The Good Soldiers (10 page)

On June 6, at 10:49 a.m., Private First Class Shawn Gajdos, twenty-five years old, became the second soldier in the battalion to die when an EFP exploded on Route Pluto as the convoy he was in headed toward the Kamaliyah COP. Soon after, as Gajdos’s body was on its way back home to a grieving mother, who would say, “I’m just very proud of my son, doing what he felt he wanted to do,” four other soldiers in the convoy wrote down their recollections of what had happened for a report that would become the official narrative of his death. In his office, Kauzlarich read it carefully as he prepared to write his second memorial ceremony speech.

From the sworn statement of Lieutenant Matthew Cardellino: “Concerning the IED attack on my platoon 061049JUN07, in which PFC Shawn Gajdos was killed and CPL Jeffery Barkdull and PV2 Jordan Brack-ett were injured; the platoon was traveling in the northbound lane of RTE Pluto enroute to Bushmaster COP to deliver a generator and two mechanics and retrieve a downed vehicle.”

From the sworn statement of Sergeant First Class Jay Howell: “We had already passed the site a few minutes prior to the attack, but were told to turn around to pick up the two mechanics back at FOB Rustami-yah. It was the second time we passed the site when the IED went off, hitting the lead truck, in which CPL Barkdull was the TC.”

From the sworn statement of Corporal Jeffery Barkdull: “Being the Truck Commander in the attack I don’t remember too much of what happened due to the fact that when the EFP hit the truck I was knocked out for a few minutes and plus memory loss of what went on that day. When the truck was hit I remember waking up not knowing what to do so I did what my driver did, if he used the radio so did I when he checked on the gunner, I checked on the gunner. After I checked the gunner I saw the engine of the truck catch fire and I saw my driver exit the truck so I also exit the truck.”

From Sergeant Howell’s statement: “Cpl Barkdull called across the radio to Lt Cardellino that the gunner had been hit and there were injuries.”

From Lieutenant Cardellino’s statement: “Over the radio I was told that there were injuries, but it was unclear at first who it was. After I and my driver dismounted from the truck, we ran over to the disabled truck and I began directing immediate security and looked in the truck to see the damage and injuries. I saw that PFC Gajdos was slumped in his gun turret sling unresponsive and bleeding. I do not know offhand whether he was standing or sitting at the time of the blast. I then tasted and smelled an oily smoke and saw that the engine compartment had caught on fire. PV2 Brackett and my driver, PV2 Gomez, grabbed their fire extinguishers and tried to put out the fire. It was at that point that I saw SSG John Jones run up from behind me with his fire extinguisher and helped to put out the fire. I screamed for the medic, SPC Walden.”

From the sworn statement of Specialist William Walden: “We were driving down Plutos, I heard a loud explosion. When I look in front of the driver I could see a giant black cloud surrounded by gray smoke. I heard over the radio, ‘There is blood everywhere,’ and I could hear moaning in the back ground. My truck drove over there to the lead vehicle, I grabbed my Aide Bag and ran over, I saw CPL Barkdull with blood on his face and left arm. He told me not to worry about him he told me to get PFC Gajdos, that Gajdos is unresponsive. I ran over to the lead trucks right rear door, the door was hanging. I got inside I yelled at PFC Gajdos to get out and asking if he was alright. I saw blood coming out of his nose and mouth.”

From Sergeant Howell’s statement: “Once he was out of the vehicle SPC Walden began treating injuries to PFC Gajdos head while I notice a large area of blood in the groin area. I cut his pants to see if his femoral artery was severed.”

From Specialist Walden’s statement: “While he was doing that, I removed his IBA to see any chest injuries that could cause the blood coming from the mouth and nose. I saw he had two wounds to the right side of neck, that was not bleeding. I removed his ACH and a piece of brain matter fell on his ACU, I could see his eyes bulging and blood coming from his ears. He had a wound size of a quarter to the right side of head. PFC Gajdos’s brain was protruding out of the wound. PFC Gajdos was having agonal breathing with a radial pulse. I sat him up so the blood would not compromise his airway, I started blind finger swipes, all I got was blood clots and more blood. I wrapped the wound to his head and neck with a Kerlix.”

From Sergeant Howell’s statement: “I asked SPC Walden if he was ready to move him he said yes so we loaded Gajdos into the LT’s vehicle which was the nearest . . .”

From Specialist Walden’s statement: “I started CPR. I tried two rescue breaths, but the air would not go in . . .”

From Lieutenant Cardellino’s statement: “. . . and the three trucks sped northwest to FOB Loyalty, where we dropped him off at the Aid Station. It was shortly after that I was informed he was dead. Nothing follows.”

From Sergeant Howell’s statement: “Nothing follows.”

From Specialist Walden’s statement: “Nothing follows.”

From Corporal Barkdull’s statement: “That is all I can remember of the incedent. Nothing follows.”

“On the morning of 6 June, 2007, Ranger Gajdos volunteered to replace one of his previously wounded Brothers to serve as the top gunner in the lead vehicle on a mission that would deliver supplies and a generator to the Bushmaster COP in Kamaliyah,” Kauzlarich decided to write in his memorial speech. “Super G, as I called him, always had a kind word and positive attitude each and every time I ran into him. He will be forever missed.”

On June 8, an EFP exploded in the area called al-Amin, and even before the smoke finished clearing, Sergeant Frank Gietz, who before leaving Fort Riley had spoken of the “dark place,” was running after a man who had come out of a building just after the explosion to stare at the Humvee that had been hit.

“He had run back inside a building and threw himself on the carpet and went down to his knees and started praying,” Gietz would remember later, sitting on his cot, his hands folded, his eyes down, his voice low so none of the other soldiers would overhear, his tone troubled. “So maybe out of anger, I don’t know, I don’t know if he was the triggerman or not, I just ran up to him and tackled him on the ground, and he turned combative on me. He tried to wrestle with me. I remember hitting him in the face, and he kind of started screaming and kind of went limp, and I threw him over on his stomach, and Cooper”—a medic—“ran up and threw his knee in his back and started holding his arms, and I heard Cooper yelling, ‘I think you broke his fucking jaw.’ And I just said, ‘Fuck it,’ and ran out to the street.”

Out on the street, he would remember next, people on rooftops had begun firing at the soldiers.

“I could hear the crack of the rounds, and for some reason or other I just stood there and brought my weapon up and shot, and I remember seeing one individual’s head just, it was weird, like a pink mist come out the back of his head when I shot, and inside my head I was like, ‘Great. One down.’”

He would remember looking over at a gunner named Lucas Sassman, who was up in the turret of a Humvee, firing away.

“I saw his head snap back. And the kid stayed in the turret, that’s what amazed me, so I didn’t really think anything of it, and I came back up and engaged again and when I turned back around to look at the truck, he wasn’t in the turret anymore.”

He would remember running over to Sassman’s Humvee.

“Sassman was laying in the middle of the truck, and I said, ‘What happened?’ and they said, ‘He’s been hit, he’s been hit.’”

He would remember running through gunfire toward another Humvee, the one that had been struck, and a soldier named Joshua Atchley. Atchley was on his second tour in Iraq. The first time he’d been a cook and had gone home wanting to be in the infantry.

“I went straight to Atchley, because Atchley was just, I mean, covered in blood, and he was quiet, just sitting there, and I walked up to him and said, ‘What’s up, buddy, are you doing okay?’ And he just looked at me and he said, ‘They got my fucking eye.’ At the time I didn’t know his eye had been blown out, so I said, ‘You’re going to be all right, you’re going to be all right.’”

He would remember that next to Atchley was a motionless soldier named Johnson.

“I thought Johnson was dead, I thought he was KIA, so I tried to focus on Atchley, and out of the blue I heard Johnson moan. So I was like, ‘Oh
shit,
he’s alive,’ so I went up to him and he was laying on his side and his hand was tucked in underneath him, so I had no idea that his hand had been blown off, so I called to him, ‘Johnson, what’s wrong? Talk to me,’ and at that time he just pulled his arm out, and I remember his hand was completely gone, I mean it was just pieces of skin and bone, but there was no blood. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Wow, there’s no blood, a massive amputation and there’s no blood,’ so I told him he was gonna be all right, and he kept telling me, ‘I’ve lost my fucking hand, Sergeant, I’ve lost my fucking hand.’”

He would remember turning his attention to another soldier.

“I said, ‘Lancaster, what’s wrong with you?’ and he goes, he goes, he goes, ‘I got hit in the arm.’ I said, ‘How bad?’ and he goes, ‘I don’t know, but it’s bleeding a lot,’ and he put out his arm and blood just started pouring out.”

He would remember yelling for someone to tourniquet Lancaster and turning his attention to another soldier, Campbell.

“I remember Campbell still walking around, just screaming, holding his mouth open because he had shrapnel in his mouth. I remember yelling at him, telling him to get the fuck down.”

He would remember that, and more gunfire, and shooting back, and killing a total of four people, and going to the hospital and being officially told that Sassman’s head wound was critical, Johnson had lost his right hand, and Atchley had lost his left eye.

“And it’s funny,” Gietz would say, crying now as he remembered the next thing. “That morning, prior to us rolling out, Johnson had left his NODs inside the vehicle, and I smoked him. I mean I made him do push-ups, crunches, and everything out there in the dirt road for about thirty minutes. I chewed him out. And they let me inside before they medevac’d them out, and I remember Johnson looking up at me and telling me he loved me.”

On June 9, in Fedaliyah, Gietz killed another seven. Maybe more. Probably more. “At least seven,” he said, but as June deepened and the mission moved away from its beginning clarity and into more maybes and more probablys, it was difficult to keep track. “We’re talking about the firefight of our life,” Ricky Taylor, the captain who commanded Alpha Company, said. “I mean this was out of control.”

Fedaliyah was the spookiest place in the AO, an area of water buffalo farms and squatter hovels, so vaguely defined that even in crystal clear satellite photos it appeared blurry and smudged, as if it existed inside of its very own sandstorm. The soldiers had gone there after dark because of a tip from a source they’d been cultivating, which seemed the best way to penetrate such an unknowable place.

“His nickname was Batman,” Taylor said. “He was a seventeen-year-old kid. He was a great guy.”

Maybe because he was a source—probably because he was a source— seventeen-year-old Batman wouldn’t live to see eighteen, or even July. He would be tortured, presumably by militia members, and then he would be killed. But on June 9, he eagerly directed a convoy of forty-two soldiers and eight vehicles into the heart of Fedaliyah to search for two Jaish al Mahdi leaders he said he might be able to identify.

He couldn’t, it turned out. But as the convoy eased along Route Tomatoes, intelligence officers picked up chatter that indicated that the two men might be at the local office for Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical cleric who was one of the most powerful Shiites in Iraq, outside of which stood a dozen men. Gietz dismounted to talk to them. So did seven other soldiers. The dozen men began moving. Gietz told them to stop. The men kept moving. “And then,
pow,
one shot goes off,” Taylor said, and a moment later, when gunfire came at the soldiers from every direction, “that’s when all hell broke loose.”

Gietz and the others chased the dozen men into a mosque. There was a sign inside indicating that the mosque wasn’t really a mosque, that it was really the Fedaliyah office for the Jaish al Mahdi, and maybe it was. Probably it was. Or maybe it was a mosque with a sign inside and a bunch of men now running through it and a ladder in the rear courtyard, propped against a wall, that two men began to climb. Gietz fired. He watched the one on top tumble off the ladder and over the wall, dead without a doubt. He fired again. He watched the one midway up the rungs fall. He went over and nudged him with his foot to make sure he was dead and went on from there, back out onto the street and into more gunfire, in the next half hour losing count of how many times he and the other soldiers nearly died. There were grenades. There were mortars. A rocket-propelled grenade whooshed in, hit a Humvee, and set it on fire. The soldiers, each of whom carried at least 240 rounds of ammunition, fired so many rounds there was concern they would run out. They fired at doors, windows, roof lines. They fired at whatever shadows seemed to be firing at them. More soldiers, from other platoons, rushed in, and they began running out of ammunition, too.

“It was an insane night,” Taylor said.

The final tally: one soldier slightly injured and thirty-five Iraqis dead, including Gietz’s at least seven.

“The men were fired up. They were fired up,” Taylor said. “It was an infantryman’s dream: close and destroy the enemy.”

And maybe so. Maybe it was an infantryman’s dream.

But as Gietz said in his troubled voice as he thought of Sassman, Atch-ley, Johnson, Lancaster, and Campbell, and the fact that he and his soldiers had gone to Fedaliyah to capture two Iraqis and had ended up killing thirty-five: “It’s a thin line between what we’re calling acceptable and not acceptable. It’s a thin line. As a leader, you’re supposed to know when not to cross it. But how do you know? Does the army teach us how to control our emotions? Does the army teach us how to deal with a friend bleeding out in front of you?”