BAQUBAH, Iraq — As darkness fell and mortar rounds thudded in the distance, the soldiers of Attack Company’s 3rd Platoon fired up a barbecue, mixed some marinade in a cut-off water bottle and slathered it on pork ribs with a paint brush.
Spc. Brant Fechter leaped on top of a concrete barrier with an acoustic guitar, teetered wildly, steadied himself and belted out, “I’m craaaaa-zy with a capital K.”
His buddies laughed as they cooked by the light of their headlamps.
“That’s the second-funniest thing I’ve seen this deployment,” said Sgt. 1st Class Corey Oliver, the platoon sergeant, setting off a spirited debate on what had been the funniest.
As the soldiers of the 5th Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment “Regulars” started dismantling their fighting vehicles and turning in their ammunition after 15 months in Iraq, suddenly there was time to start taking it all in. Thoughts turned to wives and girlfriends, whether to buy a house or a boat, that first cold beer, and friends who wouldn’t be there to savor it with them.
“At least we made it alive,” Staff Sgt. Mark Grover said quietly into his Dr Pepper. For months, they were the strike force of the troop buildup, going in where the violence was at its worst, clearing up, moving on. Every place they went, they were told it was the worst, but it never seemed to be that bad when their armored Stryker vehicles lumbered in with their menacing canons, antitank missiles and heavy machine guns.
The challenge of Baqubah
Until they reached Baqubah, the city that Sunni Arab insurgents had named the capital of their Islamic caliphate.
On the battalion’s first run through the city, they were pounded at every turn with automatic-weapons fire, rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs. By the end of the day, one soldier was dead, 12 were wounded and two vehicles had been destroyed.
“That kind of overwhelming show, we had never seen before,” Oliver said. “So we pulled back, took a deep breath and realized, yeah, this AO (area of operation) really is that bad.”
By the time the Regulars left Iraq in September, 21 of their roughly 300 soldiers had been killed. About 50 were so badly injured that they never returned to the fight.
Their 3,700-strong 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, based at Fort Lewis, lost 48 soldiers in all, and nearly 650 were injured.
“That’s a pretty steep price to pay,” Col. Steve Townsend, the brigade commander, said as soldiers packed up his plywood headquarters at a sun-baked base called Warhorse, on the northwest outskirts of Baqubah. “I’d like to think it’s been worth it. We’ll see. I think the jury’s out on that.”
Spc. Ryan Muessig sat stiffly in the back of a Stryker, convinced he was about to die.
The vehicle lumbered along darkened country roads before coming to a grinding halt on the edge of a sleeping suburb on the west side of Baqubah. As the back hatch lowered, he adjusted his night-vision goggles, grabbed his rifle and assault pack and followed the squad into the night.
Bad luck at war
Muessig, a soft-spoken 25-year-old whose persistent pessimism and dark good looks remind his fellow soldiers of the actor John Cusack, comes from what he describes as a long line of bad luck in the military. His great-grandfather fought on the German side in World War I. His grandfather had three ships sink under him in World War II. And his father was wounded repeatedly before he was sent home from Vietnam.
Muessig grew up in Washington, Calif., a small town in the Sierra Nevadas, population about 300. He joined the Army straight out of high school, hoping it would help him figure out what he wanted to do in life. But his first tour in Iraq convinced him that he was not cut out for the military.
He quit with no idea of how to make a living and ended up back in the Army in 2006. Within three months, he was on a plane to Iraq.
“I had this romantic vision of going to war that just doesn’t exist anymore, not in this kind of war,” he said.
In the movies, he said, there was always a “band of brothers” going after the enemy with honor and glory. But in Iraq, it felt like the enemy was always one step ahead, melting away before a major assault, only to strike back with even greater fury.
Arrival in Kuwait
The brigade touched down in Kuwait in June 2006, as the temperatures started to climb from hot to furnace level. After a few weeks’ training, they deployed to Mosul, Iraq’s northern provincial capital where many of them had been based in 2003-04.
Shortly after they had left, the ancient citadel had been overrun by Sunni Arab militants and the entire Iraqi security force had melted away. When they returned, it was still plagued with violence, but Iraqi government officials were back in control, two Iraqi army divisions had been formed and about 18,000 police officers recruited.
For many of the U.S. soldiers, Mosul was the honeymoon period. They lived at a base near the airport, with Internet access and telephones, a good gym and a chow hall that served up stir fries and Baskin-Robbins ice cream with all the toppings.
The base was a short commute from the city, where they spent most of their time working to improve the Iraqi security forces. Before they left, they had the satisfaction of seeing the results of their labors: When militants launched a major attack on a U.S. base, it was the Iraqi policemen and soldiers who repelled them. U.S. forces evacuated the casualties and helped clear the area after the fight.
But the honeymoon was brief. The soldiers of the 3rd Platoon had barely finished building a deck outside their sleeping quarters when the battalion was told to prepare to move.
On Thanksgiving Day, Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, then the No. 2 commander in Iraq, dropped by Mosul and chatted with the soldiers. For the young men of Attack Company, sitting on their Strykers eating take-away plates of turkey and pumpkin pie, it was a chance to ask some questions about their next assignment: Baghdad.
Policing Baghdad
What would they be doing, one soldier wanted to know. More or less what they were doing that day, he told them: being his quick response force, but this time in a city of about 7 million in the throes of civil war.
In which part of Baghdad would they operate, another asked. Chiarelli looked his questioner squarely in the eye and said: all of it.
There was a pause. This was a bigger job than they had anticipated.
As Chiarelli had promised, the Stryker battalions became the firemen of a “mini-surge” that began in Baghdad in December, before President Bush ordered five additional brigades and support elements totaling nearly 30,000 troops into Iraq.
For the last two years, the U.S. strategy in Iraq had been to train Iraqi soldiers and police to quickly take over security responsibility, while American soldiers pulled back to their bases as much as possible. But in Baghdad, the Shiite-dominated security forces became part of the problem, providing cover for and sometimes participating in sectarian death squads targeting the Sunni Arab minority.
By late 2006, it was clear that the U.S. strategy wasn’t working. The Stryker battalions became the first wave in a new approach, which commanders called “clear, hold and build.”
Their job was to swarm the neighborhoods on Baghdad’s sectarian fault lines and clear out the weapons and fighters for the U.S. and Iraqi forces who would come in behind them to maintain security, restore services and encourage small businesses to return.
It was the kind of mission the Stryker brigades were born to do, Townsend said.
The Regulars were constantly in demand, rarely spending more than a week at a time at their base in Taji, just north of the capital. Shaab, New Baghdad, Adhamiya, Kadhimiya, Dora — the neighborhoods soon started to blur.
Searches and more searches
It was exciting at first, but the luster of the offensive soon started to wear off. Searching homes became its own mind-numbing “Groundhog Day.” And until the additional brigades started arriving, there often were insufficient forces to hold the areas they had cleared.
“We’d go and clear, nobody would come in behind us, and it would go back to the way it was,” said Lt. Col. Bruce Antonia, the battalion commander. “So a week’s worth of hard work basically down the drain.”
“We thought we were untouchable,” Spc. Bryant Holloway said.
The platoon had been hit by roadside bombs, car bombs and suicide bombers. A particularly lethal device, known as an explosively formed penetrator, had pierced Holloway’s truck in Baghdad, and he escaped with a fractured foot.
Holloway, a 20-year-old gunner with a quick smile and easygoing way, used to worry about keeping up with the latest fashions and being able to buy the best cars, but he says Iraq taught him to appreciate simpler things. Showers, for instance.
His friends never thought of him as the marrying type, but he spent his last few weeks in Iraq shopping online for an engagement ring for his girlfriend and working out the perfect proposal.
“I’m pretty sure she is going to say yes … and I’m scared as hell,” he said, beaming. “I just want her to have everything she wants. I don’t want to have to say no to her.”
In March, the command decided to dispatch Antonia’s battalion to neighboring Diyala province, where U.S. forces had been battling for months to contain a raging Sunni insurgency reinforced by fighters fleeing the crackdown in Baghdad.
It was clear from that first day that this was a bigger problem than one battalion could fix, Antonia said. But the priority was Baghdad, and one battalion was all that could be spared at the time.
U.S. commanders acknowledge that Diyala’s capital, Baqubah, like Baghdad, had suffered the effects of handing too much responsibility to woefully unprepared, Shiite-dominated security forces with sectarian agendas. The result was to drive the largely Sunni population into the arms of insurgents, who promised to protect them.
Islamic State of Iraq
By the time Antonia’s battalion arrived, a collection of Sunni militant groups fighting under the banner of the Islamic State of Iraq was entrenched in much of the city.
Working with the brigade responsible for Diyala, a region dotted with orchards and palm groves stretching between Baghdad and the Iranian border, the battalion decided to tackle the city one neighborhood at a time. They began in Buhriz, on Baqubah’s southeastern outskirts, where members of the most notorious insurgent group, al-Qaida in Iraq, had overrun a police station and hoisted their black flag.
There were fierce clashes. But faced with a battalion-sized assault, most of the insurgents retreated to Baqubah’s west side, leaving the soldiers to do the same methodical, house-by-house searches they had done in Baghdad.
Winning the trust of a fearful population that had seen U.S. forces come and go was slow going at first, Antonia said. But when it became clear that the troops weren’t leaving this time, some of the residents started pointing out where the bombs and weapons cachets were hidden, he said.
The battalion replicated the strategy in Tahrir, just north of Buhriz. There were pushes into Old Baqubah, the provincial capital’s commercial and political hub. But this was strategic ground for the insurgents, and they put up a much tougher fight.
Every day, the soldiers drove through a gantlet of bombs and automatic-weapons fire. Strykers were destroyed, houses blew up as they were searched, and the casualty toll climbed. But still the 3rd Platoon had no fatalities.
On May 6, members of 3rd Platoon were visiting an Iraqi police station in Old Baqubah when they received word that men had been spotted planting a bomb in a nearby road. The soldiers piled into their Strykers and took off.
Their route took them down a notorious stretch of road, dubbed Trash Alley for the heaping piles of garbage that could easily conceal explosives.
Staff Sgt. Jose Tejada was standing in one of the top hatches of his truck when a huge bomb buried in the sewage system exploded and trash rained down on him.
“I thought it was us that was hit,” he said.
When Tejada turned around, he couldn’t believe what he saw: the hulking Stryker of friend Sgt. Vincenzo Romeo had flipped over. All that was left was a twisted heap of metal, wrapped in thick smoke. The remains of those inside were scattered in all directions.
“As we dismounted, I saw a leg by the ramp, a whole leg,” he said, his voice trailing away.
Just then, gunshots rang out from a mosque across the street and a house on the other side of a field.
Tejada, Staff Sgt. William Rose and the platoon leader, Capt. Eric Williams, fought back from the buildings they had occupied with their men to provide cover for Oliver and Staff Sgt. David Plush, who were leading the recovery efforts.
“I didn’t care if I got shot, I just wanted to fight and fight and fight until I had either killed everybody or got killed,” Tejada said. The soldiers later found the bodies of three insurgents wearing flak vests inside the mosque.
Back at Warhorse, word spread quickly. A small crowd had gathered at the tents when the platoon returned with their friends’ remains in body bags.
“They were crying and hugging one another, some just shaking their heads,” said Capt. Benjamin Hines, the battalion chaplain. “The atmosphere in the tent was very, very somber because there were now six cots that were empty.”
Martin sat hunched over on a camp stool, sucking on a cigarette.
For most of the deployment, the 24-year-old medic from Nashville, Tenn., was the court jester of the platoon, always ready with a quick comeback and irreverent aside intended to shock.
But as he tried to pick his way through the jumble of conflicting emotions that built up over 15 months in Iraq, he became deadly serious.
Martin joined the Army 3½ years ago hoping to make a difference.
“I came here feeling I could do great things. Not just bring all my guys home… but do something for people,” he said. “I failed.”
He believes, fervently, that his unit made a difference in Baqubah. But he is disillusioned with the political leaders who sent them to Iraq.
“They have made some companies into Fortune 500 companies,” he said. “But otherwise, we have just put a lot of flags on coffins for what will inevitably be nothing but a giant mess.”
The one person who still inspires him is his girlfriend, who volunteers at an orphanage in Honduras.
“She is one of the last great people on Earth trying to do something to help,” he said, softening. “She wants to go to Africa next, and I want to go with her… if she’ll have me.”
After May 6, many in 3rd Platoon said they lost faith in everything they were doing except trying to keep one another alive.
After months of pressing his superiors about Baqubah, Townsend was given the order to move most of the rest of his brigade there in June. With the additional units, the Strykers had the combat power to go after the insurgents’ stronghold on the west side of the city.
Before dawn on June 19, columns of Strykers rolled out of Warhorse and disgorged thousands of soldiers into three neighborhoods: Khatoon, Muffrek and Mujema. Tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles secured the perimeters as warplanes and attack helicopters unleashed thundering airstrikes.
Unlike previous operations, the soldiers moved in on foot, skirting canals and hauling themselves over garden walls to avoid the roads where bombs and snipers lurked. It was backbreaking work. Between their body armor, weapons, ammunition, food and water, each soldier was hauling up to 150 pounds. Spc. Ralph Willsey, a radio operator, said he didn’t weigh much more than that himself.
During the day, the mercury climbed to 120 degrees. They slept in people’s homes, never staying more than a few days in one place.
“Oh God, wake me up when the war is over,” said Grover, a jovial squad leader with an ace of hearts tucked into his helmet strap, as he dropped to the floor while a family was questioned one afternoon in Khatoon and ripped open his flak vest to get some air.
Capt. Matthew James’ pride and joy is a neon pink fountain. It stands in a neatly paved circle in the middle of Old Baqubah, across the street from a blown-up car and a short walk from Trash Alley.
Attack Company’s gruff new commander smiles as he thumbs through photographs of children splashing in its water on one of the rare days that there was electricity to power the pump, and of the bustling shops that have opened around it. Hundreds of Sunni militants once allied with al-Qaida in Iraq now help the U.S. and Iraqi security forces protect the circle and other parts of the city as “Baqubah Guardians.”
An experienced commander, James had already led two companies when Antonia tapped him to replace Capt. Hubert Parsons, who was seriously injured in a bombing four days after the six soldiers died. There was no time for ceremony. James was handed the company flag at the rehearsal for an operation he commanded the following day.
Restoring the confidence of the shattered company was his “toughest leadership challenge by far,” he said.
Seeing the changes in the city helped his soldiers understand why they were there, he said. But he wonders whether they will hold. At his last meeting with the Baqubah Guardians, he made a point of collecting e-mail addresses.
“I want to know, from their perspective, how things look a few years down the line,” he said. “All those guys that we lost, I want to know if it will be worth it.”
Until the men of 3rd Platoon set foot on American soil, it was hard to believe that it was over. Their tour had already been extended once, and Tejada for one was convinced it would happen again. Others joked bleakly that their plane would probably hit a bomb on the runway as it took off from Iraq.
But when the soldiers finally touched down in Washington, they were swept up in a whirlwind.
“Everything went very fast,” Oliver, the platoon sergeant, wrote in an e-mail. “The news guys took video of us getting off the plane. … The return ceremony was at a gym by our barracks. We lined up down the walkway and marched in. Lots of signs and people inside and out. Most of the wounded guys were there. A very quick speech. And we were dismissed. Very loud event.”
Before many of them were tough career and family decisions, the challenge of fitting back into domestic routines that no longer felt familiar, and of dealing with the grief and anger they could not afford to confront in Iraq. But for a moment, at least, they could forget all that.
“Also had a very stereotypical girl-finding-her-guy moment, while we were in formation outside,” Oliver wrote. “They hugged and kissed and all the guys yelled.”
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