Black Knights, Dark Days

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  “A gripping, astonishing insider’s account of the April 4, 2004, ambush of a First Cavalry Platoon in Sadr City that changed the course of the Iraq War. With great candor and skill, Matt Fisk interweaves the chaos and adrenaline of modern combat with the continuing battles with PTSD at home. An intense, vivid, deeply personal portrait of men at war that is up there with the very best books of the genre.” —Mikko Alanne, screenwriter and producer, The Long Road Home, The 33

  “Matt Fisk’s Black Knights, Dark Days hits the reader square in the gut from the first line—“I’ve just killed a child, and I’m waiting for my conscience to tell me it’s a bad thing”—and doesn’t let up. It is a rare first-hand look at the 2004 Black Sunday ambush in Sadar City from a grunt with Shakespearian sensibilities. A beautifully told story of sacrifice and loss, devotion and redemption, this book should be required reading for veterans and civilians alike.” —Erin Celello, Learning to Stay

  Black Knights, Dark Days

  The True Story of Sadr City’s Black Sunday

  J. Matthew Fisk

  This book is dedicated to the men and women of Task Force Lancer, Operation Iraqi Freedom II, who stood by each other in the darkest of days; to the brave warriors from Alpha and Charlie companies who charged to our rescue in unarmored trucks, without hesitation or regard for their own safety; and to Eddie Chen, Ray Arsiaga, Ahmed Cason, Israel Garza, Stephen Hiller, Forest Jostes and Casey Shehan.

  “Beloved and pleasant in their life, and in their death they were not parted. They were swifter than eagles. They were stronger than lions.” 2 Samuel 1:23

  Prologue

  It’s all there in black and white. I sit numbly reading the Newsweek article that explains why I have another human being’s blood on my boots. They even managed to label the battle. Black Sunday the writer called it. I suppose I should have seen this coming. It’s July 2004, a hot month in Iraq, and for weeks the reporters have been crawling all over each other to get out to Forward Operating Base War Eagle. We would see them sitting in our brand new Dining Facility (DFAC) dressed in the reporter uniform of khaki cargo pants, light-color t-shirt, and blue flak vest. If they were feeling particularly daring, they would swap the flak jacket for a tan cargo vest.

  They were here to fish. Their questions were meant to hook a trophy Bush Bass, Cheney Trout or Walleyed Rumsfeld. Our commanders had prepared us for their arrival by issuing daily talking points. These points all focused on the same theme: we are here to win the hearts and minds of the good people of Sadr City. After what happened on the 4th of April, it was all any of us could do to say that without any sense of irony.

  I wondered, as I sat newly returned from three days in hostile territory, if any of the intrepid correspondents actually cared what was really going on. They were so hell-bent on nailing the administration to the wall that the larger picture escaped them.

  “Bush only invaded Iraq for the oil—gasp!—and is using these poor, dumb grunts as pawns in his evil, neo-colonialist bid to spread America’s influence.” Well, no shit. Every Soldier knows that we are the final extension of diplomacy, and we like it. Last I checked, not a single one of my brothers-in-arms had been drafted.

  “Cheney started a corporation that is making untold millions in profit—double gasp!—from the blood of American Soldiers!” Who cares? Did they honestly think that we gave a crap about anything once we left the wire other than watching out for the man to our left and right?

  “That creep Rumsfeld sent the military into harm’s way without the proper equipment to keep them safe”—swoon! Don’t underestimate an American Soldier’s ability to thrive on adversity. Every time America defeats her enemies, the first thing that short-sighted politicians do is heed the media outcry to reduce the size and funding of the military. Then they all want to sound outraged when America once again has to stand against bullies—emboldened by our relaxed posture—without the latest and greatest gear.

  No, none of this concerned the average soldier. The story that the reporters missed in their frenzy to play political gotcha was that we understood these things, either tacitly or unconsciously, and did our job anyway. Political corruption and greed, is that really news? What about courage in the face of overwhelming odds? What about loyalty and devotion that transcends race and skin color? What about mourning the tragic loss of young warriors who stepped from this mortal coil with honor?

  As my eyes scanned the glossy magazine pages, I had an epiphany: Someone was going to write a book about Black Sunday. One of these louts, desperate to be the next Mark Bowden, would chronicle our deeds in order to score cheap political points. Even as this revelation made me furious, I accepted the fact with resignation. Of course they would; it was just the way things were done.

  Someone had to get it right. Someone who had actually pulled a trigger should tell this tale. Why not me? I grabbed my small tape recorder and went looking for someone to interview. I would do my best to get it right. For Eddie.

  The Question

  I’ve just killed a child, and I’m waiting for my conscience to tell me that it was a bad thing. Not just one child but three all at once, gone before my eyes could register that a cloud of red mist floats where three little heads used to be. Didn’t I used to be a teacher? Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s true. I taught Spanish to at-risk teenagers. Sure, they were a handful as only pubescent males can be when made to do something they didn’t want to do, but I can’t recall that I ever blew their heads off for it.

  Waiting. Not a peep from my soul, which probably means that I’ve killed that, too.

  I had talked with Sergeant Bellamy and a few other bored soldiers about this moment less than a week before. We lounged on our cots, young lions who had never tasted the kill, discussing what it would be like in the abstract manner of the ignorant. Jokes—gutter humor mostly—floated in the air as though we were passing around a joint in some gratuitous Vietnam War movie scene. Everyone was nervous about crossing the border from Kuwait to Iraq, yet no one would admit it.

  “Think you could do it, dude?” I’m as unsettled as the rest, the teacher recast in a post 9/11 mold as a warrior. It’s an identity that I’m trying to reconcile, my mind full of questions, speculations, myths about what it would be like to take another human’s life.

  “What?” Sergeant Bellamy is younger than me and looks it.

  “Waste a kid.” I can’t make my mouth say the word “kill.” Using the word ‘waste’ makes it seem as innocuous as throwing away a piece of scrap paper.

  “Don’t know.” He scowls as if the thought had been just birthed from his subconscious. “Hope I don’t have to.”

  The subject came up as we passed the time away watching Blackhawk Down. We don’t know war, not yet, so we grapple with the ineffable questions using the oracle of the day: war movies.

  “I’d do it in a heartbeat if they draw down on me,” declares one grunt with his nose in the latest copy of Swank magazine. I can’t tell if it’s bravado or calculated.

  “I couldn’t do it. No way,” said another. He was a big guy with a newborn baby. The parallels struck too close to home.

  Some guy from Boston was quick to chide him, “What? You sayin’ that some raghead sonofabitch tries to put a bullet in your head, and you’d just let him?”

  “Better that than having to live the rest of my life knowing I had killed a child.”

  More than a few untested warriors laughe
d and swore at him for being a pussy. I admired him for sticking with the conviction of his beliefs, even if I didn’t share his certainty.

  Still, I said nothing and mulled different scenarios over in my head. Killing a man didn’t seem out of the question. We shot man-shaped targets all of the time, ostensibly to get us used to the idea of putting the shape of a man into our sights. I wore a sharp knife that I had prepared myself to plunge into someone’s throat if need be. We had trained daily to use jujitsu both to detain and to kill. The mechanics of the deed were well known to all of us.

  But what would it be like? Again, my only yardstick was the Hollywood tome of wisdom compiled by philosophers like Kubrick and Spielberg. War movies portrayed soldiers who killed as full of deep regret and post-homicidal angst. Even cops who took part in a clean shooting routinely checked out of life and into the nearest bottle of booze. Assuming these cliché archetypes bore any resemblance to reality, was it a price I was willing to pay to survive?

  My answer came later that week during a routine patrol on my fourth day in Iraq. The proverbial Shiite hit the fan with hurricane force. Our platoon—four Humvees and 19 soldiers—was ambushed by a local militia, estimated at 10,000 strong. Within five minutes, two of our vehicles were disabled. The gunner on my vehicle was killed, shot through a gap in his body armor. His job fell to me, and I didn’t want it. Any glamour that my mind attached to combat flew out the window with Sergeant Chen’s soul.

  I popped up through the turret, expecting to die that moment as a fusillade of bullets struck the armored plate of our vehicle. I looked behind us. No one followed. We were alone.

  Left behind in the thickest part of the ambush, two of our vehicles could no longer move and the trail Humvee was trying to help them. Our mirrors had been shot out and no one could hear anything on the radio due to the deafening barrage of weapons—both ours and the enemy’s. When he realized that our comrades were still locked in combat, the platoon leader ordered his driver to turn around and drive back into the ambush to get them. The driver wasn’t happy about it. I wasn’t happy about it. We did it anyway.

  We were surrounded on both sides by three- and four-story buildings. Helplessness engulfed me as the enemy continued to pound our vehicle with unrelenting fire. Riddell drove so fast that I couldn’t see a target.

  Movement! A blur of motion caught my eye. I looked up to my right and glimpsed three small figures dressed in black. They huddled together on the roof of a four-story building. Children. Yellow-orange flame exploded from their midst. Muzzle flash.

  Now I would answer the question posed five days and a lifetime ago.

  This was wrong. Where had everything gone so wrong? I used to be a teacher. I love kids. Almost a year ago I was on a youth ranch in Arkansas. By day I taught Spanish in their on-site high school. At night, six of the children lived in my home. Sometimes I would play tag with kids. Sometimes we would play war. Bang, bang. I shot you. You’re dead.

  I put all three small figures within the iron, unforgiving circle of my front sight post. The gun roared. There was dust and there was blood.

  I continued to scan for targets as we raced to save what was left of our platoon, engaging anything that moved. Bullets snapped and whined past my head and careened off of the vehicle’s armor. I didn’t care. It no longer mattered. In dealing death, I had died. Blood was the price of life. It always is. There is no question.

  SO note by Weekes, Jennifer

  The chief complaint is: Memory loss, possible TBI.

  Patient reports difficulties with concentrating, memory loss, increasing irritability and possible TBI. Patient reports being in several IED explosions in 2004/2005 during his deployment. He recalls an incident in which a mortar round landed very close behind him. After the incident he reports feeling dizzy for 3 days, hearing loss, and difficulty walking. He reports that after the incident, he consulted with a medic and was given time to rest. Patient reports another incident in which a rock [hit] him in the back of his head. Patient reports that he now feels withdrawn, has difficulties with his sleep patterns (waking up 3-4 times per night), having nightmares once a week or sometimes monthly. Patient reports his plans to write a book. He expressed noticing worsening symptoms as he tries to recall incidents from the past. He stressed “I will write this book if it kills me.”

  Assessment: 1. ADJUSTMENT DISORDER

  ACT I: INNOCENCE

  IRAQ—2004

  The Iraqi man is tied to a chair with his legs stretched out in front of him and fastened to an iron bar. A soldier removes the unfortunate captive’s shoes as he pleads for mercy. The soldier begins to strike the bottom of the man’s feet with a bamboo baton. Fascinated, I never blink as the man whimpers in pain. I take a shallow sip from a soda can covered in Arabic writing. The scene cuts to an older Iraqi woman in a hijab, perhaps meant to be the prisoner’s mother. She is weeping as she speaks to a pair of sympathetic men and gestures with B-film quality to a picture of the captive hanging in her living room.

  With only a few shopping days to Christmas of 2004 I found myself, as I often did at two in the morning, watching Iraqi soap operas with mouth agape and mind 1,000 miles away. I could be watching one of a handful of British channels or even the Armed Forces Network, but I usually gravitated toward the Arabic networks after spending half an hour flipping aimlessly from one station to another. They are horrible, no matter which language you speak, and like watching a Special Olympics version of the running of the bulls. I lie to myself and say that I’m trying to sharpen my language skills. The truth is that I can’t sleep. Most of us can’t without pills or illicit alcohol. Sometimes I find Rollings or Puppet or Briones in the barracks TV room with the same expression on their face that I wear for such an occasion. We will sit together silently watching shows that put Telenovelas to shame with the magnitude of their schmaltz.

  But on that particular night in December, I sat alone contemplating the future. Sergeant First Class Swope had gathered us NCOs a few hours earlier for the evening huddle to pass command information. “You can put out to your soldiers that anybody who wants to become an officer,” he said, “can shoot for the slots they’re offering for an ROTC Green-to-Gold scholarship. You can sit there and attend college while still on active duty and get your butter bar.” I dutifully copied down the details in my green notebook without much thought.

  Later I thought plenty about it, even as my mind wrestled with the concept of a McDonald’s—McArabaya—commercial where the male Arab employees wore glowing white robes and desert head gear. When I first joined the Army in 1997, my recruiter noted my high ASVAB scores and college credits asking why I didn’t want to be an officer. I told him that it wasn’t for me. I wanted to be a Special Forces weapons expert. After I finished my first tour and volunteered to come back in after 9/11, the recruiter asked me again why I wasn’t applying for Officer Candidate School. Not my style, I said. I just wanted some payback. And it really didn’t seem to fit my personality. I came from humble means out of rural Arkansas and would never be the kind of guy comfortable around a West Point crowd. Plus, I didn’t think I could do it, that it was beyond my ability.

  But it’s now December 2004, and I’m different. That other guy, the eternal optimist and slayer of dragons, died in a godforsaken alley on the 4th of April. He was the one who wanted to experience battle, to see if he had what it takes. The guy who took his place is one scary son-of-a-motherless-goat. He’s the guy who, in the span of six months, has been on almost 200 missions outside of the wire. He has been shot at, shot, blown up, blown down and struck point-blank in the chest with a frozen chicken, among other indignities. He’s the guy who laughs too hard at body parts littering the street after a gun fight. I don’t recognize him when I catch his crazy eye in the mirror.

  Only three months before, during a particularly grim and extended defensive action, he was knocked unconscious by a mortar round that landed a few feet behind him. It was not jus
t a lucky round but had been directed there by a small child who had been sent in to scout their location. He hadn’t killed the child, though he wished after the fact that he had. The blast evaporated a small puppy that he had been feeding only minutes before. They picked him up and sent him back to base to recover for a few days. When he rejoined his team, he left behind the last remnants of humanity and mercy that he had been guarding like childhood keepsakes.

  Within minutes of assuming his post in the middle of hostile territory he was screaming at children who gathered below begging for schokolata. He began to shoot at the ground near them and was contemplating a center of mass shot when the company XO put a gentle hand on his shoulder. First Lieutenant Clay Spicer took five minutes to remind the young sergeant about who he was as an American and a human being. Five minutes and a calm tone of voice kept that young man from going to prison—or worse.

  Though I have come to rely on that guy when the fit hit the shan, he also worries me. He’s a guy I need to survive, a beast that enjoys his job perhaps a little too much. The X-O was right when he reminded me that other guy wasn’t me. However, if I stay in this job, I will always need that other guy in certain situations and in desperate times. He will accompany me on every deployment with the rest of my gear. I had no illusions back then that the insurgency would end as soon as our year-long tour was complete. We would be back, again and again, most likely facing off against the children whose parents we had dispatched on previous deployments. And every time, that other guy—that beast—would be rattling the bars of his cage, demanding to be let out to hunt.

  So I sit up late watching Iraqi soap operas and contemplating my options. Lieutenant Fisk? Captain Fisk? General Fisk? I laugh out loud at that. Why not? I could sell it to my wife as a bump in paygrade, more family income. I sell it to myself as a way to honor Sergeant Chen and First Lieutenant Aguero. I suppose it is a way to escape what I am becoming. While contemplating this career change I had peppered Lieutenant Aguero with endless questions about what officer life was like, having only a glimpse into their world that I suspected was less glamorous than the war movies made it out to be. I am correct-a-mundo. Aguero himself is dreading his next promotion which will take him farther away from the rank and file. All the really high-speed door kicking, lead slinging, snatch-and-grabbing hooah-hooah type stuff was done at the junior NCO level or below. Ascending higher in rank, he explained, took you farther away from the troops and farther away from combat, the two things which I enjoyed most about this profession. While our officers are unusually involved in combat, that was generally the exception to the rule which declared that if a Lieutenant or above is pulling the trigger, something has gone dreadfully wrong.