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.
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 4th 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.