I. Wolf Pack

Jess Cunningham was a staff sergeant in a mechanized unit of the U.S. Army—Alpha Company, First Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment, First Infantry Division—during the intensified fighting that accompanied the surge of American troops in Baghdad in 2007. This was his second tour in Iraq, and his first with Alpha Company. He had been a high-school football star in Bakersfield, California, before heading off to war. He had excelled in the army, rising rapidly through the ranks. Now 26, he was strong, alert, and accustomed to battle. He had a bright future.

But he also had a problem. Although Alpha Company appeared from the outside to be like any other infantry unit, neatly integrated into the larger American force structure, on the inside it revolved to an unusual degree around a single personality—that of an imposing first sergeant, a hard-charging 18-year veteran named John Hatley, who dominated the company. Hatley was a burly Texan who spoke with a drawl. He carried his 240 pounds on a six-foot frame, and at the age of 40 still achieved a perfect 300 on the army’s physical-fitness test. He had been the company’s first sergeant for three years and had delayed a promotion to sergeant major in order to return with his men to the fight. He reveled in his power. He made it clear that the rules of engagement that mattered were the ones he alone defined. Cunningham had never encountered such a sergeant before. He himself was a team player and not immune to Hatley’s leadership qualities, but over the first few months in Baghdad he began to struggle privately with doubts. The company called itself Wolf Pack and sometimes seemed to act like one. Cunningham did not question the war itself, but he wondered about the treatment of Iraqi detainees and the actions of certain gunners who seemed to be playing loose with their justifications for killing.

Alpha Company’s area of operations lay in southwest Baghdad, one of the most active battlefields in Iraq. Sunnis and Shiites were fighting over the neighborhoods, and insurgents from both groups were warring on American patrols. The U.S. mission was to promote stability. This boiled down to convoys of recent American high-school graduates lumbering around in Bradley troop carriers and armored Humvees from which they could barely see, struggling to distinguish combatants from civilians in an indecipherable city, and waiting to get attacked. Cunningham served as a squad leader in the company’s Second Platoon. They were based with Hatley’s headquarters platoon at a fortified combat outpost called Angry Dragon, which also housed the company’s Tactical Operations Center, an office and briefing room known as Wolf Den on the radios. Wolf Pack, Wolf Den, Angry Dragon—the bravura was probably useful, given the youth of the soldiers. The engagements were frequent and anything but child’s play. They resulted in uncounted numbers of Iraqi deaths. By contrast, the accounting of American losses was carefully done. During Alpha Company’s 14 months on the ground, six soldiers were killed and three were gravely wounded—a toll that amounted to a casualty rate of about 15 percent in Cunningham’s platoon alone. The first soldier died four months into the fight, on February 27, 2007. He was a tall, 22-year-old staff sergeant named Karl Soto-Pinedo, who was shot in the head by a sniper after he rose too high above the hatch of his Bradley. Three weeks later, on March 17, 2007, a 30-year-old specialist named Marieo Guerrero was lost to a jerry-rigged land mine, an I.E.D.

Then, in late March or early April, on a date lost as much to obfuscation as to the blur of war, Cunningham was given a training task, to serve as the leader of a routine “presence” patrol. The patrol consisted of a pair of lead and tail-end Bradleys, with three Humvees in between. Around noon they rolled out of the combat outpost carrying about 20 soldiers and multiple top-mounted guns. Cunningham occupied the first Humvee, along with a crew that included the unit’s civilian interpreter, an Iraqi called “Dennis.” The second Humvee was the one that mattered. It belonged to Hatley, who had decided to attach himself to the patrol to evaluate Cunningham’s performance. Along with his regular driver and gunner, Hatley was accompanied by the two men closest to him—the company’s chief medic, Sergeant Michael “Doc” Leahy, 27, who rode with Hatley wherever he went, and the Second Platoon’s senior NCO, Sergeant First Class Joseph Mayo, 26, a careerist whose eagerness to impress Hatley seemed to know no bounds. In the privacy of Alpha Company at war, these three men—Hatley flanked by Leahy and Mayo—formed the unit’s triumvirate of power.

Cunningham and Michael “Doc” Leahy at Camp Slayer, in Baghdad.

Their presence on the patrol frustrated Cunningham’s authority from the start but did not lessen his formal responsibility for the mission. The patrol rolled west. The patrol rolled south. It rolled into a neighborhood where Cunningham got out with the interpreter and asked about life on the ground. People said times were tough, and the patrol rolled on. Two hours after leaving the combat outpost, the patrol came under small-arms fire. The vehicles had stopped on an empty street between shuttered houses. The rounds clanged against the armor and caused the top gunners to hunker down. Hatley radioed to Cunningham, “What’ve you got?” Cunningham suspected he had the usual—angry locals who could melt away at will. He did not get excited. He radioed, “Does anyone have anything? All White elements respond. Direction? Distance?” The gunner on the tail-end Bradley spotted the gunfire coming from a rooftop in a cluster of buildings to the south. He answered with a burst of his own. The shooting stopped. Cunningham ordered a move toward the position. With some difficulty the convoy turned around, but it was blocked by marshy land and had to detour to the east before navigating back to the vicinity from which the attack had come. By then the attackers had gone.