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To Adhamiya and back

As they started loading into the Bradley fighting vehicle to roll out of Combat Outpost Apache, the soldiers laughed as if they weren’t afraid. As if each, at least twice, hadn’t felt the shocking heat and been deafened by the roar of roadside bombs. As if they hadn’t already lost eight friends to improvised explosive devices and snipers and grenades.

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These soldiers of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, laughed because it gave them courage to step back into the Bradleys. If they didn’t go, somebody else would have to.

“Somewhere on that street there’s an IED,” Sgt. 1st Class Tim Ybay told 2nd Platoon on June 20, briefing them just before they patrolled the streets of Adhamiya, Iraq, as they had been doing for 10 months.

“I’ll find it!” shouted Bradley driver Spc. Ernesto Martin.

Not that day. Not that soldier. But others riding on that patrol would be among five to die the next day, when an IED flipped their 30-ton Bradley upside-down like a cheap toy and set it ablaze.

The surviving platoon members comforted each other that their friends died looking out for their brothers. They told each other they would have done the same. They cried and beat their fists into walls. They knelt in the sand and bent their heads and tried to convince themselves Iraq was worth it.

But that was hard because they no longer believed they were fighting for Iraq. They had, once, a long time ago. Before they had seen the Iraqi bodies with their heads dipped in acid, before the children tossed grenades at them. Now the locals refused even to acknowledge dead neighbors sprawled on their sidewalks.

The soldiers of Charlie Company had given up fighting for the Iraqis. They fought for each other.

And so that day, they forced aside the last moments of their friends’ lives, moments filled with chaos and agony and pain and blood.

They remembered them laughing.

Over 15 months, the war would kill 13 men from Charlie 1-26, more than any other Army company sent to Iraq, according to their battalion commander.

The group of 190 would earn at least 95 combat awards. They were part of Task Force 1-26, some 820 troops, who would find 47 weapons caches, capture more than 300 insurgents, including high-value targets, and find hundreds of explosive devices. But 122 men would receive Purple Hearts and 31 would die, more than in any Army battalion since Vietnam.

One respected sergeant in Alpha Company would kill himself. A Charlie Company soldier would go home with three Purple Hearts and a lost dream. A buddy would be nominated for the Medal of Honor after saving four of his brothers. And there would be one brief mutiny.

Still, numbers don’t tell the story.

‘Just blood everywhere’

In its glory days, the mansions of Saddam Hussein’s favorite minions rose from the dust of Adhamiya, an ancient neighborhood in northeastern Baghdad. Army generals and Sunni leaders shared the area near Baghdad’s most important Sunni mosque, Abu Hanifa.

Adhamiya was the last neighborhood to fall when U.S. forces tore into Baghdad in 2003, and anti-American slogans still emblazon bullet-pocked walls.

For the eight months prior to 1-26’s arrival, no Americans had patrolled its winding streets. A mostly Shiite Iraqi army kept watch over the neighborhood, and Sunni citizens suffered corruption and violent reprisals.

Those conditions left Adhamiya in anarchy, and seared images of hatred and suffering into the minds of the young men of Charlie Company.

When they arrived in August 2006, soldiers with 1-26 found about 250 dead Iraqi civilians a month. Many of the soldiers, including Staff Sgt. Ian Newland, 27, had deployed with the unit to Samarra in 2004, but that hadn’t prepared them for Adhamiya.

They arrived upbeat and confident they could make a difference. Such expectations eroded every time they went outside the wire.

“This deployment, every patrol you’re finding dead people,” Newland said. “It’s like one to 12 a patrol. Their eyes are gouged out. Their arms are broken. We saw a kid who had been shot 10 to 15 times.”

Another man had been shot through both hands and his shoulders.

“They laid him out like Jesus,” Newland said. “Just blood everywhere. That sticks with you.”

Newland joined the Army in 2002 to escape a life of poverty in Dayton, Ohio. He had dropped out of high school in 10th grade, and then lived on welfare with his wife and young daughter while working two jobs.

In the Army, he emerged as one of the brightest, making staff sergeant in four years. As team leader, he made soldiers who got in trouble write papers about World War II hero Audie Murphy or the carbine system.

Charlie 1-26 slept 25 to a room in a decrepit and sour-smelling basement. Tiles hung from the ceiling, leaving dust on their faces when they woke in the mornings. They patrolled all day in full body armor, but could shower only every two or three days. For the first couple of months of deployment they had only port-a-johns in the 117-degree heat.

“I thought it was a dump,” said Sgt. Shawn Ladue, 27. “Every time it’d rain, we’d get that stagnant-ass water in the basement.”

Ladue joined the Army in 1997 after dropping out of high school in Phoenix, got out of the military a couple years later to learn a civilian trade, bounced around from auto mechanic school to community college, and signed back up in 2004. His career as an infantryman would end permanently in Adhamiya.

Not like training

Nothing prepared Charlie Company for Adhamiya. They’d spent a week at Hohenfels training center in Germany learning to work with interpreters.

During the training, Capt. Mike Baka would talk to “the mayor” of a mock town, and an IED would go off nearby.

“I thought, ‘No way is it going to be like this,’” Baka said. “I was exactly wrong.”

Beyond that, the West Point grad said he was never trained in counterinsurgency methods. None, not even Baka, had read Gen. David Petraeus’ counterinsurgency manual. But he had taken a year of Arabic in college, and he understood he had to interact with the locals to make it work.

At Apache, he’d roll into Adhamiya with one platoon, get back, and immediately roll out with a different platoon.

“I wanted to show a little bit of love for the platoons, but also to talk to the people,” he said. He’d play chess with the locals or talk with them about their families. But if he stayed too long, they would inevitably catch sniper fire.

“It was a rare day if we didn’t see [Iraqis] get killed or severely injured,” he said. “It was almost like they were testing us. We’d be two streets away, and shots would ring out. It was always gunshot wounds to their heads.”

One day, local Iraqis covered a body on the sidewalk with cardboard.

“But he jerked back up — he was still alive,” Baka said.

Sgt. Kevin Guenther, Baka’s medic, performed a tracheotomy on the man.

“The people all gathered around to watch, but no one tried to do anything,” Baka said. “I actually got really angry. This man was left for dead. No one here will even call an ambulance. They were more concerned about the three or four men we were questioning.”

The man died about half an hour later. He’d been shot in the head.

The soldiers were tasked with joint patrols with the Iraqi army, but the Iraqi army didn’t go out enough for there to be much “joint” involved.

“They’d set up a mission with us, but then they’d have an excuse: ‘No gas.’ ‘It’s too dangerous.’ ‘We don’t have enough guys,’” said Spc. Gerry DeNardi, 20, the company smart aleck with high cheekbones and a mop of hair bleached by the sun.

“We had to pick up an Iraqi body once at Remy [Street] because they said they were out of gas, but then they rolled past us as we were coming back in.”

Most of the soldiers were Shiite.

“To join the army, you had to go to western Baghdad,” Baka explained. “No Sunnis would go there. But the corruption in the Shia military was horrendous.”

The Iraqi army would trash Sunni houses, take people into custody who hadn’t done anything wrong and forcefully demand bribes, Baka said.

‘How does that make you feel?’

Charlie Company patrolled constantly — each guy went out three or four times a day, with a one-and-a-half-hour break between patrols.

The soldiers teased each other just as constantly, a way to break the relentless stress and fear.

Pfc. Ross McGinnis, the youngest member of the company at 19, at first annoyed just about everyone.

“He just wanted to learn so much,” said his team leader, Newland. “He was always on and intense. But then he was so much fun.”

McGinnis spent weekends with Newland and his family in Schweinfurt, playing with Newland’s children, Dryden and Haley, and trying to answer Newland’s plethora of Army trivia questions.

He soon emerged as a joker — big brown eyes flashing above a bigger grin. In Iraq, he recorded a mock interview with a friend who had been slightly wounded — asking in his best Dan Rather voice, without a trace of a grin, “How does that make you feel?”

As he became more confident in his job as a .50-cal gunner, he bragged. Sitting on the edge of his humvee, he held up the round from an M4 — about two inches long — and then the .50-cal round, twice as long, twice as thick.

“This is your round,” he chanted, holding up the tiny bullet. “And this is my round. Your round. My round.”

Another day, Sgt. Ely Chagoya, 31, decided to drill his team on how quickly they could take apart and reassemble their night-vision goggles — blindfolded.

As he demonstrated, he could hear giggling, and then a flash went off. It was a digital camera.

“Man, I knew they were up to something,” Chagoya said, shaking his head. “They showed me the picture, and I see the ass of McGinnis right next to my head.”

McGinnis was probably the only private who could tease Chagoya about being a former Marine. A grenade had gone off underneath Baka’s humvee, and a dud landed in a humvee on another occasion, so the platoon spent a week tossing tennis balls at vehicles and trying to deflect them, or, failing that, diving out of the humvees.

“Marine! You will jump on that grenade!” McGinnis yelled at Chagoya, impersonating a Marine drill instructor. Then McGinnis laughed and said, “F--- that! I’d be like, ‘See ya!’”

Gruesome reality

The jokes couldn’t keep reality at bay.

On Oct. 17, about two months into the deployment, Charlie Company lost its first man when a sniper shot Staff Sgt. Garth Sizemore in the stomach as 2nd Platoon was en route to Forward Operating Base after patrol in Adhamiya.

“I started to wise up after that,” Ladue said. “Before, it was just driving around in a hot-ass truck.”

Some of the guys channeled their emotions into unlikely jobs. For Sgt. Erik Osterman, that meant cleaning out the humvees and Bradleys that came back to Apache after Americans had died in them.

Osterman, a former bartender and concealed-carry weapons permit instructor with an intense gaze, said he made the decision instinctively.

He would do it so his troops would not have to.

Osterman asked the first sergeant to get him every time a truck needed to be cleaned out, and then he’d send the guys off on errands while he hosed out the blood. The cook supplied him with scrubbies and bleach.

He would do it in an attempt to erase any reminder of death when his troops went back outside the wire in the same vehicles.

“They’re not going to roll like that,” Osterman said. “That would be all they see.”

Charlie Company spent a lot of time trying not to think about what had happened, but they still had to pump themselves up for the fight.

They watched “300” and “Gladiator” — Sgt. Willsun Mock went so far as to have “Strength” and “Honor” tattooed from the inside of his elbows to his wrists.

“Instead of a handshake, he’d grab your wrist like the Romans and say, ‘Strength. Honor,’” Staff Sgt. Robin Johnson said. “And he meant it. He liked the Roman warriors, and I liked the Spartans. We’d go back and forth over who was the best.”

Ybay, 38 and the father figure of the company with 14 years in the Army, called Johnson, Mock and Spc. Daniel Agami the “Three Musketeers,” but Johnson said they were more like brothers. They spent all their waking hours together — including several a day lifting weights.

“We were going to gain 15 pounds, cut up and shred down,” said Johnson, his accent giving away his South Boston roots.

He and Mock were both fiercely Irish, with the Claddagh rings and Irish knots to prove it.

Chagoya and Mock were also close.

“He loved to dance salsa, merengue,” Chagoya said. “I’d be dancing with a girl and he’d stop me: ‘Hey Gunny — teach me another step.’ This little white boy trying to dance salsa at the club. That was Mock.”

On Oct. 22, Mock became the second Charlie soldier killed when an IED hit his humvee near Loyalty.

For a month, Johnson stopped working out, refusing to move except to go on patrol or eat.

“I went into complete ‘I don’t care’ mode,” he said. “But then Agami said, ‘Will’s laughing at us.’”

Hard-earned ticket home

Ladue earned his first Purple Heart in late October, when 3rd Platoon made a traffic stop on a car with three young men in it.

“We caught a lot of bad guys by pulling over vehicles with more than two young guys in there,” he said. This time, all they found was a big bag of worthless Iraqi money.

Then Ladue heard a bullet rushing toward him.

“It sounded fast and just whizzing,” he said. “I froze. It hit me. I just felt a sharp burning pain.”

He didn’t fall after the bullet hit him in the shoulder: He turned around and started shooting at a building.

“Then the little voice of reason said, ‘Hey dumb-ass. You just got shot,’” he said.

He spent two days at the military hospital in Baghdad and then was sent back to Adhamiya. He was there Nov. 5, when an Iraqi court found Saddam Hussein guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death by hanging. Gen. Petraeus praised the Iraqi people because Baghdad remained quiet following the announcement.

Except for Adhamiya.

“We started hearing gunfire as soon as the verdict was announced,” Ybay said. Then insurgents attacked Apache.

“We were hopping to fight,” Chagoya said. “We could tell who the enemy was. They gave us a little fight — about three hours.”

Charlie troops put down the attack, then mounted up to engage insurgents outside the wire.

At Abu Hanifa mosque, they ran into small-arms fire, grenades and rocket-propelled grenade rounds, but 2nd Platoon took out several insurgents and had no losses.

First Platoon followed and during a night search found a house with 40 men hiding inside. One of them had a shotgun, and as the man kicked the gate open, Newland shot him in the head with a 25mm high-explosive round from his Bradley.

“We refer to him as ‘split face,’ because that’s what happened,” Newland said. “He started puking out of his neck. It was pretty nasty.”

The day ended with 38 dead insurgents and 10 wounded, with no U.S. casualties. But the danger that U.S. troops faced hardly subsided.

On a night patrol a few days before Thanksgiving, Ladue and his crew drove past Abu Hanifa and the new graveyard that had been dug in a children’s soccer field. Near it ran a trench.

“We always talked about how they would put an IED there,” Ladue said.

They did.

As he thought about the probability, the IED went off. “I tasted engine oil,” Ladue said. “I couldn’t see nothing. My gunner, [Pfc. Eduardo] Gutierrez, started shooting at the mosque.”

Then he heard the driver, Spc. Matthew Yearwood, screaming, “My legs! My legs!” The steering column had collapsed on him. “Get us the f--- out of here,” Ladue yelled over the radio.

The other humvees pushed them back to Apache. Yearwood was not seriously injured, but Ladue had a massive concussion — and his second Purple Heart.

“Everybody walked away from that,” Ladue said. “It scared us. The next time we went out, we were terrified.”

That next time was Thanksgiving night. Ladue asked Staff Sgt. Christopher Cunningham to take the lead truck. “I took [the middle position] because my driver, especially, and I were pretty spooked.”

During the first three hours of patrol, they drove past the cemetery where they had been blown up a couple of days before.

“We went right over it,” Ladue said. “I was going out of my mind I was so scared.”

During break, his buddy Staff Sgt. Juan Campos gave him a hard time, but Ladue wasn’t in a state to be teased.

“It kind of hurt when he said, ‘Quit being a pussy,’” Ladue said. “Me and Juan didn’t talk to each other the rest of the break.”

They drove into the market area — usually fairly safe, so Ladue felt relieved. Then the explosion hit. “Not again! Not again!” Yearwood screamed.

Ladue stuck his M4 out the blown-open door of his humvee. He let off one round, and then the pain hit.

“Oh, I’m f-----d up! Oh, I’m f-----d up!”

The IED had blown a hole through his foot, leaving it a bloody mass of smashed bone and pulp.

Campos was the first to reach the Humvee. “I didn’t mean it, man,” Campos said. “I’m sorry.”

That was the last time Ladue would see his friend.

“I just remember arriving at the Green Zone, under a thin-ass blanket, freezing,” Ladue said. “After that, things got a little fuzzy.” He would get his third Purple Heart, and that was his ticket out of the war zone.

‘The grenade is in the truck!’

On Dec. 4, 1st Platoon rolled out of Apache looking for a place to put a generator to provide electricity for 100 homes. As the six-truck convoy rode through the narrow alleyways of Adhamiyah, McGinnis, in the turret of the last Humvee, manned his .50-cal as usual.

Sgt. 1st Class Cedric Thomas served as truck commander, Sgt. Lyle Buehler drove, and Newland and medic Pfc. Sean Lawson rode in the back.

“Grenade!” McGinnis yelled after someone dropped one from a rooftop. “The grenade is in the truck!”

McGinnis could have leapt from his turret. Instead, he tried to catch the grenade, just as he had done with Chagoya and others when the platoon practiced with tennis balls. As it ricocheted around the turret, he fumbled and the grenade dropped into the Humvee.

“When he yelled ‘grenade,’ I wasn’t even alarmed because we’d seen so many,” Newland said. “Then I saw it. It was next to me.”

McGinnis quickly dropped into the humvee and smothered the grenade with his body. “I heard him say, ‘It’s right here,’” Newland said.

McGinnis absorbed the brunt of the explosion.

Through the smoke and confusion, Newland didn’t yet understand what had happened.

Thomas saw a man on the roof of a building and started shooting as Newland reached for McGinnis. “I remember seeing his eyes moving around,” Newland said. “I grabbed his hand and started praying.”

Then he realized he also was injured. Newland looked down through the cloud of black smoke.

“It was like a horror movie watching blood come out of my side,” he said.

His jaw hurt — a 4-inch piece of shrapnel had cracked it and he couldn’t think of anything but the pain. Then the pain flowed everywhere.

“When I took my glove off, I thought my hand was coming with it,” he said. Shrapnel had dug into the nerves of his forearm, causing him to lose the use of three fingers.

Then he saw his leg was bleeding. He tried to hold a pressure bandage on the inside of his thigh, but blood gushed out between his fingers.

“It was squirting me in the face,” he said. “I realized I needed a tourniquet. I got about three turns in, but it was just so painful.”

The blast had blown open all four combat-locked doors, and Thomas and Buehler had shrapnel wounds.

“I heard voices outside the humvee and thought, ‘I’m going to get grabbed out of here and get my head cut off on the Internet,’” Newland said. “There was dark, dark blood coming out of my thigh. I told [Thomas], ‘I’m going to die right now if we don’t get back to the aid station.’”

He felt dizzy and knew he was dying.

“I bled out,” he said. When he woke up, he was on a table in the aide station back at Apache.

“Don’t mess with me,” he said to the medics. “Did it hit the artery?”

Baka pushed him back down on the table as a medic injected him with morphine. Then Newland saw McGinnis on a table nearby. The grenade had exploded at his lower back and sent shrapnel up into his sides.

“What’s up with Ross?” Newland said. “Why isn’t anybody working on him?”

Baka answered.

“He’s gone.”

DISCUSS: The realities of Adhamiya

Multimedia

See photo galleries and video of Charlie 1-26

The complete saga

Part 2: ‘I’ve seen enough. I’ve done enough.’

Part 3: ‘Not us. We’re not going.’

Part 4: Picking up the pieces

Extras

‘Nothing was done.’

Getting the pain out in the open

Leadership in the midst of loss

Building a life after escaping death