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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The atmosphere had become instantly more tense at Falcon, though some guys seemed to let nothing get to them. Sergeant Ben Laymon was one. Laymon was 22, a native of Mount Vernon, Ohio, outsized and redheaded, with tattoos of concertina wire and Skoal tobacco cans covering his arms. Back in Texas, he was fond of guzzling Jägermeister and frequenting the Perfect 10 men’s club. But he was also the last guy standing and spraying ammo during the base drills. In his fearlessness Laymon was similar to the compact and dark-haired Sergeant Richloff, whose charisma derived from his focused intensity. As one Bravo Trooper would put it, Laymon was “the Chris Farley of the platoon,” while Richloff was “the kind of guy I wanted to be.”
Early on the morning of June 24, two Humvees conveying both sergeants and a few others from Bravo and Alpha troops headed down an isolated canal road known as Route Buick. An IED had been discovered there the night before, and the Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit needed an escort to the site so that its robot could destroy the bomb. Laymon was in the lead truck, Richloff in the rear. A mile before they reached the IED, the Humvees came upon a gigantic crater in the road, the site of an earlier IED blast that had killed three Alpha Troop soldiers in their Bradley tank. Laymon’s truck eased past the macabre spectacle. As soon as Richloff’s Humvee did the same, a booming noise shattered the morning silence. A crack spread across Richloff’s windshield. Someone had detonated an IED, but not in time to do the desired damage.
The platoon dismounted, and the EOD specialists soon found copper command wire in the crater. Laymon saw no percentage in continuing to the previous night’s IED site. “I’m gonna hole up here,” he told Richloff. “If we get ambushed, we don’t have the personnel to defend ourselves.” He called in for the Quick Reaction Force to supply backup. Then he, Richloff, and a couple of other soldiers began to follow the command wire from the crater into the brush, toward a mud shack fifty meters off the road.
No one expected the second blast—and thus no one could compute that the first IED blast had been a decoy, luring the platoon along the wire to another IED, which an unseen triggerman then set off with a remote-control switch or a cell phone. Someone screamed. Bodies flew in all directions. The air was filled with machine-gun fire. Richloff scrambled to his feet. Running to a berm for cover, he could see that the bullets were coming from a house farther away from Route Buick. He began firing back. As he radioed for his truck to come forward, he noticed that his boot had filled with blood and that both of his arms were aching. But when the medic jumped out to render first aid, Richloff suddenly thought about Laymon. He ran back to the wire.
Laymon’s legs were a mess; he wasn’t conscious at first. Feeling Laymon’s throat, Rich-loff called out to the medic, “I think he’s dead. But you take a look.” Then Laymon let out a snorting gasp. When Richloff and the medic picked the big fellow up, they could see the two wounds on the back of his head and on either side of his spine.
Richloff then found another soldier in the tall grass. The facial wounds had rendered him unrecognizable. It was Justin Norton, an Alpha Troop sergeant. Richloff ripped apart Norton’s body armor and saw that his stomach had been split open. “This is way out of my league,” he muttered.
The medevac choppers descended. There were seven wounded in all. Richloff waved off the stretcher. With Laymon and Norton down, the platoon needed him to stay behind. A lieutenant called in for Apache helicopters to strafe the house where the enemy fire had come from. Which house? the pilots wanted to know. The platoon was ordered to fire smoke bombs to mark it. The platoon did so, but all the smoke bombs were duds. No strafing. The triggermen, whoever they were, got away.
That afternoon, several members of Bravo Troop were ferried to the military hospital inside Baghdad’s Green Zone to visit Laymon. They were gathered in the hallway when Captain Mac stepped out of Laymon’s room and headed their way. He was accompanied by a chaplain.
The commander did as commanders must do. As he delivered the news, several of his men broke down on the spot.
Captain Mac and the 1-10 Cav’s squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel J. J. Love, were determined to establish a presence in the Jab. A boulevard, nicknamed Route Gnat, ran parallel to the Tigris right through town and straight up to Baghdad. Whether by land or by water, weapons and bomb-making materials were running through the Jab and into the hands of Sunni insurgents. The town, so said intel, was rotten with AQI, “Al Qaeda in Iraq.” If they took control of the Sunni enclave, they could choke off terrorist operations in the capital. If only they could find a safe road in there.
The squadron had been doing route-clearance operations up and down the river on the morning of July 7 and had already lost two Humvees to IEDs when Jalone and his guys in the second platoon were called out to escort EOD specialists to yet another IED site. Along the way, he received word by radio that a clearance team had discovered a huge IED blast hole up ahead. Jalone’s platoon would have to take a bypass through an open field. When the lead truck missed the turn to the bypass, Jalone’s Humvee raced ahead. When the gunner remarked that there was a man running away from the road toward a house and then the driver added that he could see a second man doing the same thing, it occurred to Jalone that something bad was about to happen.
The Humvee flew fifteen feet into the air, landing in the crater the IED had just created, and then burst into flames. Fire barreled into Jalone’s face. Somehow he pushed the door open, rolled out, and swatted down the flames on his leg. Then he slid into a canal embankment. Struggling to his knees, his head seething from burns, he saw his driver, Johnny Bridges, staggering over the crater’s ledge. Bridges, 270 pounds of muscle, yanked him out of the embankment. The gunner, Marcos Arredondo, had landed on the back hatch and fractured two limbs. Jalone picked him up and helped him to the EOD vehicle. As the truck roared with flames, someone asked where Nathan Nadasi was.
Bridges found Nadasi, Bravo Troop’s tiniest soldier, curled up in a ball on the floorboard of the Humvee. Two men held back the door while Bridges reached inside and plucked out Nadasi, as if delivering him from a fiery womb. Jalone lay on his back, listening to the ammo cooking off in the blazing truck. Soon the skies erupted with the whirring of medevac choppers. A doctor scrubbed his second- and third-degree burns. “We’re gonna send you to Qatar for two months of rehab,” the doc told him. “Then we’ll send you home.” Jalone could not have been happier.
Twenty minutes later, the brigade’s colonel arrived on the scene and observed the men and their injuries. “RTD,” he said of Jalone, Arredondo, and Bridges. Return to duty.
It was commonly held in Bravo Troop that while there were some very fine Iraqi soldiers, the best policy was to be suspicious of them. They were volunteers, so no one could force them to stay on the job. Many in their ranks swore more allegiance to the Sunni or Shia militias than to the national army. Their officers lacked the leadership training necessary to enforce discipline. As Lieutenant Colonel Love would observe: “This is what you get when you disband the army. You’re building one from scratch.”
On the evening before launching Operation Iron Fist—a full-scale mission to locate new east-west routes into the Jab—Captain Mac learned that a local news station was broadcasting word of a new U.S. initiative in the area, something called “Operation Metal Hand.” The Bravo Troop commander convened a meeting with the interpreters and the Iraqi army officers in the dayroom. Those passing by could hear furniture flying around and Captain Mac hollering, “I’d better not find the source of the leak came from here!” In fact, he had little doubt that their Iraqi brothers had done them in.
They went through with the operation anyway, commencing in early July. On the first day, an IED blasted one of their Humvees off of Route Corvette. One of the men medevaced to the hospital, Derrick Ruffin, had arrived at Falcon only a few weeks before.
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