Authors: Charles W. Sasser
PFC Daniel W. Courneya was nineteen years old when he died. His stepfather, Army Specialist David Thompson, also serving in Iraq, flew home for the funeral. During the previous Thanksgiving/Christmas holidays, Courneya had been granted leave to come home to Vermontville, Michigan, where he married his longtime girlfriend Jennifer in a civil ceremony. They had planned to have a “real” wedding after he returned from Iraq.
Jennifer was a war bride and a war widow before she turned nineteen.
On 14 May, Maple Valley High School's public address system had announced Courneya's death and asked for a moment of silence throughout the school. Students put together a memorial of photographs, posters, and plaques surrounding a portrait of the 2005 graduate. The school's flag flew at half-mast until after his funeral.
“I always called him âmy bright eyes,' ” said his grandmother. “He was my hero.”
PFC Christopher E. Murphy was twenty-one. Memorial services were held in his school gymnasium at William Campbell High School near Lynchburg, Virginia, followed by a funeral ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. Mourners stood at attention under a blazing afternoon sun while Major General Michael Oates, commander of the 10
th
Mountain Division, presented a folded flag to Murphy's mother. She looked toward the sky while a bugler played “Taps,” wiping tears from her eyes with one hand and clutching the flag with the other.
“He was just one of those kids everyone enjoyed being around,” said James Rinella, his school's assistant principal. “A very hardworking kid, a very humble kid.”
Murphy was the most recent of 340 members of the military killed in Iraq to be buried at Arlington.
Sergeant Anthony J. Schober was twenty-three. He would never own the ranch he dreamed about. Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons and Nevada Congressman Dean Heller spoke at his service, held at the Vietnam War Memorial in Carson City. The local chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars vowed to erect a bench and a plaque bearing his name at the site.
Congressman Heller read quotes posted by readers on the message board of the Nevada
Appeal
newspaper.
“Rest easy, soldier . . .”
“You are a hero and will forever walk with heroes . . .”
“Anthony is not going to be forgotten . . .”
The congressman presented a flag that had flown over the nation's capitol to Schober's father Edward. “I believe someday you will be together again,” he said.
Sergeant First Class James D. Connell, forty, received a hero's welcome upon his return to his small east Tennessee hometown of Lake City, where he had spent his leave a few weeks ago. A motorcade met him at the airport and escorted him home for the last time. Community members lined the street. Men, women, and children displaying tiny American flags stood at silent attention. The motorcade paused in front of his parents' home for a moment of silence before proceeding to memorial ceremonies at the Air National Guard Base. The same motorcade escorted his body on to Arlington National Cemetery for burial.
“We don't want another soldier to come back like they did from Vietnam,” said Duane Romine, part of the escort for the Patriot Guard Riders. “We want them to come back with honor whether alive or deceased.”
“I'm proud of my dad,” said Connell's fourteen-year-old daughter Courtney, “because he didn't really fight for himself, he fought for his country.”
The operation to recover the DUSTWUN men grew so massive that the soldiers of Delta Company, who had a personal stake in the outcome, felt they were little more than very small cogs in a big machine. They seldom saw the Big Picture. What they saw instead were raids and patrols, the daily grind of jumping across ditches and wading through muck in the difficult terrain searching for clues.
Sammy Rhodes' heart leaped when he came across a shred of camouflage caught on a bush. Disappointment followed when it turned out to be from the uniform of an IA who had passed through previously.
Grim-faced troops drained a canal along the Euphrates after local villagers reported seeing body parts floating. Nothing.
Second Platoon soldiers dug for the missing soldiers' bodies along another stretch of river. Either their information was bad, or they weren't in the right place.
The search that initially centered around the Kharghouli area soon began to widen. Not a good sign. Night and day throughout The Triangle of Death, GIs operating on the best intelligence available launched scores of raids against the houses of potential witnesses and suspects, rounding up more than 250 people with suspected ties to the attack. Gradually, the effort began to pay off. It was like piecing together a complicated puzzle.
Acting on a tip from a Shiite elder, Major Bob Griggs, Lieutenant Colonel Infanti's operations officer, took a squad of Polar Bears into the unfriendly 109 Mosque on Malibu to snap mug shots of thirty-nine men there with their prayer rugs. One or two of them, the elder said, might have been involved. Local Iraqis helping in the case behind the scenes identified one of the pictures as a man named Al Jasma, whom they said might know the missing soldiers' whereabouts. The guy took off before
troops could arrest him. Raiders hit Al Jasma's house from then on every time they thought he might have slipped back into the AO.
Two apprehended suspects under harsh interrogation by Iraqi Army intelligence officers, who didn't always play by Geneva rules, confessed to having taken part in the attack. They said the insurgents split into two groups afterwards. The ringleader took the kidnapped soldiers with his band of men to turn them over to al-Qaeda in Iraq, whose leadership demanded live U.S. soldiers be turned over for use as hostages and bargaining chips.
U.S. forces stormed a storefront in Amiriyah, a Sunni stronghold with close tribal ties to Kharghouli, and captured nine more Iraqis suspected of some form of involvement in the attack. Under questioning, they confirmed information obtained by the IA intelligence officers. They believed one of the three captives was killed shortly after his capture, while the other two remained prisoner.
On May 18, six days after the incident, General David Petraeus gave a press conference. “Somebody has given us the names of all the guys that participated in it and told us how they did it. We have to verify it, but it sounds spot-on. We've had all kinds of tips down there. We just tragically haven't found any of the individuals. As of this morning, we thought there were at least two that were probably still alive. At one point of time there was a sense that one of them might have died, but again we just don't know.”
Not a day passed but that the men of Delta Company didn't have their missing friends on their minds and on the day's schedule. In spite of gains made in hunting down players, any trail that might have been left by Fouty, Jimenez, and Anzak grew colder day by day, leaving their platoon mates with faint hope that they were still alive.
“We're not going to stop what we're doing,” declared Colonel Mike Kershaw, 2
nd
BCT's commander. “We're not going to stop searching. We'll not leave any of our men behind.”
A sentiment the White House echoed. “I'm confident that the military is doing everything it can to find the missing soldiers,” President George W. Bush said during a press conference. “We're using all the intelligence
and all the troops we can to find them. It's a top priority of our people there in Iraq.”
Anzak and Jimenez, with their senses of irreverent humor and propensity for wisecracks, would undoubtedly have had a few witty comments to make had they known the President of The United States was talking about them.
Hey, Alex. You hear that? We are impo'tent.
Bad guys started disappearing off Malibu Road, fleeing to a better climate, when they discovered the Americans knew who they were. Malibu Road had never been so safe. At the same time, insurgents in the Baghdad enclave initiated a Surge of their own in response to beefed-up, more aggressive ops by American troops.
Jihadists disguised as Iraqi soldiers massacred fifteen men in a Kurdish Shiite village northeast of Baghdad. The next day, a Saturday, about fifty insurgents assaulted a U.S. FOB in the center of Baghdad, sparking a battle that left at least six militants dead. Later that same day, mortar shells rained down into the Green Zone, wounding one American soldier, when British Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived for talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
Two American soldiers were killed and nine wounded in separate ambushes and IED attacks in the capital, apparently to counter the continuing search for the captured soldiers of the 10
th
Mountain Division. Two Iraqi journalists working for ABC News were also slain as they drove home from work, bringing the toll of journalists killed in the war to more than one hundred.
Allahu Akbarâ
God is Great!
Videotapes usually made their way to Al Jazeera TV within a day or so after any incident in which insurgents scored what they considered a victory, especially if it entailed hostages who could be executed for the edification of the world. So far, however, the silence coming from Jihadists had been deafening, perhaps due to the fact that couriers bearing the tapes hadn't been able to slip through the cordon the Americans threw up around The Triangle. The only contact the insurgents attempted came via a brief message on a terrorist website.
It said the ambush and abductions were in retaliation for the rape and
murder of 15-year-old Abeer Hamza and the slaying of her parents and sister by rogue troops of the 101
st
Airborne in Mahmudiyah in March 2006.
“What you are doing in searching for your soldiers will lead to nothing but exhaustion and headaches,” the message warned. “Your soldiers are in our hands. If you want their safety, do not look for them.”
Unlike in previous wars, when hundreds of troops sometimes went missing from chaotic battlefields, only three U.S. soldiers were listed as missing in action in Iraq from the 1991 Gulf War through Operation
Iraqi Freedom
, up until the current DUSTWUN. The last U.S. soldier known to have been captured by the enemy was Sergeant Ahmed Qusai al-Taayie, an Iraqi-born GI from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who was snatched from the home of his Iraqi wife on 23 October 2006 while visiting her in Baghdad.
Sergeant Keith Maupin of Batavia, Ohio, was abducted on 9 April 2004 after insurgents ambushed a fuel convoy. Two months later, tapes on Al Jazeera showed a hooded man in U.S. ACUs being shot. Purportedly, it was Maupin, although no body had ever been recovered.
Maupin and al-Taayie remained listed as MIA, along with U.S. Navy pilot Michael Speicher, whose jet fighter was shot down during Operation
Desert Storm
sixteen years previously. The three soldiers from Delta Company had not yet formally been reclassified from DUSTWUN to MIA.
The round-the-clock hunt for the Americans continued despite warnings from the Islamic State of Iraq, now claiming responsibility for the abductions, that the search, if pursued, could end only with the soldiers being executed. No one really believed anything the U.S. did would affect the soldiers' fate one way or another. They were going to be publically executed sooner or laterâunless they were rescued first.
Nearly every day, Lieutenant Colonel Infanti and CSM Alex Jimenez went out into the field to check on progress. When night fell, the tall commander of 4/31
st
often could not sleep because of back pain and the weight of responsibility upon his shoulders. Lines of concern and pain etched into his rough countenance, he stood outside his shipping container and gazed up at the sky, as though seeking a brighter, more hopeful tomorrow.
On 23 May, eleven days after the ambush on Malibu Road, the first confirmed news of the missing men reached 4/31
st
headquarters.
An Iraqi farmer named Ali Abbas al-Fatlawi and some of his neighbors were looking for a lost goat on the outskirts of the little village of Musayyib a dozen miles or so south of FOB Inchon when they saw something large bobbing in the gentle current of the Euphrates River. Whatever it was had hung up in some reeds near the bank. Approaching it out of curiosity, they discovered the body of a big man clad in a U.S. military uniform.
Using shepherd's staffs, they pulled the partly decomposed corpse from the brown water. Two point-blank gunshot wounds punctured the face, with more gunshots visible in the left side of the abdomen. That the hands were not tied nor the eyes blindfolded, a common procedure found on executed men recovered in The Triangle, seemed to indicate that the man may have been fighting his captors when he had to be shot and tossed from a boat crossing the river. Al-Fatlawi notified the local Iraqi police.
That afternoon, Captain John Gilbreath and First Platoon leader Lieutenant Springlace drove to Brigade at Mahmudiyah. A Graves Registration officer escorted them to a small room where a body lay on a table. He unzipped the bag to reveal the decomposing remains of what had once been a muscular young man. Not enough of the face remained to be sure, but Springlace recognized the distinctive tattoo on the man's arm. He nodded, sighed deeply, and looked up.
“It's Joe Anzak,” he said. “Damn them all to hell.”
Something astonishing began to happen in the month following the DUST-WUN incident, a remarkable change that the Joes on Malibu Road found hard to explain. Sure, they had started to make progress in winning the people away from the homicidal maniacs in their midst, but nothing like the sudden acceleration that occurred now. Not a single IED had ruined anyone's day along the entire length of the road since 12 May.
One afternoon, Lieutenant John Dudish and Sergeant Ronnie Montgomery dashed out of the Company TOC at Inchon to where Second Platoon was catching a breather smoking 'n joking around their trucks in the yard. Second was acting as Company QRF for the week.