Stars and Stripes Army Times published a long and perhaps confusing article yesterday about a nasty subject: mutiny. Because it’s convoluted, I want to delineate it enough to make sure all twenty-six of my readers understand the history, so they can understand the story.

The 1st Bn/26th Infantry (1st Infantry Division) was operating in the general area north of Baghdad. Its 2nd Platoon was operating from Combat Outpost Apache, located in the area known as Adhamiya, northeast of Baghdad.

By June the 45-man 2nd Platoon had been in Iraq for 11 months, and had lost four men. On June 21st they had been ordered to patrol a road and a Bradley ran over a bomb buried in a road. The explosion flipped the Bradley over and the platoon watched helplessly as the five men in the Bradley died, at least one of them screaming in the flames.

Something like this will unnerve the best of troops. Command understood this, and withdrew Company C’s 2nd Platoon, moving them from COP Apache to Camp Taji in order to allow them some decompression time.

[SFC] Tim Ybay, 38, served as 2nd Platoon’s platoon sergeant, but also its father figure. The former drill sergeant teased constantly and tried to treat his men like family. At memorial services for lost soldiers, he cried the loudest. He’d been on patrol June 21 when the five 2nd Platoon soldiers died in the Bradley. When he came back, his grieving platoon circled him as the weight of the loss forced him to his knees in the sand. He’d promised to bring all his boys home.

Now he would concentrate on the ones that remained.

“I knew after losing those five guys, my platoon had to get out of there,” he said. “These were the guys they slept with, joked with, worked out with. I don’t think they’d be able to accomplish the mission.”

The tears came again as he spoke, and he looked away.

“And I was having a hard time losing my guys.”

If you haven’t served in the military, and more importantly in combat, you can’t really understand the effects of losing friends. It’s like losing a family member because nothing bonds men more closely than facing danger together. The grief is usually followed by a consuming rage. The instinct to strike back is powerful. Wise leaders understand this emotion, and the ability to prevent your men from “getting some” is one of the greatest challenges a combat leader faces. Many have failed this challenge, as Ernest Medina and William Calley learned to their shame in 1968.

At Taji, the company had a week off… Ybay and his sergeants sat at the picnic tables drinking frozen coffee concoctions. The guys bought Persian carpets and brass lamps to send home as souvenirs — as if Taji were a vacation spot. But the anger over Adhamiya emerged even poolside, and erupted at the mental health clinic, which they visited in groups.

“You never really get over the anger,” said Staff Sgt. Robin Johnson, a member of Charlie’s scout platoon who had been especially close to Agami [gunner of the burned Bradley]. “It just kind of becomes everything you are. You become pissed off at everything. We wanted to destroy everything in our paths, but they wanted us to keep building sewer systems and handing out teddy bears.”
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Adhamiya remained under the control of 1-26, but the brass moved Charlie 1-26 to another combat outpost, Old Mod — so called because it used to house Iraq’s Ministry of Defense — in a calmer area on the outskirts of Adhamiya. From there, they patrolled Kadhamiya.

“If my guys had stayed at Adhamiya, they would have taken the gloves off,” said Capt. Cecil Strickland, Charlie’s company commander. “We were afraid somebody was going to get in trouble.”

There had been close calls before. DeNardi had to fight back a strong desire to kill an Iraqi — accused of triggering an IED that killed two Charlie Company soldiers — as he held a 9mm Glock handgun to the man’s eye socket.

And Cardenas and Staff Sgt. John Gregory had been ordered to the Green Zone to talk to an investigator after they roughed up two insurgents. A week after Pfc. Ross McGinnis fatally threw himself on a grenade to save four friends, Cardenas and Gregory had chased a couple of guys on a scooter and managed to stop them. Cardenas kicked over a wooden box the two Iraqis stood next to.

“There was a grenade full of nails,” Cardenas said. “We had to go see a major about detainee abuse. We told him [the Iraqis] didn’t want to get in the Bradley.”

The investigation in the Green Zone of Cardenas and Gregory unsurprisingly came to nothing.

In the years to come, veterans will start telling stories of summary executions after situations like this. It will take time for soldiers to catch their breaths, overcome their inhibitions, and admit to war crimes. Right now emotions are too high and political considerations too prominent to allow honesty. The Defense Department has initiated several noteworthy courts-martial, whose results have generally been whitewashes.

After the Camp Taji decompression and move to COP Old Mod, Company A’s 2nd Platoon found itself patrolling Kadhamiya, a Shiite district where the streets were clean and paved, garbage was collected, and the appearance was almost civilized.

But there were still problems. The battalion would lose A Company’s first sergeant to suicide, and act that would rock the entire battalion.

And then:

On July 17, Charlie’s 2nd Platoon was refitting at Taji when they got a call to go back to Adhamiya. They were to patrol Route Southern Comfort, which had been black — off-limits — for months. Charlie Company knew a 500-pound bomb lay on that route, and they’d been ordered not to travel it. “Will there be route clearance?” 2nd Platoon asked. “Yes,” they were told. “Then we’ll go.”

But the mission was canceled. The medevac crews couldn’t fly because of a dust storm, and the Iraqi Army wasn’t ready for the mission. Second Platoon went to bed.

They woke to the news that Alpha Company had gone on the mission instead and one of their Bradleys rolled over the 500-pound IED. The Bradley flipped. The explosion and flames killed everybody inside.

This shattered C Company’s 2nd Platoon. The similarity to their own loss in June and the “but for the grace of G_d” circumstances emasculated the soldiers. When ordered to go out the next day to Adhamiya the platoon refused.

The company CO was of course enflamed. He contacted the platoon sergeant and reminded him of the consequences.

I’d have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that counseling session. Threats are the perfect way to motivate spooked troops.

“I was irritated they were thumbing their noses. I was determined to get them down there.”

As it turns out, the mental health staff at Camp Taji had the entire platoon on sleeping pills after the shock of losing their Bradley and its crew. But the CO, CPT Strickland, claims he never knew that.

He didn’t know 2nd Platoon had gathered for a meeting and determined they could no longer function professionally in Adhamiya — that several platoon members were afraid their anger could set loose a massacre.

“We said, ‘No.’ If you make us go there, we’re going to light up everything,” DeNardi said. “There’s a thousand platoons. Not us. We’re not going.”

They decided as a platoon that they were done, DeNardi and Cardenas said, as did several other members of 2nd Platoon. At mental health, guys had told the therapist, “I’m going to murder someone.” And the therapist said, “There comes a time when you have to stand up,” 2nd Platoon members remembered. For the sake of not going to jail, the platoon decided they had to be “unplugged.”

This is not the Workers and Peasants Revolutionary Collective of 1917 Russia, and we don’t function by soldiers’ councils, but I can see why the platoon would hang on the words of the mental health social workers, if the report is right.

The process took over. The battalion CO and Sergeant Major stepped into the mess. The soldiers had their rights read to them in what’s called an Article 32 investigation, the preliminary to a court-martial. Soldiers were counseled, given “15 yes-or-no questions” that implied they were wrong no matter how they responded. Seven NCOs were relieved, transferred to other positions, and (undoubtedly) fire-breathing hard-chargers replaced them. Records were flagged and promotions and awards were put on hold.

If you’re going to punish a soldier for an offense stopping promotions is logical. Delaying awards is bullshit. What are you going to do? Claim he wasn’t entitled to his CIB or Bronze Star because he refused to deploy?

Finally, the platoon was disbanded and troops were sent home or distributed to other units. That should have taught them a lesson.

The primary cause of this mutiny is most likely a failure of leadership. The platoon sergeant didn’t fail. SFC Ybay stood up for his men, even going to the battalion headquarters in an attempt to explain the circumstances. CPT Strickland, the company CO apparently failed to properly comprehend the circumstances, because two months later he removed the records flags. The battalion sergeant major should have been all over this and should have grabbed his colonel by the stacking swivel to explain it.

But the real failure lies exactly where all the failures of Iraq stem from: at HQ, Department of the Army.

Let’s once again review the oath of office of a commissioned officer in the United States Army:

“I (insert name), having been appointed a (insert rank) in the U.S. Army under the conditions indicated in this document, do accept such appointment and do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter, so help me God.”

While there is nothing in there about caring for the welfare of your men, an experienced officer understands soldiers are human beings and as Napoleon Bonaparte observed the moral is to the physical as five is to one. When you forget there are human beings at the base of the military pyramid you forget the difference between “leadership” and “management.” You tend to lose track of what a realistic mission is. We haven’t had much success with realistic missions in the last 40 years.

My Army is dying the death of 10,000 cuts.

My thanks to ex-Corporal of Marines Gordon who lit my fuse about this story

UPDATE: An alert reader, eager to make a pathetic poor ole brokedown sergeant look bad, notes that the story appears in Army Times, not in Stars and Stripes. Thanks for looking over my shoulder, Jason.