The Mission 
Sentimental Journey 
“I Think We Got Blown Up for Nothing”
Like an untold number of U.S. soldiers in Iraq, the brave young men of Bravo Troop were lab rats in a slipshod military experiment. Theirs is the story of everything that’s gone wrong in this great fiasco of a war.
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Orders came down: Switch gears. Warriors to goodwill ambassadors. Hearts and minds. In the nearby town of Al Muhawil, Bravo Troop erected a water treatment plant. They visited schools and, as if in a parade, flung candy from the turrets of their Humvees. In this improvised mission, less was more. They didn’t fire warning shots from the guard towers like the Mongolians had. The entire cavalry stayed at Camp Charlie during the December 2005 Iraq elections, so that the four U.S. senators who choppered in to visit a polling station at Al Hillah would see only the welcome image of Iraqi soldiers safeguarding their country. And on February 9, 2006, on the Muslim holy day of Ashura, Bravo Troop’s first platoon sat in their parked Humvees on the side of a road—weapons hidden, gunners crouched—and watched in astonishment as thousands upon thousands of chanting men garbed in black swelled through the street like a cloud of mosquitoes. These were radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, the same Shiite brigade that had fought U.S. troops in Najaf to a standstill in the summer of 2004 (and the same militia that would run roughshod over Baghdad in the ensuing months of 2006). The militiamen scowled at the Humvees. Inside, the two dozen Americans kept low. Their orders relating to al-Sadr’s thugs had been ambiguous: Observe, but do not engage unless necessary. The matter was out of their hands. They were thoroughly exposed, laughingly outnumbered. “Anyone who tells you they weren’t scared,” Ganser would later recall, “is full of shit.”
Al-Sadr’s forces passed by. They were there not to waylay Americans but, instead, to escort fellow Shia on their Ashura pilgrimage to Karbala. In one of the trucks sat a lanky, sharp-eyed 28-year-old scout named Michael Plimmer, awed as much as anything else as he gaped at the throngs of males flagellating themselves with ropes and chains in brutal synchronicity. Plimmer was cut differently from the others in Bravo Troop. He was the son of an oil executive, had lived everywhere from Brunei to Scotland, and had graduated from Vanderbilt University with an anthropology degree. He’d been reading scripts for a movie production company in Los Angeles when, one day in 2004, he chucked his dilettantism to consider a fundamental question: Am I tough enough?
Plimmer had the background to go the intel route. But he wanted to see combat. Though watching Shia pilgrims self-flagellating was an absorbing cultural spectacle, it wasn’t the primal test he’d had in mind. Fully four more months would pass before he finally heard the words he’d been waiting for: “You’re going on a right-seat ride.”
Plimmer, sergeants Jalone and Ryan Roush, and a few others had been chosen to accompany Captain Mac on a tour of the area that they would soon be inheriting from the 1-22 Infantry, another contingent from Fort Hood’s Fourth Infantry Division. The territory lay just south of Baghdad, along the Tigris River, near Forward Operating Base Falcon. As the captain’s convoy rolled up to the gates of FOB Falcon during the first week of June 2006, they noticed a convoy gathered on the opposite side of the road. “You should be fine on your side,” someone from the convoy called out. Plimmer caught a glimpse of what was preoccupying them: an IED sitting right outside the gates. Welcome to Falcon.
At the base, the Bravo Troopers studied the map of what would be their new jurisdiction. Pointing to a mass of residences set along the river, one of the sergeants said, “That’s Arab Jabour, right? I guess that’ll be our area of operations.”
The 1-22’s commander shook his head. “We don’t even go there anymore,” he said. “You can’t get there. There are IEDs all over the place. Snipers. Everything’s booby-trapped. It’s not worth it.” The Jab had effectively been consigned to the insurgency. The Bravo Troopers who heard this dire assessment were not especially intimidated. “We walk in as cavalrymen,” Jalone would say. “No job’s too hard.”
To Plimmer, the men of the 1-22 looked as if they were from another civilization. Their eyes somehow betrayed both an exaggerated state of alertness and hopeless exhaustion. Everything they carried had been rigged for the realities on the ground, from the lighter rucksacks on their shoulders to the shotguns with pistol grips that were easier to grab at a moment’s notice. The 1-22 was the twelfth American unit to rotate in and out of the area since the war had begun. Though their commander would later proclaim dubiously that they had “given hope to the people of southern Baghdad,” his troops were badly whipped. The previous week, one of their corporals had been killed by an IED blast. Half a dozen other comrades had been shipped back to the States with severe wounds in the past month alone. The hell they’d been through was about to become Bravo Troop’s hell.
At 0300 the following morning, thirty Bravo and 1-22 troops descended by helicopter into the Jab for a raid on a suspected bomb-making safe house. They rolled out of their choppers, near the banks of the Tigris. The target house was about six hundred meters away. They made it to the house, where the accompanying Iraqi army soldiers arrested its residents. The scouts set out to patrol the area. A jungle of date palms loomed along the river, the canopy hovering 75 feet overhead. Half a mile beyond, the valley opened up into acres of cultivated farmland. Grass nearly five feet tall covered the banks. A web of hundreds of canals stretched across the river valley. The air was almost unbreathably humid. This was not Iraq as many of the Bravo Troopers had imagined it. This was Vietnam.
From across the river came the staccato of small-arms fire. Jesus, this is the real deal, thought Plimmer. The scouts ducked, but the snipers were invisible. Plimmer saw the bullets spray the grass behind him. By the time they made it back to the safe house, it was noon, and the temperature had climbed to 130. Most of the Americans shed their body armor, lay on the floor of the portico, and passed around some MREs for lunch, while the Iraqi soldiers and the men from the 1-22 provided security from the rooftop . . . except they weren’t on the roof. They were upstairs taking showers and cooking food. The building suddenly shook with mortar blasts. Two grenades landed in the driveway of the house, near a burned-out car where Plimmer and Roush had been resting with their helmets off. The concussion of the first grenade knocked Plimmer flat. Roush grabbed him by the shoulder and they ran. The second grenade went off in front of them. They dived into a garage. Plimmer’s ears were ringing, but he could hear someone holler, “Medic!” Roush’s arm was bloody. Another sergeant ran up to Plimmer. He asked in disbelief, “Are you okay?”
Running back to the choppers, Jalone thought of how, earlier that morning, one of the 1-22 troops had promised him, “Enemy contact here is one hundred percent. You can count on it.” Jalone had protested that this was surely bullshit—but here it was, mortars, grenades, machine-gun fire, all on a single right-seat ride, before Bravo Troop’s mission had even begun. More action in a single day than they’d seen in the past six months combined in Al Hillah.
Captain Mac was a strong believer in street talk. During his previous tour, he’d made a habit of dropping in on a pool hall in Baqubah to listen to what the locals were griping about. He had been able to see how de-Baathification had caused schools to shut down because government ministers weren’t present to tell teachers to report to work. He saw how the unsealed borders had led to unfettered trafficking into and out of Iran and Syria. He saw disgruntled men from the disbanded Iraqi army join sides with the insurgency. And he heard a continuing refrain: You Americans can put people on the moon. Why can’t you restore our electricity?
So the first task he assigned Bravo Troop once they took over FOB Falcon was to tour a small village outside the Jab on a Friday, the Muslim day of worship, and see what the imam was preaching in the mosque that day. Four Humvees rolled up to the outskirts of town on the morning of June 8. Lieutenant Patrick Rice led a dismounted patrol to a place where he and an interpreter could hear the mosque message. The imam read a passage from the Koran about pleasing God by giving water to thirsty people. A lightbulb went off over Rice’s head. He radioed back to Sergeant Zachery Boltz: “Hey, let’s consolidate all our extra water, drive it up to the mosque, and pass out the bottles!”
An hour or so later, the first three trucks crossed a small dirt bridge en route to the mosque. The fourth truck, containing Boltz, never got there. As a deafening sound erupted, the Humvee bucked in the air at a 45-degree angle. Boltz was momentarily knocked unconscious but sustained no serious injuries. Later that afternoon, while waiting for the recovery vehicle to tow the Humvee back to Falcon, Boltz and Rice asked the imam to come speak with them. They inquired as to why the villagers would attack the Americans for trying to do the Lord’s work. “I don’t know what happened on the road,” the imam coolly replied. “I stay inside my house.”
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