This is
an impactful book that is astounding in its darkness and gut-wrenching in its
writing. Frederick takes the reader through the yearlong deployment of one Army
platoon in Iraq, south of Baghdad, where almost everything goes wrong. It is a
profoundly disturbing book that makes the reader question a lot about the Iraq War
and what it means to be a good leader. There are countless shows of good and
bad leadership in the book, though they are mostly bad. The book culminates in
a horrific war crime: the murder of an entire Iraqi family, the rape of the
14-year-old daughter, and the burning of her body. It is a book about a descent
into evil.
Frederick
starts by giving us some background on the importance of the south Baghdad
region and what had been going on in the Iraq war in the leadup to deployment
of the 1st platoon of Bravo Company of the 101st Airborne’s
2nd Brigade. He talks about how Jerry Bremer, head of the Coalition
Provisional Authority fired all party members from government and dissolved the
entire Iraqi military and national police force. These moves crippled Iraq, which
would have been good if the strategic goal was the destruction of Iraq. However,
the goal of the Bush administration was to rebuild, and this destruction early
on made construction later on all the more difficult. While the 100,000 men
that had been sent to Iraq were sufficient to overthrow the government and win
the invasion, they were not enough to hold the country, but when General Eric
Shinseki requested more troops, he was publicly criticized. American generals
did not request more troops for a long time until around 2006, and they would
eventually get 30,000 more under General Patreus.
A critical
phenomenon of the War on Terror was that the war attracted radicals to it. For
example, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was Jordanian, not Iraqi, but in 2003 he joined
forces with Al-Qaeda to set up Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and fight the United
States. While he would die in 2006, AQI would eventually develop into ISIS, as
thousands of foreign fighters had flocked to Iraq and later Syria to join in
what they saw as holy wars. Among the American ranks, there were soldiers who
had joined because they also saw it as a holy war and they wanted to kill Muslims.
Private Steven Green, who was involved in the infamous quadruple homicide and
rape in March 2006 was one of those people.
The
soldiers in Iraq were in a very awkward situation. The book shows us how the
majority of the NCOs and commissioned officers just wanted to get all their
guys out alive. While many wanted to take on the enemy tactically, that was
generally because the Army was more comfortable in gunfights than in patrols
that would lead to IEDs exploding out of nowhere. At a fundamental level, by
the end of a deployment, nobody was hoping for a better future for Iraq, they
just wanted to go home to their families. It shows that soldiers need a good
reason to fight a war and that lack of a reason caused huge problems in Iraq.
The
leadership within the 2nd battalion was not good. It was dominated
by conflict, especially due to Lieutenant Colonel Kunk, who was constantly
screaming and humiliating his subordinates. It was Kunk who demanded that they
set up several checkpoints along a road that overextended the 1st
platoon severely, as each checkpoint was chronically undermanned and a prime
target for attack. He also demanded that the soldiers constantly look for IEDs
on foot, which was problematic because, while a soldier on foot could spot an
IED better than one in a vehicle, he often didn’t see it until it was too late.
Private Justin Watt is quoted as saying, “Take something you do every day, like
go to the mailbox. Every day, you go to the mailbox. Now say that every time
you go to the mailbox, there was, say, a 25 percent chance that the mailbox was
going to blow up in your face. The explosion might not be big enough to kill
you. But it could be. You just don’t know. Either way, you do know that there
was a one-in-four chance that it was going to blow right the fuck up in your
face. But you have to go to the mailbox. There is no way you cannot go to the
mailbox. So, I ask you: How many times do you think you could go to the mailbox
before you started going crazy?” The pressure of living like this must have
been horrible. The author stops to make us think about how different it must
have been to fight in Iraq rather than in Korea or WWII, as in Iraq, the intensity
of fighting was much lower, but it had soldiers in the line of fire all the time.
In previous, more conventional wars, soldiers did not stay at the front lines
for more than a few months and then they were allowed to withdraw. In Iraq, the
men of Bravo company spent their entire eleven months in country in the porous “front
lines.”
All
through the book, we see pressure mounting on the heads of the soldiers and
driving them to depression, anger, and hatred. With none is it worse than
Private Steven Green, who was a virulent and hateful racist before he ever
joined the Army. Something incredibly disappointing is that for all the red
flags he showed in psychiatric counseling sessions, he was never marked as
someone at risk to do something horrible as he should have been. Obviously, it
is easier to see this in retrospect, but there were many red flags. In the end,
Green was given life in prison for his part in the murders and rape and the
other participants were given 90-100 years in prison.
This
book is very good but definitely heavy to read. It is primarily a reflection on
war and why certain men crack and commit horrible acts of evil while others
bear it, perhaps harming only themselves. It is an incredibly good look at what
it was like to be in Iraq for a year and it is a truly terrible thing to read
about. Living in the checkpoints and Forward Operating Bases in the “Triangle
of Death” was an experience that destroyed people psychologically even if they
could survive it physically.
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