Search continues for two missing U.S. soldiers

By Thomas Frank, USA TODAY
QARGHULI VILLAGE, Iraq — Sometimes when he's out on patrol, Army Spc. Samuel Rhodes sees a shred of camouflage in the bushes, and his heart leaps. Each time, Rhodes hopes it will be the missing clue to the fate of two U.S. soldiers who were captured by insurgents south of Baghdad after an attack in May. Inevitably, though, the piece of camouflage turns out to be from an Iraqi army uniform.

"That just crushes you," Rhodes says. His missing comrades, he adds, "are on my mind every day."

The trail of Spc. Alex Jimenez and Pvt. Byron Fouty is getting colder by the day, leaving their platoon-mates with only faint hope that they are still alive. Their absence is particularly poignant because such losses have been so rare in Iraq: Unlike previous wars, when thousands of troops have gone missing from chaotic battlefields, only four U.S. troops are listed as missing in Iraq.

PHOTOS: Hope fades for missing soldiers That's largely because U.S. forces have made a point of engaging enemy fighters only in limited and tightly controlled situations, and because of the military's improvements in keeping track of troops by using satellite technology and other types of communication, says Larry Greer, spokesman for the Pentagon's POW/MIA office.

The May 12 attack, which the U.S. military blames on al-Qaeda, killed four other soldiers instantly. Immediately afterward, more than 4,000 U.S. troops began searching a 500-square-mile area of date palms and goat pastures south of Baghdad for Jimenez, Fouty and Pfc. Joseph Anzack Jr., who also was captured in the attack. More than 1,000 Iraqi men were detained for questioning.

On May 23, Anzack's body was found floating in the Euphrates River about a mile south of the attack site. Two weeks later, images posted on an insurgent website showed close-ups of Fouty and Jimenez's military ID cards.

Since then, the manhunt — a mission made more grim by the loss of two more troops who took part in it — has been scaled back. These days, troops from Jimenez and Fouty's 10th Mountain Division pursue tips from local villagers and dig for their comrades' remains in fields.

"If they haven't been found by now, they're probably buried somewhere," battalion spokesman Sgt. Joseph Caron acknowledges.

The search for Jimenez, 25, and Fouty, 19, has become a test of how much Iraqis will cooperate with American troops — a crucial element of the counterinsurgency strategy launched this year by Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq.

Six of the 12 to 20 suspected attackers have been captured and are being held at a U.S. military prison near the Baghdad airport. However, the search also has encountered a frustrating number of dead-ends, raising questions about how many of the clues are red herrings.

Among the division's 800-soldier 4th Battalion, the drive to find the missing soldiers has never been greater. Yet many are beginning to fear that when their tour ends in three months, they will do the unthinkable: return home without two of their own.

"I'm actually scared to go home," says Spc. Shaun Gopaul, whose wife, Caridad Gopaul, is close with Jimenez's wife, Yaderlin Hiraldo. "To look her in the face — what am I supposed to say?"

At the battalion headquarters in Youssifiyah, 10 miles from where the attack occurred, color photocopies of the two missing soldiers are tacked to a wall. The paper edges are starting to curl. A handwritten inscription at the top of Jimenez's photo reads: "Never Give Up, We will find You, Keep Fighting."

Troops say the search is now mostly a mission of pride — and principle.

"You don't want to leave a body just out there," says Pfc. Clayton Peterson, who had been in the same company as Fouty since basic training. "You feel like you left them behind."

A pre-dawn ambush

The troops of the Delta Company continue to perform the same mission that Jimenez and Fouty did: protecting a narrow, dusty road known as "Route Malibu." The road, which runs parallel to the Euphrates south of Baghdad, was so bomb-infested a year ago it was considered one of Iraq's most dangerous.

Al-Qaeda and other insurgent groups have used the region to stash arsenals, plan attacks and build car bombs, says Maj. Robert Griggs, the 4th Battalion's operations officer.

Last fall, when the 10th Mountain Division began arriving, soldiers launched a new tactic, moving out of fortified regional bases and establishing small outposts in houses and buildings along the road. The effort presaged the aggressive U.S. military strategy — popularly known as "the surge" — that Petraeus implemented in February.

"We were months ahead of the surge," Griggs says.

One company outpost where platoons of 20 or so soldiers spend a week at a time is a concrete produce market the Army rented and surrounded with sandbags. It has no running water, no toilet, no windows and no furniture. It offers little escape from a room cluttered with coolers, wet clothes and anti-tank guns. Soldiers sleep on triple-decker wood platforms they built. The bitter stench of dried sweat hangs heavily.

They are the sort of close quarters in which troops get to know each other well.

Wise and mature, Jimenez, of Lawrence, Mass., learned some Arabic for his second tour in Iraq, which began a year ago. He helped platoon medic Sgt. Michael Morse communicate with Iraqis he was treating. Jimenez instructed other soldiers to accept tea or cigarettes offered by locals, and gave newer troops tips on how to scan the ground for buried bombs.

"He was one of the best," Rhodes says.

Fouty, of Waterford, Mich., was just eight months out of basic training when he was captured, but he was not shy about speaking his mind. "If he saw something wasn't being done right, he'd tell you," Peterson says.

On May 12, the soldiers were in their Humvees guarding the road when the attack began in darkness at 4:44 a.m., says Capt. John Gilbreth, commander of Delta Company.

A group of 12 to 20 al-Qaeda fighters cut through razor-wire coils that U.S. soldiers had placed along both sides of the road to try to deter people from planting bombs under the road's surface.

After months of intensified U.S. attacks, al-Qaeda "needed to reassert their dominance," Griggs says.

Rockets and gunfire smashed the vehicles' armor. Grenades were thrown inside the Humvees through turrets. The Humvees' fuel ignited. The soldiers' own ammunition detonated, Griggs says.

"The attack was extremely bold," he says.

Soldiers from Delta Company headquarters a half-mile away on the same road heard the explosions and charged toward them. But they had to stop their Humvees when they saw wires that al-Qaeda operatives had laid on the road to detonate nearby bombs.

"It really is amazing how good the enemy was," Griggs says.

Rhodes, the Army specialist, hopped out of his Humvee and raced toward the burning vehicles shouting his comrades' names. He looked for them, saw a nearby house and wondered if they had escaped inside. "That's when we saw 'em," Rhodes says. "We saw our guys burning."

Then Rhodes caught the smell — "burning flesh."

Four soldiers from the platoon were killed. An Iraqi soldier working with the U.S. Army that morning also died in one of the Humvees.

Some soldiers believe that Jimenez, Fouty and Anzack were dragged away.

Peterson, the private first class who knows Fouty, says he and others found marks in the dirt near the attack site that were crusted with blood. Griggs says it's not clear how the captives were taken from the scene.

Many missing from wars past

By controlling its troops' exposure to insurgent forces and using satellite-based computers and phones to track troops, the Pentagon has made it extremely rare for a soldier to go missing from the battlefields of Iraq.

"You no longer have the possibility of thousands of guys or even hundreds being isolated or cut off," Greer says.

In World War II, hundreds of troops would go missing in a single battle when they were surrounded by enemy fighters, killed or captured. In some cases, their remains were buried and never found.

More than 78,000 U.S. troops remain missing from World War II, according to Pentagon figures. More than 8,100 remain missing from the Korean War, and 1,779 from Vietnam. Another 867 troops who were declared missing at some point during the Vietnam War were identified when their remains were found.

In Iraq, the U.S. protective tactics have frustrated insurgents, who can gain stature and a potential bargaining chip by capturing a soldier, Virginia Military Institute historian Malcolm Muir Jr. says.

Griggs believes that on May 12, the attackers set out to kill — not capture — U.S. soldiers but saw that three were injured and took them. Al-Qaeda's leadership demands that live U.S. troops be brought to them, Griggs says.

Shortly after the attack, Griggs and other officers met with local sheiks and told them they had a choice: They could help the U.S. and Iraqi armies take out al-Qaeda or face a heavy-handed response. There was "a quick turnaround of sentiment" toward the U.S. troops, Griggs says.

Last month, Griggs went to a spot near the Euphrates where a source had told him to dig for the soldiers' bodies. He found nothing. "You'll never know if it was bad information or if you just weren't in the right area," Griggs says.

More recently, Griggs took a squad to a local mosque whose elders, he was told, might help find people involved in the capture. The soldiers took photos of 39 men who were at the mosque and showed them to local Iraqis who are helping the search. The local informants identified a man they said might know the soldiers' whereabouts, Griggs says. Troops are now trying to find him.

Griggs also is pursuing leads indicating that the captured soldiers may have been transferred from one al-Qaeda cell to another. There are other tips, too vague to act on.

"In all of these instances," he says, "the information started as a tip from a local citizen."

Despite all the leads, there's no clear sign pointing to the soldiers' whereabouts.

"Our information has not been the greatest," Caron says. "Obviously, they haven't been found."

'I feel he is still alive'

Under Pentagon policy, U.S. troops retain their missing status until a year after a war ends.

At that point, if they or their remains have not been found, the military will declare them presumptively dead, Greer says. That would allow a missing servicemember's family to receive $400,000 from a military life insurance policy, a $100,000 "death gratuity" and lifetime annuity for the spouse of about 40% of the servicemember's base pay.

A week after Jimenez and Fouty were captured, their Delta Company comrades packed their belongings and sent the boxes to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, along with the possessions of the soldiers who were killed. Personal items went to families.

Meanwhile, the unit is not as cohesive, not as spirited, not as jovial as it used to be "because we've got all these new guys," Sgt. Michael Morse says. "I'd go back to getting blown up and shot at every day to have (Jimenez and Fouty) back."

Gopaul, the Army specialist who lived with Jimenez, became so distraught after the attack that Army mental-health counselors pulled him from combat, he says. He now works a desk job at battalion headquarters in Youssifiyah, and says he takes the antidepressant Lexapro and sleeping pills.

Finding Jimenez and Fouty remains "a No. 1 priority" of the U.S. Army units operating in the area south of Baghdad, 10th Mountain Division spokesman Maj. Webster Wright says. The search is "still very much alive," Wright says.

Back in the USA, Fouty's family will be holding a vigil, the second for him, Sunday at a veterans memorial in Lake Orion, Mich.

"In my mind and my heart, I feel he is still alive," says Gordon Dibler, Fouty's stepfather. "I'm going to keep that hope until I find any evidence" he isn't.

The troops hope to soon reopen Route Malibu, which has been closed to vehicles for months. Delta Company will start issuing Qarghuli Village driver's licenses that will list the make of each driver's car. Anyone found driving a car not listed on the license will be questioned.

Rhodes, the specialist, sounds bittersweet when he considers his platoon's fate as he sits on a cot outside the produce market smoking a cigarette.

"We gained a little more support in being able to work with this village" as a result of the attack, he says.

"They're a little more open with us. But we paid for this road in blood."

Contributing: Andrea Stone in McLean, Va.