly.

He came out of the room and proudly announced to his buddies, “I just killed them. All are dead.”

In the other bedroom, Green and two of the soldiers ripped off Abeer's clothing and took turns raping her. Afterwards, Green shot her two or three times with the AK-47, threw a blanket over her body, then set the house afire in a crude effort to cover up the crime. He returned to the checkpoint, buried his blood-drenched clothing, and swore everyone to secrecy.

Eventually the secret leaked out, and the five soldiers were arrested and charged.

“I came over here because I wanted to kill people,” Green admitted with casual indifference. “The truth is, it wasn't all I thought it was cracked up to be. I thought killing somebody would be a life-changing experience. And then I did it, and it was like ‘All right, whatever . . .' Over here, killing people is like squashing an ant. I mean, you kill somebody and it's like, ‘All right, let's go get some pizza.' ”

Green's crimes (for which he was later convicted) constituted the most horrific instance of criminal behavior by American troops during the four-year-old war, a worst-case scenario of mentally and emotionally unfit soldiers slipping through the army's pre-enlistment screening to end up
on the killing fields in Iraq where their maladjustments might be triggered under stress.

Even normally adjusted soldiers could crack under the pressure, as the Crazy Legs incident proved. They sometimes thought they were damned either way, whether guilty or innocent.

In previous wars, “Go tell it to the chaplain” was the mantra served to disturbed or “shell-shocked” soldiers. Chaplains were counselors of choice for no matter what ailed the soldier psychologically or emotionally, whether a marital crisis back home or adjustment problems on the front. Psychiatrists to help soldiers deal with combat stress entered the military picture as early as the Vietnam War, but they were never in great numbers. The commencement of
Iraqi Freedom
in 2003 changed all that. The army began sending military mental-health teams to Iraq's most intense combat zones to keep an eye on soldiers and pull them from their units for therapy.

Almost immediately after PFC Stephen Green witnessed the shooting of his two friends at the roadblock and still three months before the rape-murders in Mahmudiyah, an Army Combat Stress Team found that he had “homicidal ideation” and diagnosed him as a homicidal threat. Reports said he was angry about the war and desperate to avenge the deaths of his comrades. Treatment consisted of a prescription for a mood-regulating drug and orders to get some sleep before returning to duty the next day.

After his arrest, the army launched the most aggressive campaign in history to deal with hidden scars like Green's and with soldiers suffering from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) that might cause them to flip out. Exposure over long periods of time to suicide bombers, roadside mines, and the constant threat of attack posed a unique challenge to the mental health of American soldiers.

“When you're in a combat theater dealing with enemy combatants who don't abide by the laws of war and do acts of indecency, soldiers become stressed,” Army Brigadier General Donald Campbell told a Pentagon briefing. “They see their buddies getting blown up, and they could snap.”

The Iraq War had so far produced more cases of PTSD than any conflict in decades. A study published by the New England Journal of Medicine estimated that one out of six of the more than 300,000 soldiers who had served in Iraq to date may have been struggling with PTSD. Fully 40 percent of the soldiers fighting in The Triangle of Death were treated at one time or another during their tours for mental and emotional anxiety.

The aim of the “shrink campaign” was to treat soldiers as close to the front lines as possible.

“Every time you evacuate the soldier further from where they work, your chances of getting that soldier back to full duty decrease,” explained Lieutenant Colonel Elizabeth Bowler, an army psychiatrist. “The closer we can treat to the front, the better our chances.”

What they army was trying to avoid, she said, was “a whole generation of veterans sitting by the side of the road with a cardboard sign saying
WILL WORK FOR FOOD
.”

Soldiers often resisted seeking psychological help because of the “loser” stigma attached to it. It seemed to the troops of Delta Company on Malibu Road that shrinks were always sniffing and snooping about, trying to “catch” them and send them up to Brigade to be checked out.

Signs of progress in The Triangle didn't mean the war was over. There were lulls in the action, then hot spots again, the ebb and flow of a stubborn insurgency. Within Delta Company and within the platoons, things seemed to be breaking down. Every day GIs went down that damnable road and got blown up for doing a good job.

Sergeant Rashid Reevers' truck was hit three times by IEDs in a single day. He kept towing and switching trucks and getting blown up. “Lucky child” Sergeant John Herne, who had gone months without striking an IED, was hit twice in one week in front of the 109 Mosque.

He wasn't the only one to take it in the shorts at the mosque. Located at the beginning of the S-curves, it was a typical dome-shaped, sand-colored building with a big loudspeaker on top that played the muezzin calls for prayer five times a day while a vendor down the road sold dried goat heads. One afternoon as Second Platoon went roaring by, a freshly patched spot in the road caught Jonathan Watts' attention. He yelled for driver Dean Fetheringill to slow down. Fetheringill hit his brakes, almost throwing Chiva Lares through the windshield.

The truck stopped just in time to avoid being blown to Kingdom Come. A big IED erupted directly in front of the truck, bending its grill and front bumper. It would have been a lot worse but for Watts' sharp eye and Fetheringill's quick reflexes.

Specialist Brandon Gray, the kid from Oklahoma who wanted to be a cop, was driving for First Platoon's Sergeant James Connell when his vehicle struck a mine in the road that blew open his door and spurted blood from his ears. He maintained consciousness long enough to bring the truck to a stop without crashing it into the roadside ditch. When he regained awareness, it was 0400 the next morning and he was lying in the
first aid station at Inchon being treated by a doctor helicoptered in from the Green Zone.

An explosion right in front of Specialist Alex Jimenez' truck burst a front tire. As the vehicle veered toward its flat, heavy machine guns opened up from the flat roofs of nearby houses. TC Sergeant Anthony Schober heard slugs ricocheting off Jimenez' turret. Jimenez ducked.

“Holy shit! That was close!”

Then Jimenez popped up again. He had two or three spare cans of 7.62 ammo for his two-forty. He burned it up shooting at anything that moved within range, pinning down a bunch of Iraqis in their houses. Battalion QRF rounded them up and marched them to 152. IA and Brigade interrogators came down and hauled them away. Schober and Jimenez couldn't care what happened to them. It would have suited them just fine if the IA had taken them out back, lined them up against the blast wall, and shot them. Enough of this shit already!

Corporal Mayhem Menahem, second only to First Sergeant Galliano as the company's “IED magnet,” was hit so many times that none of the other guys wanted to ride with him. The day of the “daisy chain” when Fletcher and Scribner threw their bodies over his proved the final straw. After that, every time he heard a crashing boom rippling through the air, whether he was wide awake or fast asleep, he jumped up automatically to throw on his body armor, grab his weapons, and rush off to defend the perimeter.

He wasn't particularly superstitious about being a magnet. It was just that he was scared to death all the time, particularly when he had to go out on the road. Like most good infantrymen, however, he tended to ignore his aches and pains and phobias. To admit to them and seek help was tantamount to admitting a weakness.

His nerves finally got so bad that Lieutenant Tomasello and First Sergeant Galliano sent him to Brigade to see a shrink. The psychiatrist was a colonel sent down from the Green Zone by the Army Combat Stress Team. He reminded Mayhem of TV's Doctor Phil.

“How do you feel about your friends Sergeant Messer and Private Given dying?” the shrink asked in his best you're-lying-on-a-couch manner.

“How am I supposed to feel, sir? I don't know how to feel. I go back and forth in my mind over and over again. It could have been me—or any of the other guys. I feel guilty about it, but I'm glad it wasn't me if it had to be somebody.”

“Are you afraid, Corporal?”

“All the time, sir. I guess that's why I'm here. I've started having nightmares, sir, like Messer had—that I'm going to be blown up and killed. I've been blown up so many times that my string's got to run out sooner or later. Have I become a coward? What kind of person does that make me?”

The doctor gave him a kindly pat on the shoulder. “It makes you normal, Corporal,” he said. “I've spoke with a lot of soldiers since we've been in Iraq. Some of them have long roads ahead. You're struggling with what's happening to you, and that is a struggle to retain your humanity. You've seen things no human should have to see, done things people shouldn't have to do. Combat is contrary to all that we've been taught. It's not a black and white world over here. Some of us move too far to the dark side. Corporal Menahem, I don't believe you will be one of them.”

As treatment, the doctor prescribed “three hots and a cot”: burgers and fries, conversation in air conditioning, a movie, and a good night's sleep in a real bed. It helped Mayhem forget the war. He was still afraid when he returned to Malibu Road, but at least he could sleep.

Platoon leaders and sergeants were reminded that it was up to them to hold things together while the pressure continued to build.

“Are your soldiers out of their fucking minds?” officers raged. “What the fuck are they thinking?”

“We'll fix it, sir.”

“Unfuck them, or I'll unfuck you.”

The Joes tried. Anzak and Murphy and Chavez and some of the others sometimes got together with Brenda the blow-up to put on a little strip show, anything to pass the time and distract from where they were. Somebody might sneak in a jug of Iraqi black market rotgut. Everybody had a few shots, stuck dinar bills down Brenda's panties and whooped it up. What it did mostly, however, was remind them of home and
real
girls.