The Good Soldiers

by David Finkel

  But it hadn’t, and as the first weeks of the deployment went by, that bit of good fortune seemed to set the pattern for them.

  They were finding stockpiles of weapons before the weapons could be used against them. They were getting shot at but not hit. Training and standards, Kauzlarich said—that was the difference. Other battalions were getting rocked by IEDs, but not them, and Kauzlarich kept saying, “It’s all good,” and that’s who they had become as March moved into April. They were the good soldiers.

  On the FOB, they were the only ones who wore gloves as they walked around, always ready for the just-in-case, and whenever a convoy rolled out of the wire, as one did now on April 6, at ten minutes past midnight, the soldiers always drove slower than fifteen miles per hour, because slower improved the chances of finding an IED. Other soldiers in other battalions who had been around longer sped; but not them. They crept along encased in the very best body armor, eye protection, ear protection, throat protection, groin protection, knee protection, elbow protection, and hand protection available, as well as in the very best Humvees the army had ever built, with armoring so thick that each door weighed more than four hundred pounds.

  Slowly, deliberately, they rolled into a neighborhood called Mualameen. They passed darkened apartment buildings. They passed the silhouette of a mosque. They drove with headlights off and night-vision goggles on, which at 12:35 a.m. flared into sudden blindness.

  Here came the explosion. It came through the doors. It came through the body armor. It came through the good soldiers. It was perfectly aimed and perfectly timed, and now one of the good soldiers was on fire.

  This was Cajimat, who in February had been gung ho to go, who in March had already seen enough to write in an online posting: “I just need some time to think this through,” and who in April was driving the third Hum-vee in a convoy of six, which was the one chosen by someone hiding in some shadow with a trigger in his hand.

  A wire ran from the trigger to another shadow, this one at the edge of the road. Almost certainly the man couldn’t see the actual IED, but he’d lined it up beforehand with a tall, tilting, broken, otherwise useless light pole on the far side of the road, which he could use as an aiming point. The first Humvee arrived at the aiming point, and, for whatever reason, the man didn’t push the trigger. The second Humvee arrived, and again he didn’t push. The third Humvee arrived, and, for whatever reason, now he did push, and the resulting explosion sent several large steel discs toward the Humvee at such high velocity that by the time they reached Cajimat’s door, they had been reshaped into unstoppable, semi-molten slugs. At most, the IED cost $100 to make, and against it the $150,000 Humvee might as well have been constructed of lace.

  In went the slugs through the armor and into the crew compartment, turning everything in their paths into flying pieces of shrapnel. There were five soldiers inside. Four managed to get out and tumble, bleeding, to the ground, but Cajimat remained in his seat as the Humvee, on fire now, rolled forward, picked up speed, and crashed into an ambulance that had been stopped by the convoy. The ambulance burst into flames as well. After that, a thousand or so rounds of ammunition inside the Humvee began cooking off and exploding, and by the time the Humvee was transported back to Rustamiyah toward sunrise, there wasn’t much left to see. As the battalion doctor noted on Cajimat’s death report: “Severely burned,” and then added: “(beyond recognition).”

  Nonetheless, there were procedures to follow in such circumstances, and Kauzlarich now got to learn precisely what those involved.

  They began when the Humvee was unloaded at Vehicle Sanitization, a tarped-off area with decent drainage just inside a side gate. There, hidden from view, photographs were taken of the damage, the holes in the door were measured and analyzed, and soldiers did their best to disinfect what was left of the Humvee with bottles of peroxide and Simple Green. “I mean, it’s clean. It’s cleaner than when it comes off the assembly line,” the officer in charge told Kauzlarich of what his soldiers usually accomplished—but in this case, he said, “You’re more consolidating it and getting it ready for shipment, because you can’t really clean that.”

  At the same time, Cajimat’s remains were being prepared for shipment behind the locked doors of a little stand-alone building in which there were sixteen storage compartments for bodies, a stack of vinyl body bags, a stack of new American flags, and two Mortuary Affairs soldiers whose job was to search the remains for anything personal that a soldier might have wanted with him while he was alive.

  “Pictures,” one of the soldiers, Sergeant First Class Ernesto Gonzalez, would say later, describing what he has found in uniforms of the bodies he has prepared. “Graduation pictures. Baby pictures. Standing with their family. Pictures of them with their cars.”

  “Folded flags,” said his assistant, Specialist Jason Sutton.

  “A sonogram image,” Gonzalez said.

  “A letter that a guy had in his flak vest,” Sutton said, thinking of the first body he worked on. “‘This is to my family. If you’re reading this, I’ve passed away.’”

  “Hey, man. Don’t read no letters,” Gonzalez said.

  “It was the only time,” Sutton said. “I don’t read the letters. I don’t look at the pictures. It keeps me sane. I don’t want to know anything. I don’t want to know who you are. I want the bare minimum. If I don’t have to look at it, I won’t. If I don’t have to touch it, I won’t.”

  Meanwhile, the Explosive Ordnance Disposal team was finishing its report about the explosion:

  “Blast seat measured 8’ x 9’ x 2.5’ and was consistent with 60—80 lb of unknown explosives.”

  The platoon leader was writing a statement about what had happened:

  “PFC Cajimat was killed on impact and was not able to be pulled from the vehicle.”

  The platoon sergeant was writing a statement, too:

  “PFC Diaz came running out of the smoke from the explosion. Myself and CPL Chance put him in the back of my truck where CPL Chance treated his wounds. I then saw to the left of the HUMV three soldiers, one being pulled on the ground. I ran to the soldiers and saw it was CPL Pellecchia being dragged, screaming he couldn’t get PFC Cajimat out of the vehicle.”

  The battalion doctor was finishing his death report:

  “All four limbs burned away, bony stumps visible. Superior portion of cranium burned away. Remaining portion of torso severely charred. No further exam possible due to degree of charring.”

  The Pentagon was preparing a news release on what would be the 3,267th U.S. fatality of the war:

  “The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

  And Kauzlarich, back in his office now, was on the phone with Cajimat’s mother, who was in tears asking him a question:

  “Instantly,” he said.

  Several days later, Kauzlarich walked to a far corner of FOB and went into a building that was indistinguishable from all the other buildings except for a sign on a blast wall that read, chapel. One last thing to do.

  Inside, soldiers were preparing for that night’s memorial service. A slide show of Cajimat was being shown on a screen to the left of the altar. In the center, a few soldiers were making a display out of his boots, his M-4, and his helmet. Sad, sentimental music was playing, something with bagpipes, and Kauzlarich listened in silence, his expression betraying nothing, until Cajimat’s platoon wandered in and took seats.

  Diaz, the one who’d come running out of the smoke, his lower leg now filled with shrapnel, was among them, on crutches, and when he took a seat, Kauzlarich sat next to him and asked how he was.

  “Yesterday I put on a tennis shoe for the first time,” he said.

  “We’ll get you out in the fight again ricky tick,” Kauzlarich promised him, slapping him on the good leg, and when he got up and moved on, Diaz closed his eyes for a moment and sighed.

  He next made his way to John Kirby, the staff sergeant who had been
in the right front seat of the Humvee, just a foot or so from Cajimat, and whose eyes suggested he was still there.

  “How are the burns?” Kauzlarich asked.

  “All right,” Kirby said, shrugging as he gave the good soldier’s answer, and then, willing his eyes to be still, he looked directly at Kauzlarich and said, “I mean, it sucks.”

  Up on the screen, the pictures of Cajimat continued to rotate.

  There he was smiling.

  There he was in his body armor.

  There he was smiling again.

  “I love that picture,” one of the soldiers said, and they were all watching now, chewing gum, picking at fingernails, saying nothing. It was late morning, and even though the chapel was surrounded by blast walls, a few rays of gray light managed to find their way in through the windows, which helped.

  That night, though, when the memorial service began, it was different. The light was gone. The chapel was dark. The air didn’t move. Several hundred soldiers sat shoulder to shoulder, and some were crying as the eulogies began. “He was always happy. He had a heart bigger than the sun,” said one soldier, and if that wasn’t sad enough to hear from a nineteen-year-old who ten weeks before had been hollering in some Kansas snow, another said, “He was always there for me. I wish I could have been there for him. I’m sorry.”

  Through it all, Kauzlarich sat quietly, waiting for his turn, and when it came, he walked to the lectern and looked in silence at his soldiers, all of whom were looking at him. In this moment, he wanted to say something that would describe Cajimat’s death for them as more than grievous. He had been thinking for several days about what to say, but while it was easy enough to sit in Kansas filled with ham and apple crisp and talk about change with a detached curiosity, now they had lost their first soldier. Their cherries had been popped. As had his.

  So he decided to call it what he believed it to be, a rallying point as much as a loss, the point from which to measure everything to come, and said so to the soldiers. “Tonight,” he said, “we take the time to honor Task Force Ranger’s first loss, an unfortunate loss that in a special way made us as an organization whole.”

  That’s how he characterized the subtraction of a soldier—as making the 2-16 whole—and the word seemed to hover in the air for a moment before settling onto the quiet men. Among them was Diaz, and as he sat there with shrapnel in his leg, did he believe that, too? Did Kirby, with his twitchy eyes? Did the other two soldiers who’d been in the Humvee, who were both on their way back to the United States with injuries so serious that they would be out of the fight for good?

  Did all of them?

  Didn’t matter. Of course they did.

  That’s what their commander said, and that’s what their commander believed. For two months the soldiers had thought they were in the war, but now they really were in it, Cajimat was the proof, Cajimat was the validation, and as soon as the memorial ended, Kauzlarich hurried back to his office to see what would come next.

  He turned on his computer. A fresh e-mail was waiting for him. It was from army headquarters, and it was informing him that in order to better accomplish the strategy of the surge, the 2-16’s deployment was being extended from twelve months to fifteen months.

  “That’s okay,” he said.

  He read it again.

  “More time to win,” he said.

  Again.

  “It’s all good,” he said, and went into the next room to tell the news to Major Cummings, who was at his desk, lost in thought, a little homesick, and Michael McCoy, his command sergeant major, who was tracking a fly that was crawling across the battalion’s American flag. Red stripe. White stripe. Red stripe. White stripe. Now McCoy reached toward a stack of programs left over from Cajimat’s memorial and grabbed a dirty fly swatter that was resting on top of them. Kauzlarich paused. The fly fell. Then the surge resumed.

  2

  APRIL 14, 2007

  Violence in Baghdad, sectarian violence in Baghdad, that violence

  that was beginning to spiral out of control, is beginning to subside.

  And as the violence decreases, people have more confidence, and

  if people have more confidence, they’re then willing to

  make difficult decisions of reconciliation necessary for Baghdad

  to be secure and this country to survive and thrive as a democracy.

  —GEORGE W. BUSH, April 10, 2007

  The building that Kauzlarich got for his headquarters was the one on the FOB that none of the other battalions had wanted, a two-story box that was being used for storage until the 2-16 took it over. It had deep cracks in several walls from earlier rocket attacks, and whenever a rocket landed nearby, dust clouds would come flying inside. Other battalion commanders on the FOB had offices big enough for sofas and conference tables; Kauzlarich’s office had just enough room for his desk and three metal folding chairs. It wasn’t even an office, really, but a section of an existing room that soldiers had walled off with spare plywood. He squeezed into the space on one side of the plywood, and on the other side were McCoy, Cummings, and four items whose importance would shift back and forth during the course of the deployment.

  One was the fly swatter. One was a tape dispenser. One was a book called Counterinsurgency FM 3-24. And one was a large cardboard box filled with dozens of deflated soccer balls.

  Views from the right rear window of a Humvee, Baghdad, Iraq

  For now, Kauzlarich thought that giving soccer balls to Iraqi children who would run up to his Humvee screaming, “Mister, mister,” was having an effect. A child would take home a soccer ball; his parents would ask where it came from; he would say, “the Americans”; the parents would be delighted; their confidence would increase; they would be more willing to make the difficult decisions of reconciliation; Baghdad would become secure; democracy in Iraq would thrive; the war would be won. Eventually, Kauzlarich would give up on soccer balls.

  For now, no one touched the tape dispenser. Eventually, Cummings would begin swatting flies just hard enough to stun them, stick them to a piece of tape, and drop them alive into his trash can, which would be something that did have an effect. “I hate flies,” he would say each time he did this.

  Eventually, the book would become covered with dust. But in these days after Cajimat, it was still something that was referred to, enough so that Cummings had bookmarked page 1-29 with a piece of paper on which he had written: “Are We Winning Table.”

  The book, released just before the 2-16 deployed, was the military’s first update to its counterinsurgency strategy in twenty years. When he announced the surge, Bush had made it clear that counterinsurgency was now what the war was about, and to the extent that a war could have an instruction book, that’s what the field manual was. It was 282 pages of lessons, all urging soldiers to “focus on the population, its needs, and its security” as the best way to defeat the enemy, rather than by killing their way to victory. Control the population, win the war. Win the people, win the war. To the soldiers of the 2-16, this was an interesting turn of events. “Remember, we are an infantry battalion,” Cummings said one day. “Our task and purpose is to close with and destroy the enemy. We are the only force designed for this. Armor stands off and they kill from a distance. Aviation kills from a distance. The infantryman goes in and kills with his hands, if necessary.” The manual got even more interesting under the section called “Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency,” which sounded suspiciously Zen-like. “Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is.” “Some of the best weapons for counterinsurgents do not shoot.” “Sometimes, the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be.”

  Privately, Cummings wondered whether this was the type of war Kauzlarich would want to fight. “He’s a soldier. All he is is a soldier. He’s an instrument of war, and he’s looking for that fight, and that’s why I think he is somewhat frustrated in the fact that he’s not in the clean war, where he can be the leader up front—‘Follow me, men’�
��because this war doesn’t dictate it. This war dictates drinking chai, handshaking, being political. And I think that’s where he’s a little uncomfortable. Because he’s the guy at the front of the formation who can run the battalion into the ground, if necessary. Literally: ‘Follow me.’”

  But Kauzlarich, at least at this point, insisted that he loved being part of the strategy. “You know what’s funny? This is what I always wanted to do. I always wanted to be a soldier and statesman together,” he said one day. He was in his office, looking at a wall map that showed the 2-16’s AO. Some people called the area New Baghdad. Some called it Nine Nissan, for the ninth of April, the day Baghdad fell. Kauzlarich had his own name for it. “This place is a shithole,” he said, “but it has so much potential. I’ve often thought, let’s take Fedaliyah”—he pointed to one of the worst neighborhoods in the AO—“and let’s bulldoze the whole town. In six months, I could have an entire city rebuilt. It would have electricity. It would have running fresh water. It would have sewerage. It would have new schools. It would have houses that were built to some sort of safety code. And then we move to Kamaliyah and do the same thing there. Rebuild the whole darn place.”

  The map he was looking at, composed of satellite imagery, was extraordinary in its detail. It showed Fedaliyah, Kamaliyah, Mualameen, Al-Amin, Mashtal, and every other neighborhood in the AO, building by building and street by street, each of which had been given an American name. That wide street with the waterway running down the middle of it, which Iraqis called Canal Road, was, to the Americans, Route Pluto; the busy road it intersected with, which was constantly being seeded with hidden bombs, was Route Predators; the one where Cajimat died was Route Denham; and the skinny one that soldiers tried to avoid because of its ambush possibilities was Dead Girl Road.