Authors: Charles W. Sasser
Guys like Sergeant Jeremy Miller, Specialist Joe Merchant, and Mayhem
had all served previous combat tours in Iraq. They thought they had done their share and would be discharged and allowed to go home. Stop-Loss extended them in the army and sent them back to Iraq one more time. It was harder on them in many ways than on first-timers. They had already survived one tour. Now, they had to survive another one. Double jeopardy.
One morning, Second Platoon prepared for a mission over toward JSB and the Russian power plant. Lieutenant Dudish issued the OpOrder before breakfast. The sun was up, it was a warm day for January, the flies were not biting, there had been no incidents the previous night, and everything appeared all quiet along the Euphrates. However, a murmur of discontent started over breakfast when somebody bitched about rubber eggs and refused to eat. Several other Joes tossed their plates in a gesture of solidarity that had nothing to do with Cookie Urbina and his kitchen. Eating or not eating, unlike the IEDs along Malibu, was something over which the soldiers had control.
Sergeants John Herne and Nate Brooks were in an intense discussion with Miller, Merchant, and a couple of other guys out where the trucks were lining up in front of 152 when Sergeant Montgomery exited the old barbershop with his rifle slung over one shoulder and carrying his nitch by its strap. Lieutenant Dudish was still inside taking care of a last-minute commo problem.
“They won't get in the trucks,” Sergeant Herne said, indicating Miller and the others.
Montgomery's drill sergeant hackles bristled. “What do you mean, they won't get in the trucks?”
“They say they're not going back out.”
Miller had been behaving edgy lately, nervous, chain-smoking, and not sleeping much. Montgomery got in his face. Miller was senior man of the “revolt” and therefore its leader.
“Get your ass in that truck,” Montgomery ordered.
“Sergeant, I'm tired of this shit,” Miller said. “We're getting hit all the time while we have to grin and bear it. We've all had enough. It feels like we're taking crazy pills. So I quit. I'm walking back to Yusufiyah and going home.”
He threw his rifle down, turned abruptly and started toward the compound gate that opened onto Malibu Road. An American soldier alone wouldn't make it three hundred meters before some sneaky asshole nailed him. Merchant and the others looked uncomfortable, but they remained in-place.
“Sergeant Miller, I'm giving you a direct order. Get back here now or face charges.”
Miller kept walking. It seemed he was desperate enough not to give a damn what happened to him.
“Sergeant Miller, this will land you in Leavenworth. You still have a chance to reconsider. Either way, I'm going to stop you before you get to the gate.”
The previous year, two soldiers from the 4
th
Infantry Division had hijacked an Iraqi and his personally owned vehicle and ordered him to drive them to Kuwait. They were stopped, given a summary court martial, and sentenced to serve long terms in the federal prison at Fort Leavenworth. It had been a big joke among the Joes all over Iraq.
Miller hesitated. Reluctantly, he turned around and came back.
That was his last day in The Triangle of Death. Company shipped him off to Brigade to see a shrink. Montgomery never learned what happened to him, whether he was punished for mutiny or whether he was diagnosed with PTSD and sent back to the States upon the recommendation of the Army Combat Stress Team.
The soldiers behind on Malibu Road laughed. Hell, PTSD for them was
normal.
The inability to suppress the insurgency in Iraq prompted President George W. Bush to revise the war's strategy. On 20 January 2007, he held a press conference to announce “the Surge.” Another 30,000 troops in five brigade combat teams would be infused into the nearly 140,000 already in-country. He named General David Petraeus to command the Multi-National Force.
Petraeus, along with his executive officer, Colonel Peter Mansoor, and General Ray Odierno, the new commanding general of Multi-National CorpsâIraq, had published Army Field Manual 3-24 the previous month outlining their new philosophy for counterinsurgency operations in Iraq. Although Petraeus was the primary architect of the new strategy, a number of combat military commanders had gradually come to realize that what they were doing was not working and was not going to work in a war unlike any ever fought by the United States. No one would get hurt if the Americans remained forted up in their major bases. Nothing would be accomplished, either.
Petraeus based his new approach upon Vietnam-era programs such as General Creighton Abrams' PROVN (Provincial Reconstruction of Vietnam) Report. Abrams advocated spreading U.S. platoons into villages and communities to work with local residents in “community policing” designed to pacify immediate regions while developing allegiances and collecting intelligence that would help the wider prosecution of the war. As Mansoor noted, “We needed infantry in patrol bases spread among the population. A military force must live with the people it would defend.”
In Petraeus' opinion, securing the population was the key to effective counterinsurgency. He penned a detailed explanation of his “clear-hold-build” philosophy that he circulated among all troops in the war zone.
“Improving [the] security of Iraq's population is the overriding objective of our strategy,” he wrote. “Accomplishing the mission requires carrying out complex military operations and convincing the Iraqi people that we will not just âclear' their neighborhoods of enemy, we will also stay and help âhold' the neighborhoods so that the âbuild' phase can go forward.”
Rather than undertaking large sweeps, small units would push out into communities to establish security stations and combat outposts that allowed them to live and fight among the population. Determined to minimize harm to civilians, he asked that commanders consider one simple question before they approved any operation: Would it take more bad guys off the streets than it created by the way it was conducted?
At the same time, the Surge called for pounding hell out of the enemy.
“The reality is that there is a hard-core minority who cannot be won over by any reasonable effort; they can only be incapacitated,” Petraeus noted. “We have a pretty clear message. If you shoot at us, we will do our damnedest to kill you . . . and if you live in a neighborhood and you know there are bad people and you don't want Americans to return fire, endangering your families, you need to turn in the bad guys . . . It's great to be nice, but we've found that if you let up for one second against the bad guys, they're right back at your throats.”
The larger point of the Surge was to create a breathing space in the violence during which political reconstruction and rebuilding efforts could take place.
The Surge validated operations already being conducted by Colonel Mike Kershaw and his battalion commanders like Lieutenant Colonel Mike Infanti in The Triangle of Death. It also provided a common blueprint for the conduct of the war rather than leaving it to the discretion of individual commanders. Everyone would now be working together toward a common goal.
It would have been easy for Petraeus to say this is how you're going to fight, this is what you're going to do, then step back out of the picture and let the outfits root hog or die. That was not what he did. Not only were more troops sent into battle, but he also spread them out and got the entire
country to fighting. He made sure BCTs had everything they needed to fight with.
Whereas 4
th
Battalion had previously been chronically short of certain supplies, it never lacked for wire, ammo, food, water, or anything else from then on. Infanti asked for hand-cranked washing machines so his soldiers could wash their uniforms. He got them.
Iraq's year of torment began to change with the Surge. Maybe Colonel Infanti hadn't reached that turning point of his yet. But he thought he could see it just around the bend.
Winter in Iraq arrived late that year and departed early. With a laugh, the jolly big workhorse of First Platoon, Joe Anzak, called it “The Winter of Our Discontent.” Most of the rains were over for the year. Biting flies were back again in force. Foliage along the fertile Euphrates looked fresher and greener in the spring sunshine. Temperatures were reaching triple digits by the end of March, and people were once more taking to their open roofs to sleep. Even with the war, the normal cycle of life in the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley continued the way it had since the beginning of time in the Garden of Eden.
The Joes on Malibu Road thought they detected some decrease in violence after the start of General Petraeus' Surge. Their outfits seemed as chronically undermanned as ever, what with only twenty or so men available to a platoon at any one time when there should have been thirty or more. But they kept hearing about an infusion of new brigades, none of which, as far as they knew, had reached The Triangle of Death. And they kept hearing about how they were winning, and how more and more of the Iraqi police, military, and political classes were stepping up to the plate to take a swing at the insurgents. There weren't any home runs yet, but the soldiers were more optimistic when Colonel Infanti assured them they were reaching a turning point.
Life in wartime, as the soldiers of Delta Company were constantly rediscovering, was full of irony and grim humor. Often, however, irony wasn't recognized until long after its introduction.
Lieutenant Morgan Springlace relieved Lieutenant Vargo as platoon leader of First Platoon. Young officers were rotated in and out of combat to give them command experience. Whether true or not, rumor had it that Springlace was from an Old Blood military family and that he was a
top graduate of the West Point Military Academy. He started out strict, but then relaxed under the rigors of war's reality.
One afternoon, First Platoon set out to check reports of suspicious activity near the old Russian power plant. Halfway there, Lieutenant Springlace received a radio message that Joe Anzak was needed at Company HQ immediately. It sounded urgent. Generally that meant some kind of crisis in a soldier's family. Captain Gilbreath ordered Second Platoon to take over the mission while First returned to Inchon.
Captain Gilbreath and Brown Dog met the platoon. Anzak was frantic with worry.
“Calm down, son,” Gilbreath said. “Everything's okay. Just call your dad right away. He thinks you're dead.”
It seemed that messages on the MySpace website appeared that morning stating that PFC Joe Anzak had been killed in battle. Anzak's hometown high school, South High in Torrence, California, a Los Angeles suburb, picked up on it and posted Anzak's obituary outside on the school's marquee:
IN LOVING MEMORY, JOSEPH ANZAK, CLASS OF
2005.
Hearing of it, Joseph Anzak Senior contacted the Red Cross, who cut through red tape and military channels to connect him to Delta 4/31
st
in Iraq. Even though Captain Gilbreath assured him that his son was very much alive and well, and that the family would have been notified first in the event of bad news, the distraught father refused to believe him until he spoke directly to his son.
“Dad. It's me. Joe.”
“Is that really you, son? Are you sure you're okay? There's a big sign at school that says you were . . .”
“Yeah, Dad. Everything's cool.”
“We . . . We were so afraid we would never see you again.”
Anzak batted back tears. It took him a few minutes to regain his usual composure after he got off the satellite phone with his father.
“Reports of my death have been highly exaggerated,” he finally joked.
Specialist Chris Murphy had known Anzak since Delta Company stood up at Fort Drum and Anzak reported to the company for deployment.
He didn't think cracks about dying were funny. Sergeant Messer's nightmares had been premonitions of things to come. He shuddered. Who knew but what this wouldn't turn out to be another premonition of sorts?
The army had been good to SFC James C. Connell. Born in Lake City, Tennessee, he enlisted in the army in 1989 and since then had been to forty-two different states in the U.S. and thirteen different countries around the world. His son Nick once asked him why he stayed in the army.
“It's always what I wanted to doâso no one else has to do it.”
At first after CSM Alex Jimenez gave him a platoon, Connell seemed happy to be back in the field with Delta Company and his “boys” in First Platoon. That was where he belonged, in the middle of the action where he really contributed to the American effort rather than riding out the war in a relatively safe zone behind a desk. It was his first combat leadership assignment. He remained a contradictionâa former Ranger running a rifle platoon, carrying weapons, and at the same time carrying a heart full of compassion for the Iraqi people and love for the Iraqi children.
“I have kids,” he explained. “But for the grace of God they might have been born in a place like this. The children are innocent of what happened here. We have to give them a chance at a better life.”
For some of the soldiers in First Platoon, he provided the only true father figure they had ever known. Byron Fouty sought him out frequently for advice and reassurance, as he might have from a real father. Connell was never too busy to sit down with a soldier and talk out a home problem or other concern. He was always
there
for them. Often, even in the middle of his sleep time, he would get up to take a hot cup of coffee or a sandwich to a Joe on roof guard or crater watch. For reasons he never explained, his friends and relatives back home had nicknamed him “Tiger.” To First Platoon, he became known as Daddy Connell.
A few weeks after he was transferred to First Platoon, an IED blew up underneath his vehicle, puncturing the floorboard and salting his leg with
shrapnel. It wasn't much of an injury. Doc Michael Morse, the platoon medic, patched him up. He recovered almost literally over a cup of coffee.