by David Finkel
A loser watching a loser: On January 10, it was hard to see Bush any other way. At 33 percent, his approval rating was the lowest yet of his presidency, and as he began to speak that night, his voice, at least to the 67 percent who disapproved of him, might have sounded more desperate than resolute, because by just about any measure, his war was on the verge of failure. The strategy of winning an enduring peace had failed. The strategy of defeating terrorism had failed. The strategy of spreading democracy throughout the Middle East had failed. The strategy of at least bringing democracy to Iraq had failed. To most Americans, who polls showed were fed up and wanted the troops brought home, the moment at hand was of tragedy, beyond which would be only loss.
In that moment, what Bush then announced seemed an act of defiance, if not outright stupidity. Instead of reducing troop levels in Iraq, he was increasing them by what would eventually be thirty thousand. “The vast majority of them—five brigades—will be deployed to Baghdad,” he said, and continued: “Our troops will have a well-defined mission: to help Iraqis clear and secure neighborhoods, to help them protect the local population, and to help ensure that the Iraqi forces left behind are capable of providing the security that Baghdad needs.”
That was the heart of his new strategy. It was a counterinsurgency strategy that the White House initially called “the New Way Forward,” but that quickly became known as “the surge.”
The surge, then. As far as the majority of the American public was concerned, those additional troops would be surging straight into the tragic moment of the war, but as Bush finished speaking, and rumors about the identities of the five brigades began circulating, and their identities started becoming public, and the official announcement came that one would be a brigade that was about to deploy from Fort Riley, Kansas, Kauzlarich saw it differently.
A battalion commander in the thick of the war: that was who he was going to be. Because of strategic disasters, public revulsion, political consequences, and perfect timing, he and his soldiers weren’t going to be protecting supply convoys. They were going to Baghdad. Meaning restored, Kauzlarich closed his eyes and thanked God.
Three weeks later, his departure now a few days away, his hand a bit sore from being grabbed so many times by people shaking it and hanging on to it and looking in his eyes as if they were already trying to remember the last time they saw Ralph Kauzlarich, Kauzlarich sat down in his house to fill out a booklet called the Family Contingency Workbook.
I want to be buried / cremated.
“Buried,” he wrote.
Location of cemetery:
“West Point,” he wrote.
Personal effects I want buried with me:
“Wedding band,” he wrote.
In came his wife, Stephanie, who had been in another part of the house with their three young children. They had met twenty years before, when both were at West Point, and he had sensed immediately that this tall, athletic, chin-out woman suddenly in front of him was someone who would be able to hold her own against him. She was a catch, and he knew it. He considered himself one, too, and his very first words to her, spoken with utter confidence, were, “You can call me The Kauz.” The Kauz—to him, it sounded so much better than Ralph, and so much better than his full last name, which some people properly pronounced as KAUZ-la-rich, and some people mispronounced. Now, so many years later, years in which Stephanie had never, not even once, called him The Kauz, she looked at what he had written down and said, “That’s all you want to be buried with?”
“Yes,” he said, continuing.
Type of headstone:
“Military,” he wrote.
Scripture you want read:
“Psalm 23,” he wrote.
Music you want played:
“Something upbeat,” he wrote.
“Ralph, upbeat music?” Stephanie asked.
Meanwhile, in other parts of Fort Riley, the other soldiers were getting ready, too. Finishing wills. Designating powers of attorney. Working their way down final medical checklists. Hearing. Heart rate. Blood pressure. Blood type. They went to health briefings and were told: Wash your hands. Drink bottled water. Wear cotton underwear. Watch out for rats. They put on their body armor and stood outside in a zero-degree wind chill for inspection and were told that the straps weren’t tight enough, the ceramic plates intended to stop high-powered sniper bullets were an inch off, their compression bandages and tourniquets were stored in the wrong place, they were effectively dead men. They went to a briefing on stress management and suicide prevention and were told by a chaplain, “This is important. If you are not ready to die, you need to get there. If you are not ready to die, you need to be. If you are not ready to see your friends die, you need to be.”
And were they ready? Who knew? For most of them, this would be their first deployment, and for many it would be their first time away from the United States. The average age in the battalion was nineteen. Could a nineteen-year-old be ready? What about a nineteen-year-old soldier named Duncan Crookston, who was in his little apartment with his mother and father and new, nineteen-year-old wife, packing his things, when the phone rang? “Buried,” he said. “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” he said. Ten minutes later he hung up. “Just planned my funeral,” he nonchalantly told his curious parents and new wife, and was Duncan Crookston ready?
What about the youngest soldier in the battalion, who was only seventeen? “Roger that,” he said, whenever he was asked if he was ready, but when rumors about the deployment first began to circulate, he had taken aside his platoon sergeant, a staff sergeant named Frank Gietz, to ask how he’d be able to handle killing someone. “Put it in a dark place while you’re there,” Gietz had said.
So was a seventeen-year-old ready?
For that matter, was Gietz, who had been to Iraq twice, was one of the oldest soldiers in the battalion, and knew better than anyone the meaning of “a dark place”?
Was Jay Cajimat, who in ten weeks was going to be remembered by his mother in the local paper as a “soft-hearted boy”?
Didn’t matter. They were going.
They packed ammunition and photographs and first-aid kits and candy. They went into town for the last time and in a few cases drank too much, in a few other cases went AWOL to see girlfriends, and in at least one case got married. Five days before departure, Kauzlarich studied a list of soldiers who wouldn’t be able to go. Seven needed some sort of surgery. Two were about to become fathers. One had an infant in intensive care. Two were in jail. Nine were, for various reasons, as Kauzlarich put it, “mentally incapable of doing what we’re about to do.” But most were eager to do what they were about to do, were impatient, even, and said so with certainty. “It’s the decisive point of the fight,” one soldier explained, foot tapping, head nodding, practically vibrating. “This is the chance to win it.”
Four days until departure:
Kauzlarich gathered the battalion in a field behind headquarters to explain where in Baghdad they would be based. It had snowed, and it was cold, and the sun was going down as he said that they soon would be near Sadr City, Baghdad’s infamous slum and a center of the insurgency. The soldiers ringed him and pressed closer to hear, and as he raised his voice and said the words “a nice, little, mean, nasty area,” they echoed off the ice and the surrounding buildings, making this place feel even chillier than it was.
“Now, it’s not a game, guys,” he said. “You are going to see some horrific things in the next year. You are going to see some things you are not going to understand . . . It’s down to nut-cutting time, and we’re going to get some, but we’re going to do it in a disciplined manner, like we do everything . . . I am absolutely confident in your abilities, absolutely confident . . . The bottom line is this weekend’s your last, okay? So call your parents, love your families, stay focused on them for this weekend. Not later than Tuesday night, as soon as you get on that airplane and that airplane takes off, your sole focus is going to be winning our nation’s war.”
There was a pause, just long enough for the word war to finish echoing, and then the soldiers began to cheer, lustily and for a long while, after which they headed inside, filling the room with the wintry smell of boys who have been out in the snow.
One day until departure:
In the Kauzlarich house, the children were running around with stuffed animals purchased over the weekend, each with a memory chip containing a quick-recorded message from their father for them to play over the coming year. “Hi Jacob. I love you.” “Hi Garrett. I sure do love you.” “I love you, Allie-gator.” Allie was seven-year-old Alexandria Taylor Kauzlarich, a name chosen because the initials were ATK, which reminded her father of the word attack. The oldest of the three children, she was also the most sensitive to what was at hand. “I don’t want you to leave,” she said at one point, and when her father told her, “I’ll be okay, and if I’m not okay, you’ll be okay, because I’ll be checking on you,” she said, “Then I’ll kill myself so I can be with you.” She climbed onto his lap, and meanwhile, Jacob, five, and Garrett, three, both too young for such sensitivities, continued to run around the house clobbering each other with their stuffed animals, while Stephanie had her own images to contend with. “Gray. Dismal. A very sad place to live,” is how she envisioned the place her husband was going. She had done her time in the army after graduating from West Point and had learned to guard against too much sentimentality, but now came a new image, that of a freshly dead soldier. Meanwhile, Kauzlarich looked at his family and, giving into that sentimentality a bit, said, “I mean, this is a very complex war. The end state, in my opinion, the end state in Iraq would be that Iraqi children can go out on a soccer field and play safely. Parents can let their kids go out and play, and they don’t have a concern in the world. Just like us. Being able to go out and do what we want to do and not being concerned about being kidnapped, accosted, whatnot. I mean, that’s the way the whole world should be. Is that possible?”
Departure day:
The soldiers were due in the battalion parking lot at 1:00 p.m., and by 12:42 the first hug between a soldier and his family was under way, a tangle of moving arms that was still going strong at 12:43. By 12:45, tears had begun in several places, including inside a car where a woman sat motionless against the door, head in her hands, while outside the car a soldier leaned against the trunk and smoked; and so it continued as the afternoon progressed.
The soldiers smoked cigarettes. They lined up their body armor. They signed out their weapons from lockup. They waited with wives, girlfriends, children, parents, and grandparents, and constantly checked their watches. One soldier couldn’t stop kissing a young woman who was up on her tiptoes, while Gietz told his platoon to start wrapping up the goodbyes already, while another soldier loaded his parents’ car with the things he wouldn’t be taking, including a pair of cowboy boots whose top halves had been dyed a beautiful blue. Midafternoon now, and Kauzlarich arrived with Stephanie and the children. “This day sucks,” he said, and when Allie started to cry, that only made things seem worse. He said goodbye to his family in his office. He said goodbye again when he put them in the car. He said goodbye again when they didn’t leave right away, just stayed in the car, and then he went back into his office and into the final hours.
Family photo: packed. Extra tourniquet: packed. Extra compression bandage: packed. He looked out the window. The family car was gone. He turned out the lights, shut the door, went outside, and made his way with his soldiers to a nearby gymnasium to wait for buses that would carry them to the airfield.
Nighttime now.
Here came the buses.
The soldiers stood and moved forward, and Kauzlarich clapped their backs as they funneled by.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Yessir.”
“Good?”
“Yessir.”
“Ready to be a hero?”
“Yessir.”
Out they went, one after another, until there was only one soldier left for Kauzlarich to speak with. “Are we ready for war?” he asked himself, and out he went, too.
A bus to a plane. A plane to another plane. Another plane after that to some helicopters, and at last they arrived at the place where they were to spend the next year, which wasn’t the Green Zone, with its paved roads and diplomats and palaces, and wasn’t one of the big army bases that members of Congress would corkscrew into just long enough to marvel at the Taco Bell before corkscrewing out. It was the place Congress and Taco Bell never got to, a compact forward operating base called FOB Rustamiyah, which some of the soldiers first got a sense of back in the United States by looking at maps. There was Iraq. There was Baghdad. There, marking the eastern edge of Baghdad, was the Diyala River. And there, next to a raggedy U-turn in the river, which to laughing nineteen-year-olds looked like something dangling from the rear end of a dog, was their new home.
Now that they had arrived, jamming in among 1,500 other soldiers from several other battalions, the descriptions would only get worse. Everything in Rustamiyah was the color of dirt, and stank. If the wind came from the east, the smell was of raw sewage, and if the wind came from the west, the smell was of burning trash. In Rustamiyah, the wind never came from the north or the south.
They began learning this as soon as they landed. The air caught in their throats. Dirt and dust coated them right away. Because they arrived in the dead of night they couldn’t see very much, but soon after sunrise, a few soldiers climbed a guard tower, peeked through the camouflage tarp, and were startled to see a vast landscape of trash, much of it on fire. One thing they had been told before they arrived was that the biggest threat in their part of Baghdad would be from homemade roadside bombs, which were referred to as improvised explosive devices or, more simply, IEDs. They had also been told that IEDs were often hidden in piles of trash. At the time it didn’t overly worry them, but now, as they looked out from the guard tower at acres of trash blowing across dirt fields and ashes from burned trash rising in smoke columns, it did.
“We ain’t ever gonna be able to find an IED in all this shit,” a soldier named Jay March said. Twenty years old and eager to fight, he could have been any soldier in the battalion. He said this quietly, and he said it nervously, too.
Several days later, their nervousness deepening, the entire battalion was ordered to gather before sunrise for its first operation: a day-long walk through the sixteen-square-mile area of operations they’d been assigned to bring under control. It was Kauzlarich’s idea. He’d wanted a dramatic way to announce to eastern Baghdad that the 2-16 had arrived, and he’d also wanted a dramatic way to get his soldiers off of the FOB and into their area of operation, or AO, so they would realize that they had nothing to fear. “To pop everybody’s cherry,” as he put it.
“Operation Ranger Dominance” was the name he chose for the walk. “The Kauzlarich Death March” was what his soldiers were calling it.
“Hey, Two-sixteen,” a soldier from a different battalion on the FOB scrawled on their bathroom wall the day before the operation. “Good luck on your Ranger Dumbass walk tomorrow.”
In full body armor, they assembled at 5:00 a.m. near the FOB’s main gate. Humvees would be interspersed here and there in case a soldier needed to be evacuated, but the point of the operation was to walk, to see and to be seen in some of Baghdad’s most hostile neighborhoods, and so the soldiers made sure their ceramic plates were perfectly in place. They put on Kevlar helmets, bullet-resistant glasses, and heat-resistant gloves. They strapped on knee pads and elbow pads in case they had to hit the dirt. Each soldier packed a tourniquet in one pants pocket and first-aid bandages in another pocket, and grenades and 240 rounds of ammunition in pouches attached to their body armor. All carried an M-4 assault rifle, some carried full machine guns, some carried nine-millimeter handguns, some carried good-luck charms, and all were carrying at least sixty extra pounds of weaponry and bulletproofing as they walked out of the FOB to make their first impression on 350,000 people who sur
ely were just waiting to blow the dumbasses up.
As they walked out of the gate, some of the soldiers were visibly shaking. Step by step, however, as they passed people who regarded them quietly, they began to relax, and by the time they got back to the FOB ten hours later, just as Kauzlarich had intended, they felt, if not fearless, then at least a little smarter about things. One platoon had found an unex-ploded mortar shell sticking out of the ground, with Iranian markings on the fins. A lesson, perhaps, in who they would be fighting.
Another platoon had been approached by a frantic woman carrying something bundled in a blanket, and when she didn’t halt, they could have been forgiven for assuming she was a suicide bomber. But now, as she reached them, they saw that she was holding a badly burned little boy with open eyes and blistering skin, and as they knelt to wrap him in clean bandages, the mother they might have shot was instead thanking them in tears.
A lesson, then, in restraint.
And a third platoon got a lesson in stupidity and luck after a soldier said that a piece of foam block on the side of a street looked weird to him, a second soldier went over and gave it a nudge with his foot, and a third picked it up to have a look and saw a hole with wiring inside. Back on the FOB now, astonished, relieved, knowing that it had been an IED packed with nuts and bolts, they still couldn’t believe it hadn’t exploded.