Dear Jordan,
While I was writing to Charles in the spring of 2006 about your first smiles and the smell of your skin after a bath, he was writing to me about Iraqi children searching trash heaps for scraps of food to eat. He wrote of proudly watching American boys he had trained become men during battle, only to see them die in pools of blood in the streets in Iraq.
From the day your father and his soldiers crossed into Iraq from Kuwait, he realized that Operation Iraqi Freedom was different from any other conflict he had known. Instead of fighting at a distance, with missiles launched from ships and artillery rounds fired from tanks, U. S. soldiers engaged their elusive enemy in narrow, unfamiliar streets. He wrote to me about training Iraqi soldiers by day, never knowing whether they would join the insurgency by night.
I wondered how a man who knew he could be shot by an unseen adversary at any moment could ever reenter a world in which he was safe. I tried to focus on keeping his spirits up until his two-week leave, still several months away. I sent care packages stuffed with some of his favorite things: tuna, smoked nuts, Rice Krispie treats, and fitness magazines. I included cards scented with my perfume, my way of reminding him that he was adored.
There were times when my packages made things more difficult. In some of his letters, he wrote that the photographs and cards made him long even more for all that he was missing.
Much later, I would discover the details of your father’s life in Iraq. I learned that Charles was a Death Dealer, as the roughly one thousand men of his heavy-tank, armor, and infantry battalion called themselves. As such, his survival depended on his ability to shut out thoughts of us. Formally the ist Battalion, 67th Armored Regiment, 2nd Brigade, 4th Infantry Division from Fort Hood, Texas, the Dealers operated in an area about thirty miles south of Baghdad—one of the most dangerous Sunni-Shiite fault lines. Iskandariyah, the town where the Dealers made their forward operating base, or FOB, was part of a larger region of about 2,700 square miles. Insurgents were everywhere. The military called it the Triangle of Death.
First Sergeant King, “Top,” as his soldiers called him because of his rank, was in charge of the 105 men of Charlie Company— the Carnivores. He reported to a young West Point-trained commander named Stefan McFarland who was as ambitious as he was demanding. Captain McFarland, a tall, white, boyishly handsome former football player from Carrollton, Texas, was only twenty-nine but had considerable combat experience. He had served in Kuwait and was on his second tour of duty in Iraq.
Given his resume and his gung-ho reputation, McFarland seemed destined to travel a straight line up the military chain of command. Charles sometimes referred to McFarland as “The Golden Boy,” but he respected his command.
If the two men had taken different paths to military leadership, they shared a love for the institution and the company they led. While Charles had more experience, he considered the junior officer a competent leader who shared his high standards, and under their command the company became known for its willingness to take on tough missions.
“We were kind of famous,” said Specialist Harold Garcia, a proud Carnivore. “Charlie Company was the shit.”
As first sergeant, Charles was Captain McFarland’s go-to guy. Before the troops deployed, Charles oversaw their training for combat, making certain they could navigate a battlefield and operate sophisticated weapons. He also made certain that they knew something of the culture of Iraqi Muslims, both for defensive reasons and to avoid giving offense.
Charles would exercise with the weakest soldiers to improve their fitness and stamina. “When we went on company runs, he would go with us and smoke us sometimes,” said Sergeant Adam Martinez, twenty-nine, a tanker in the unit “It was uplifting for soldiers to see that a first sergeant could run us into the ground.”
Leading his young soldiers tapped into Charles’s paternal impulses and made him feel as if he were personally obligated to them. He even counseled the youngest soldiers about saving the first money they had ever earned. Their race, upbringing, religion, and politics didn’t matter. What did was that every one of them had a family and a life to get back to. He would dedicate himself to their survival.
Before he left, I asked your father to describe what a typical day in Iraq would entail. “Everything from making sure my soldiers get their mail to recovering their bodies,” he said.
Given his gentleness at home, I was astounded to learn about Charles’s demean or in the field. The first sergeant was a different person from my sweet, shy fiance.
“He would get out there and yell his lungs out at us,” Martinez told me. “He’d tear our heads off and stomp on us if we fucked up, but then he’d tell us, ‘If you get in trouble, I’ll come get you in the middle of the night.’“
Charles tearing people’s heads off? I searched my mind for such an image.
As their leader, he would admonish his men before they headed out on missions to “stay alive and kill shit,” which became Charlie Company’s battle cry. I had never heard my Charles swear.
“I guess he was real good at turning on the switch and turning it off,” Martinez said.
But Charles only yelled when he believed he had no other recourse, which is why his soldiers and superiors recall in great detail the times that he did. “He was an almost strikingly quiet, thoughtful leader,” said Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Donahoe, Charles’s battalion commander. “Here was a guy who looked like some Greek statue. He had the physical presence, so he didn’t have to talk loud and didn’t have to always shout at guys. He had this kind, calm demeanor to him that soldiers just responded to.”
It was precisely because Charles and McFarland were such superior leaders that their Charlie Company saw the most combat action in the battalion. “I told them what that meant for them is that they get the most difficult missions we had in Iraq and they would get the most dangerous areas we had in Iraq,” Donahoe said. “Those guys were war fighters. They were the guys who could figure out how to get to their objectives when, given the same set of circumstances, other companies would not. If I was going to send anybody up there, I had to send a unit that was cohesive enough that, if it came to it, they could take the losses and take the everyday grind of going in there. And I had to have a unit where the individual solders were confident in their leadership.”
The Dealers’ mission was to locate and destroy insurgency cells, train local military and security forces, and help transfer the region to Iraqi control. Achieving that goal required as much diplomacy as armaments. So the Dealers worked to broker peace deals between Sunni and Shiite factions. They protected the construction site of a new police station in a small, volatile town not ten miles from their base, Jurf as-Sakhr. Insurgents had blown up the last one. They whitewashed schools, oversaw the installation of water purification systems, and built marketplaces for local merchants to sell their wares. But before the battalion could work on the governance and goodwill efforts, Charlie Company had to pave the way with a far more arduous task.
“An awful lot of killing had to be done before we could do that,” Donahoe said. “Charlie Company was down there in the knife fight, if you will, rooting out a very well-entrenched insurgency.”
Within a month of Team Carnivore’s arrival, civilians and insurgents alike had felt its presence. The soldiers had seized large caches of weapons and commandeered an enemy encampment they called “Carnivore Island”: a one-story concrete house surrounded not by water but by desert. It got its name because of its isolation, rather than its proximity to the Euphrates River.
Word spread quickly among the locals about how the Carnivores had transformed the Island. Before they took it over, it had been the site of what the New York Times called “a clandestine court,” where, according to Iraqi police, “insurgent judges would try, torture and execute collaborators.” Thereafter, it became a patrol base from which the company conducted surveillance of the region and launched attacks on insurgents.
“That was an enemy sanctuary where we found thousands of pounds of explosives,” McFarland said. “Taking over the house put us in their backyard, so the big, bad Americans were in there now and the enemy had to face it.”
The position also put the American soldiers in good stead with the locals. In an area that had known constant fighting as the warring Sunnis and Shiites looted merchants and killed locals caught in their crosshairs, the soldiers added a measure of security.
There was, however, a tactical downside to making this the company’s patrol base: the ten-mile route between the Island and the battalion’s forward operating base in Iskandariyah. It was a perilous sliver of asphalt known as Route Patty, not more than a lane and a half wide and littered with deadly IEDs, or improvised explosive devices.
“Everyone knows that it was pretty much IED alley,” Martinez said. Charles called it “one of the most dangerous roads we have.” He had even discussed the dangers with his “battle buddy,” First Sergeant Arenteanis “Tony” Jenkins, who was his bunkmate in Iraq and led another company in the battalion.
“Everybody had an uneasy feeling about that road,” Tony told me. “There were so many blind spots coming around curves with a bunch of trees, and what you were trying to look for was a tree out of place. One time we halted a convoy because we noticed that a tree wasn’t there a week before.” Trees often contained camouflaged wires attached to detonators. A wire mistaken for a twig could be deadly.
The explosives that lay in wait for the Americans were as crude as they were lethal. They could be deceptively small when hidden inside a soda can, or as large as a discarded crate at the side of the road. They could be packed into propane canisters, disguised in rubbish, or tucked into a briefcase in an abandoned car. The bomb makers were creative and audacious—sometimes mockingly so. They even hid IEDs in discarded MRE (meals ready to eat) packages.
Making an IED required only a rudimentary knowledge of explosives. All the insurgents needed was a combustible substance (usually gunpowder, dynamite, or a mixture of hydrogen peroxide, gasoline, and nitrate) along with nails, metal, glass, and rocks, all of which were crammed into the container. The bomb makers often used nine-volt batteries as power sources and triggered the explosives with detonators fashioned from common electronic devices. A cell phone or car alarm could serve as a bomb trigger. Even the remote control for a toy would do.
Sometimes, under the cover of darkness, the insurgents dug craters in the road, placed explosives in them, and repacked the asphalt. After they scattered dirt around the area, the road looked untouched, especially from atop a tank. The enemy also hid bombs in the carcasses of dogs and other animals, which were then placed along the road.
It was on the treacherous Route Patty that Charles would look not just for bombs but Iraqi children, who would stand at the side of the road and marvel at the American convoys.
“He’d say to his gunner, ‘Are my kids out there?’“ Tony recalled. “He took candy out there to those kids all the time. He thought if he could make a difference or have one smile, just by throwing people candy, why not do it? He didn’t look at it like some soldiers did, that these were little Iraqis growing up to be big Iraqis who were going to kill Americans.”
But it was on Route Patty that Charlie Company also experienced its most crushing defeats.
Corporal Robbie Light was just twenty-one years old. His wife was pregnant with their first child, a daughter.
Charles was so shaken after he recovered Robbie’s body that he mailed the journal to me immediately, even though it still had about a dozen empty pages, in case he never made it back. Charles also seemed to need to tell me about Robbie’s death. In a letter he wrote:
He would have said all this to me on the phone, but the military restricted what we could discuss. Once, when I was venting about “stop loss,” the government’s practice of adding another tour of duty for soldiers who were about to be discharged, the line suddenly went dead. Your father called back and told me not to say anything like that or we would once again be cut off.
I could feel Charles’s anguish in what he wrote about Robbie, and it distressed me that I could not be there to comfort him. I could not wrap him in my embrace and whisper for him to hold on until the pain subsided. Nor could I call him to try to raise his spirits. Even the letter I wrote would take weeks to reach him.
I knew that Charles’s 104 remaining soldiers were drawing on his strength during those bleak days, but I wondered who was giving him strength. Then I remembered the angel print His faith would see him through, I thought, just as his love for his Biscuit would sustain him.
“Oh, man, that was his life, right there,” Garcia told me. “He loved that little boy. He always carried a picture in this book he had.” Charles’s bunkmate, Tony, often noticed that Charles’s light was on late into the night. It was then, he thinks, that your father was writing to you in his journal.
Tony and Charles had known each other casually before they deployed and shared a bond as black first sergeants. But it was only when they lived together in Iraq in their cramped cinder-block, wood, and canvas quarters that they discovered that they had a great deal more in common. Both had lived in Mobile, Alabama. Both were athletic and liked to run. Both were engaged to marry when their tours were over.
“With us being first sergeants we couldn’t associate with the lower enlisted members and we didn’t associate with the officers, so the only person we could really associate with was a first sergeant,” said Tony, a lanky, high-energy forty-six-year-old.
Charles and his roommate looked out for each other. If one of them was late coming in from a mission and the dining facility was closing, the other would save a plate of food for his buddy. They had promised that if either got hurt in battle, the other would come to the rescue no matter what the personal risk. And there was one other promise they made to each other. I’ll tell you about that later.
Your father confided in other friends, too, about his plans for a life with the two of us. His buddy Sergeant First Class Helder Camera knew of our relationship from their days as tankers at Fort Riley, a time when he would teasingly ask your father at the end of a workweek where he was headed. “I’m flying to see my girl,” Charles would say.
When Charles e-mailed Camera, who was serving in another part of Iraq, to say that he was getting married, his buddy was shocked. “At Riley he said he was never going to get married again,” Camera told me.
Camera wrote back congratulating Charles and confided that he was having family problems. “I know you love the military,” Charles e-mailed back, “but one day you are going to retire and the people at the end of the tunnel waiting for you will be your family.”
Charles and I had talked about getting married on a Caribbean cruise a few months after he returned, inviting only our families and a few friends. In the weeks after he left, I thought planning the wedding would be the ideal way to keep him focused on coming home. I pictured myself sending him fabric swatches and sample invitations. I leafed through bridal magazines, fantasizing about a gown—off-white, simple, elegant, and formfitting. Naturally, I would be svelte. I would carry a bouquet with tropical flowers. Since I have always been clumsy, and since Charles had minimal rhythm, I wondered how I could talk him into dance lessons. Could I send cake samples to Iraq?
But I never got far with my planning. It all felt wrong, inappropriate even. I could not bring myself to commit to caterers or florists—much less buy a dress—while my man was still in harm’s way. I abandoned the idea after a few months.
Instead, I concentrated on losing my remaining baby weight in time for our wedding. Mostly my fitness strategy involved long walks pushing your stroller, since I could not seem to drag myself to the gym in our building. I wondered how Charles found the fortitude to start his days in the gym in Iraq. Even his soldiers marveled at his discipline.
“It was hard over there, it really was,” said one of them, Sergeant First Class Kenny Morris. “I spent six out of every nine days outside the gate, so the two or three days inside the gate I didn’t waste my time going to the gym. I chose to relax, but he was obviously very physically fit and took a lot of pride in keeping himself in shape. I know he also ran a lot.”
Charles did not exercise out of vanity. It was a form of therapy. It also gave him the stamina to do his job. Sergeant Shoan Mohammed, a gunner in your father’s unit, recalled walking for miles with Charles in full body armor in the dry heat, searching for weapons and combatants in areas that were not easily reachable by vehicle. When the soldiers took breaks and sat down, Charles was always the first up. “That was to let the guys know that if he could do it, we could do it, too,” Mohammed told me.
Lt. Col. Donahoe recalled one such mission, during which dozens of his soldiers became dehydrated. “It was hot as the dickens. We had to give fifty to seventy IVs.” Charles, he said, was not one of the soldiers treated. “He wouldn’t have allowed anyone to give him one anyway. The first sergeant was not going to let himself get to the point where he had to let his guys see him get an IV.”
Your father was so determined to set an example for his troops that he often made a point of taking on duties usually left to a private or another entry-level soldier, dedication that occasionally took his soldiers by surprise. One day, after a mission to a village to scout out insurgents, Mohammed was “out in the middle of nowhere,” surrounded by sand, when he saw a tank approaching. The gun loader, typically the junior soldier riding the tank, began waving at him to come toward him.
“I gave him the finger, not thinking anything of it, for him calling me over there as if I didn’t have anything better to do,” Mohammed admitted. “So this loader jumps off the tank, I mean literally jumps off the hatch, and now he’s really mad coming toward me. When I started walking toward him I realized it was First Sergeant King and said ‘Oh shit, what did I just do?’ I’m five-six and a half and about a buck and a half dripping wet, and he’s about six-two and two hundred fifty pounds. He was walking through two feet of sand.”
When your father reached his soldier, he got in his face. “Don’t you ever give me the finger again,” he barked.
Charles cooled down quickly, though. He realized that Mohammed had not recognized him from so far away. And how many first sergeants performed the duties of a gun loader?
“You can always humble yourself to do the job at the bottom is what he told me,” Mohammed said. “To me, his rank and stature wasn’t what I respected him for. I respected him as a man. There was a selflessness in him.”
Charles did not always hold his soldiers to the standard he set for himself. He had a soft streak. One of his soldiers’ wives, Valerie Lauer, recalled how Charles pretended not to notice when she spent several nights in the men’s barracks in Fort Hood with her husband, Timothy, before they moved into their home. “I even got to climb into a tank,” she told me.
One soldier recalled how Charles gave him time off from combat training to be with his wife for the birth of their baby. “He gave me his word that I could go and he kept his promise. I stayed in the hospital three days because she had a C-section and he didn’t ask once when I was going to come back to formation.”
These stories were difficult to hear. On one hand, I was envious; Charles had not always been as generous with us as he had been with his men. On the other, I loved him more for embracing the responsibilities of his position in away that set him apart. Only about io percent of enlisted troops ever attain the rank of first sergeant. Fewer still lead troops in war. Charles also earned an army Combat Action Badge for “engaging the enemy” in battle. He was awarded the badge for his actions during a gun battle that took place less than three months after he arrived in Iraq. Some men from another company were ambushed and your father drove into the melee and pulled the wounded to safety. “Without regard to his personal safety, he remained in the kill zone to ensure the rapid and safe evacuation of every other soldier,” reads the citation nominating him for the badge.
Charles did not care much about medals and awards, but he did give and demand respect for men and women in uniform.
I could tell from the letters Charles wrote in the weeks just before his leave that the trauma of combat was wearing on him. After all, he had been away for nearly eight months. I began to make plans for his homecoming. I bought a black leather backpack for him to use as a diaper bag. I stocked the refrigerator with his favorite beer. I did not know if my efforts would help, but I would have done anything to soothe the suffering I read in those letters.
