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 10th Mountain Division only weeks before the 2nd 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.”