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 next morning, the second platoon was marching along Corvette at a rapid pace—too fast for the Iraqi soldiers, one of whom tried to bribe a patrolman with $200 to slow things down—when Sergeant Justin Edmondson’s foot kicked a command wire. Immediately the scouts began to cordon off the area and fan out in search of the wire’s origin. In doing so, someone found two air defense weapons lying in the tall grass. They radioed for the EOD to bring out the bomb-killing robot. A couple of trucks went up ahead to clear the road.
Specialists Michael Brown and Micheal Douglas were in the lead truck, discussing the virtues of overweight prostitutes, when their Humvee ran over a pressure-plate IED that levitated it and blew away its front end. Douglas screamed. When he and Brown discovered that they were somehow unhurt, they began whooping and high-fiving. Pointing to the gash on his elbow, Douglas said, “Here’s my Purple Heart, dude!”
Because Bravo Troop was now short one vehicle, Douglas’s platoon leader, Sergeant Michael Thornton, told him to ride back to the patrol base in the Humvee following the tow truck. When the recovery vehicle arrived and hitched up the blasted Humvee, Douglas squeezed himself in, waved goodbye, and . . .
Boom! Three hundred meters down the road, the Humvee ran over a second IED. When they pulled Douglas out, he had two large holes in his left thigh. Had the camera in his cargo pocket not taken the brunt of the blast, his leg would have been severed nine inches below the waist.
By now, the road was chattering with sniper fire. One of the men from Charlie Troop escorting the EOD specialists got shot. They radioed for medevac and then started pulling out toward FOB Falcon. Brown happened to be in the lead vehicle. A mile from the base, his ears suddenly split open from a ferocious noise, and his mouth filled with blood. His second IED.
The hood of Brown’s Humvee was gone. Two of the tires were flat. Captain Mac radioed Thornton to ask if they’d like to wait for recovery. No, said the sergeant. No way in hell were they going to sit in this death trap any longer. They would roll back to FOB Falcon at whatever speed the ruined vehicles could manage. And so they did, along a well-populated street, where the locals stood and took in the miserable procession of smoking hoods and deflated tires. The Humvees sat for weeks in Falcon’s maintenance yard—a monument to defeat.
Late that evening, Captain Mac and Lieutenant Colonel Love decided that Iron Fist had been compromised and that it would be a good idea to cut the mission short. They sent out a route-clearance team to guard a path from the patrol base they had set up back to Falcon. A vehicle sat watch all night. The path back to Falcon was secure.
Plimmer was among the scouts doing overwatch. Crouched against a berm, they could see a man standing on a hill. Whenever one of the Apache surveillance choppers zoomed overhead, the man fell to the grass. Once it was gone, he stood again. This went on for hours. Plimmer radioed Lieutenant Rice, and Rice accosted the man, who said he was but a humble goatherd. Rice ordered his men and the Iraqi soldiers to start searching the area for command wire. The Iraqis wouldn’t participate—it was too hot, they said. They sat under a tree for a while, then simply wandered off northward, abandoning Rice.
Plimmer made his way through the tall grass to the trucks. He climbed into a backseat and took off his helmet, summoning the breeze. From the front seat, Ganser handed him a water bottle. “We’re rolling. Put your cap back on,” Ganser told him.
The convoy rolled toward the patrol base, a hundred meters away. A guard lifted the concertina wire. The first truck passed under it. The second truck was Ganser’s, the last surviving member of Bravo Troop’s original fleet of Humvees, and it went over the same spot as the first truck—the very same spot where the guard vehicle had been sitting throughout the previous night.
And then it blew up. The Humvee flipped in midair. Ganser flew out of the turret and landed in a field, his right leg thoroughly shattered. Plimmer had to be pulled from the truck. His skull was fractured in multiple places. A third soldier, Emmett Martin, collided against the back plate of the truck and cracked his spine. Only Private Jason Palmer remained inside, momentarily unconscious.
When they returned to the base, Plimmer couldn’t see. “It’s gonna be okay,” he heard Captain Mac say. “You look fine.” His face was, in fact, oozing blood and pus. It was swollen beyond all recognition.
Plimmer, Ganser, and Martin were medevaced to Baghdad. They were later flown to the military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, and, finally, back to America.
In the days after Operation Iron Fist fell apart, Captain Mac had his morale-boosting work cut out for him. Laymon was dead. Douglas, Ganser, Plimmer, and Martin had been sent home, nursing serious wounds. Richloff was hobbling around the base on a cane with two dime-size holes in his left ankle. Since the mosque mission IED, Boltz had been blasted twice more (a fourth was still to come). Jalone, who had burns on his face and arms, had proclaimed himself done with combat. Another sergeant was using every excuse available to hang out at the base, where he would flirt with an Iraqi interpreter named Amanda, who was widely suspected of funneling information to the insurgents. One of the privates had suffered a meltdown and put a gun in his mouth, prompting Captain Mac to confiscate his firing pin before the stress doc finally arranged for a medical discharge.
“Hey, I know this sucks,” the captain would tell them. “Division’s hearing great things. You may not be seeing it, but you’re helping to secure Baghdad.”
His guys felt sorry for Captain Mac for having to resort to such crap, because they knew him to be a straight talker. It wasn’t his fault that the Apache choppers had been assigned to more-glamorous missions. (Thanks to the Rumsfeldian transformation of the cavalry regiments, Bravo had been stripped of its own air support.) At headquarters, they could hear him hollering on the phone, “I’m not making my guys do that!” He himself had caught shrapnel during one mission and had refused to be medevaced. Any way he could fight for his men, he would fight. When the hollering didn’t work, when his later gung ho testimonials would fall on deaf ears, Captain Mac would try another approach: sending a few guys at a time off to Camp Liberty, in Baghdad, on some baloney assignment, adding, with a winking aside, “There’s a swimming pool on the base. Do what you have to do.”
Of course, he didn’t have it all wrong. They’d learned all sorts of things out there. This road was impassable. That bridge on the map didn’t exist anymore. And here was a town, Abu Waitha, that the map didn’t even include. But why, four years into the war, had such rudimentary things been left for Bravo Troop to discover?
Meanwhile, the insurgents—whoever they were (and the top brass could never figure out if they were AQI or homegrown)—were giving them something new to discover every day. They were adapting faster than Bravo Troop could adjust to their new devilry. Their IEDs had gotten more powerful, so Bravo Troop had added armor to its vehicles, which prompted the insurgents to bury pressure-plate IEDs under the roads, in turn compelling the Americans to get out of their trucks and start walking, which incited sniper fire. For his part, Captain Mac had tried to mix things up—taking different roads, changing the speed and spacing of the vehicles—but in the end, the least-bad option was for his troops to proceed on foot. That meant being so hot that they couldn’t eat, so hot that they concluded their missions hooked up to IVs. But at least they weren’t getting blown up as much.
For a few days at a time, they even made it into the Jab, a town filled with the grand river homes owned by Saddam cronies, mostly deserted. The main boulevard, Route Gnat, was rumored to have some of Saddam’s five-hundred-pound bombs buried underneath it. The neighborhoods were littered with concertina wire—emblems of halfhearted attempts to build patrol bases there. The 1-10 Cav was the thirteenth unit to roll into Arab Jabour, promising salvation from the insurgents. Captain Mac’s soldiers dropped off stacks of tabloids on street corners, trumpeting “good news” for hearts-and-minds conversions. His lieutenants paraded the Iraqi army officers around town—See? Your people are running things!—and offered public works projects in exchange for counterinsurgency tips. The locals did not bother to conceal their skepticism.
“Every time you come to see me,” a resident told Roush, “some man in a mask comes the next day and threatens to kill me.”
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