by David Finkel
Where did the names come from? Who had the dead girl been? How had the dead girl died? This far into the war, no one seemed to care. Sometimes anything more than an assumption is a waste of time in Iraq; and anyway, the names were fixed now, not just in 2-16’s AO but throughout all of Baghdad, which the map showed as well. Neighborhood by neighborhood, there was Baghdad in its entirety for Kauzlarich to consider—the east side, which was largely Shi’a after several years of violent ethnic and religious cleansing that had been brought on by the war; and the west side, which was largely Sunni. The west side contained elements of al Qaeda, and the east side contained the insurgent armies of the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, called the Jaish al Mahdi, or, in American-speak, JAM. The west side had suicide bombers killing American troops, and the east side had a particularly lethal type of IED called an explosively formed penetrator, or EFP, which was the type of bomb that had so easily penetrated Cajimat’s Humvee. The east side was the 2-16’s side, and every day that Kauzlarich looked at the map it got uglier and uglier, especially the way the Tigris River, which runs north—south and divides the city in half, curves to the west at one point and then curves back to the east, creating an elongated peninsula that is politely referred to as “teardrop shaped.” Kauzlarich wasn’t always polite, though. “It’s the perfect metaphor for this place,” he said, staring at the way the peninsula seemed to be inserting itself into the west side of the city. “Iraq fucking itself.”
His war, then, would be to take all of this on—the JAM, the EFPs, the mounds of garbage, the running sewage, the whatever else—and fix it. So far, no one had been able to do this, but he seemed so confident that he made a prediction. “Before we leave, I’m going to do a battalion run. A task force run. In running shorts and T-shirt.” He traced the route he had in mind on the map. Up Pluto, along First Street, up toward Den-ham, over toward Predators, and back.
“That’s my goal—without taking any casualties,” he said, and to that end, he was willing to try anything that might fall under counter-insurgency strategy, including one highlighted on page 1-29 of the field manual, which read, “Conduct effective, pervasive, and continuous information operations.” Hidden away on the FOB was a U.S.-funded radio station, and that’s where Kauzlarich headed late one afternoon, to speak to the residents of his nice, little, mean, nasty area via PEACE 106 FM.
The air was dusty as usual, and the wind, from the west, carried the scent of burning plastic as he walked past a latrine trailer, under which lived a feral cat with grossly swollen testicles. The fact that the cat was alive at all surely said something about resiliency in a country where life was down to the survival level. There were plenty of mice and rats on the FOB to kill, but there were things that wanted to kill the cat, too, such as a fox that could be seen from time to time trotting by with something writhing in its mouth and at other times standing with its teeth showing as it watched soldiers entering and exiting the latrines.
Next he walked past the mooring site for a bright white blimp called an aerostat, which floated high above the FOB with a remote-controlled camera that could be focused on whatever might be happening a thousand feet below. Day or night, the aerostat was up there, looking down and around, as were pole-mounted cameras, pilotless drones, high-flying jets, and satellites, making the sky feel at times as if it were stitched all the way up to the heavens with eyes. There were helicopters, too, armed with thirty-millimeter cannons and high-resolution cameras that could focus tightly on whatever was about to be shot, which one day was a dead water buffalo that had been spotted on its side with wires sticking out of its rear end. Concerned that an IED had been hidden inside the water buffalo’s rectum, the helicopter moved in for a closer look as its camera recorded what came next. There was the water buffalo. There were the wires. There was a dog trotting up to the water buffalo’s rear. “Be advised, there’s a dog licking the IED,” the pilot said, and then he opened fire.
Next Kauzlarich walked past the PX, which would soon have to close temporarily after a rocket crashed through the roof and exploded next to a display rack of Maxim magazines, and then he entered a ruined, four-story building that once had been a hospital.
The studio was on the top floor, up where the workers lived, those who had come to Rustamiyah from Nepal and Sri Lanka to clean the latrines, sweep up the endless dust, sleep six to a room, and listen to mournful songs on tinny speakers purchased from the sad little shops on the hospital’s first floor. The doors to these rooms were splintered and scuffed, and behind one of them was the radio staff. One of them was a local Iraqi whom the military was paying $88,000 a year to run the radio station. He introduced himself as Mohammed and then confided that Mohammed was a fake name he used to shield his identity. The other man was Mark, an interpreter, also from Baghdad, who confided that his name wasn’t really Mark.
“Dear listeners. Welcome to a new show,” Mohammed, or whoever he was, said to whoever might have been out there listening to PEACE 106 FM, and that’s how the first of what would be dozens of radio shows began. It was a complicated process. In Arabic, Mohammed said to his listeners, “Our first question to Colonel Kauzlarich is about the situation nowadays in New Baghdad,” which Mark then translated into English, to which Kauzlarich said in Arabic, “Shukran jazilan, Mohammed”— “Thank you very much, Mohammed”—and in English went on from there:
“Approximately eight weeks ago there was a great deal of crime,” he said. “There was sectarian violence. There were numerous murders. There were many bombs going off, roadside bombs, IEDs, EFPs, and also car bombs that were killing many innocent civilians. Today that does not exist. Crime is down by over eighty percent. The people of Nine Nissan are beginning to feel safe.”
He waited for Mark, or whoever Mark was, to translate what he’d said, and then continued: “My organization is known as Task Force Ranger, which is approximately eight hundred of the finest American soldiers. Everything that they do is in a controlled and disciplined manner. And one of the things I stress that they do as their commander is to go out and talk to the Iraqi people and determine what their feelings are, what their greatest fears are, and how we can best assist them and the Iraqi Security Forces in developing a very secure environment for them to live in.”
Again he waited for Mark to translate, and continued: “Bottom line is, the current situation is good—but it’s not as good as it’s going to be . . .” and on he went for thirty-six minutes until he said, seeking to win over the people, “Shukran jazilan,” and Mohammed said, “Shukranjaz ilan,” and Kauzlarich said, “Ma’a sala’ama, sadiqi,” and Mohammed said, “Ma’a sala’ama.”
This was war fighting as counterinsurgency, just as it was when, in an attempt to “expand and diversify the host-nation police force,” Kauzlarich met with an Iraqi army officer who was living in an elementary school that the Iraqis had taken over not far from the FOB. The walls were pink. They were decorated with Tweety Bird cutouts. There was a single cot and a small TV hooked up to a satellite dish, and the Iraqi had just brought Kauzlarich an orange soda when from the TV there came some kind of roar.
“Tomorrow, you’re going to begin doing clearance operations?” Kauzlarich asked, ignoring the sound.
“Yes,” said the Iraqi, shifting his eyes from Kauzlarich to the TV, where a movie was playing that showed American soldiers being shot.
“What is your personal assessment of the attitude of the Iraqi people in Baghdad al-Jadida?” Kauzlarich continued.
“Most of the people are from Sadr City,” the Iraqi said, as blood spurted in slow motion, guns blazed in slow motion, and the actor Mel Gibson moved in slow motion. “Every time the Americans put pressure on Sadr City, they run here.”
“What area do you think we should clear next?” Kauzlarich asked, shifting his attention to the TV, too, and then falling silent as he realized the movie was about a famous battle in the Vietnam War that had taken place just a few weeks after he had been born. In so many ways, that was the war that
had made him want to be a soldier in this war. It had been the background scenery of his childhood from the day he was born, on October 28, 1965, when the number of dead American troops was at 1,387, to the end of the war in April 1975, when 58,000 were dead and he was nine and a half years old and thinking he would like to be in the army. It wasn’t the deaths or politics that had affected him, but rather a boy’s romanticized visions of courage and duty, especially the scenes he had watched on TV of released POWs in the embrace of weeping families. But even more than those scenes was the Battle of Ia Drang, which began when an outnumbered army battalion was airdropped into the midst of two thousand North Vietnamese soldiers and ended up in a face-to-face fight to the death. Years later, in the army now and studying the mistakes of Vietnam, Kauzlarich had also studied the heroics of Ia Drang, and when the battle was memorialized in a book called We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young, he had a copy of it in hand when he one day met the commander of the battalion, Hal Moore, and asked him for advice. “Trust your instincts,” Moore had scribbled in the book. Ever since, Kauzlarich had tried to do just that, and now, how strange, here he was: a battalion commander just as Moore had been, in Iraq watching the movie version of the book about the battle that had helped turn him into what he had become.
“This is one of my favorite movies,” he said to the Iraqi.
“I like the way they fight,” the Iraqi said.
“That’s how I fight,” Kauzlarich said.
“What’s the name of the actor?” the Iraqi said.
“That’s Mel Gibson,” Kauzlarich said.
“He acts like a leader,” the Iraqi said.
Now neither said anything, just watched until Gibson, the battle over, said inconsolably, “I’ll never forgive myself—that my men died, and I didn’t.”
“Tsk tsk,” the Iraqi said.
“He’s very sad,” Kauzlarich said.
“Tsk tsk,” the Iraqi said again.
“He was the first guy to tell me to trust my instincts,” Kauzlarich said. “Hal Moore.”
The Iraqi got up and returned with a vanilla ice-cream cone that Kauzlarich began licking as Gibson, home now, fell into the arms of his wife—at which point the electricity went out, the TV went dead, and the movie came to a sudden end.
“Whoops,” Kauzlarich said.
Both waited in vain for the electricity to come back.
“So, how are we going to fix this?” Kauzlarich said, meaning the war.
The Iraqi continued to look at the TV and shrugged.
“How are we going to get this to stop?” Kauzlarich tried again.
“We need God’s help,” the Iraqi said, and Kauzlarich nodded, finished his ice-cream cone, and after a while excused himself to return to the FOB.
Hours later, as the sun set, the sky took on its nightly ominous feel. The moon, not quite full, rose dented and misshapen, and the aerostat, a gray shadow now rather than the bright white balloon it had been in daylight, loomed over a landscape of empty streets and buildings surrounded by sandbags and tall concrete blast walls.
Inside some of those buildings were Kauzlarich’s soldiers, all of whom had been trained not in counterinsurgency, but, as Cummings had put it, to close with and destroy the enemy. A week after Cajimat’s death, they were passing time between missions like they usually did, by playing video games on their computers or videochatting over the Internet. Or lifting weights, or watching bootleg DVDs that they could buy at the hospital for a dollar. Or drinking Red Bulls or Mountain Dews or water mixed with high-protein powder. Or stuffing themselves with tubs of Corn Pops at the dining facility. Or flipping through magazines that came as close as possible to violating the army’s ban on pornography. Such was life on the FOB for the eight hundred of the finest, whose behavior could be explained simply by the fact that so many of them were nineteen, or by the more complicated fact suggested by the ubiquitous blast walls that they did all of these things behind.
Blast walls surrounded their barracks.
Blast walls surrounded their dining facility.
Blast walls surrounded their chapel.
Blast walls surrounded their latrines.
They ate behind blast walls, prayed behind blast walls, peed behind blast walls, and slept behind blast walls, and now, on April 14, as the sun rose and the dented moon disappeared, they emerged from those blast walls and got in their Humvees wondering if this would be the day that they were now dreaming of behind the blast walls, the one in which, like Cajimat, they would get blasted.
“And we’re off,” Kauzlarich said.
He was in his usual spot—left rear seat, third Humvee from the front. There were always at least four vehicles in a convoy; this one happened to have five. Nate Showman, a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant whose belief in the war and optimism about it matched Kauzlarich’s, was in the front right seat. There was no junior officer in the battalion with more promise than Showman, and Kauzlarich had selected him to be in charge of his personal security detail.
Out they went through the heavily guarded main gate of the FOB and were instantly on the front lines of the war. In other wars, the front line was exactly that, a line to advance toward and cross, but in this war, where the enemy was everywhere, it was anywhere out of the wire, in any direction: that building, that town, that province, the entire country, in 360 degrees.
In such a war, and in an area seeded with EFPs, what was the safest seat? The soldiers discussed it constantly. Kauzlarich didn’t discuss it, but he thought about it, too. The lead truck in a convoy was the one that got hit the most, but lately insurgents had been aiming at the second in line, or the third, which had been Cajimat’s, or sometimes the fourth or fifth. And while most EFPs had been coming from the right side, Cajimat’s had come from the left.
So there was no sure thing to rely on, only precautions to be taken. The Humvees were fitted with jamming devices to defeat EFPs armed with infrared triggers, but the devices weren’t always effective, which was why one Humvee also had a good-luck horseshoe wired to the front grille.
Every soldier had his own version of this. Showman carried a small cross knitted in army colors by someone in his parents’ church in Ohio. The gunner tried to stand in a particular way, with one foot in front of the other, so that if an EFP slug came roaring in, he might only lose one foot instead of two, and for similar reasons Kauzlarich sometimes tucked his hands inside of his body armor as he looked out the window and wondered how aware he would be if the explosion came. “Instantly,” he had told Cajimat’s mother, but was that really the way it happened? Would he know it? Would he hear it? Would he see it? Would he feel it? Would the pile of trash outside of his window that he was now regarding suspiciously be the last thing on earth he would see? Would his last words be what he was saying now into his headset, in response to a soldier’s trifling question back on the FOB? “Do you guys have shitters?” That’s what he was saying. Is that how it would end? In the midst of a sentence like that?
“Do you guys have shitters?”
“Do you guys have—”
The convoy approached another pile of trash. Maybe one was hidden in there.
The convoy approached a shadowy area in a viaduct. Maybe one was hidden in there.
Eyes sweeping, jammers jamming, the convoy moved along Route Pluto at a very deliberate ten miles per hour, which afforded the chance to see what the surge had accomplished so far. By now, other drivers knew what to do when a convoy of Humvees got near: pull over, wait patiently for it to pass, make no sudden moves, and show no frustration about the inevitable traffic jam that the convoy would leave in its wake. Now the convoy passed a driver with the temerity to bury his head in his hands, and did Kauzlarich and his soldiers happen to notice that?
Did they see the old man sitting in front of a shuttered store watching expressionlessly as he fidgeted with a string of worry beads?
Did they see the boy next to the old man regarding the convoy as if it were something slithering?
> Did they see the white car decorated with flowers, and the van behind it filled with a bride and eight other women who were laughing and bouncing up and down in rhythm in their seats?
They moved past some children herding goats. They moved past a man pushing a block of concrete. They moved past a man smoking a cigarette and looking under the raised hood of a stalled car, and maybe the car really was stalled or maybe it was a car bomb that was about to explode. The soldiers slowed to a near stop. The man didn’t acknowledge them. No one did. No one smiled at them. No one threw flowers. No one waved.
Now someone did: a young boy dragging a piece of wire. He paused to wave at Kauzlarich, and Kauzlarich saw him and waved back, and what Kauzlarich saw was a waving boy who for all he knew was wired to explode, and what the boy saw was a thick window and a soldier behind it in body armor waving a hand that was encased in a glove.
Suspicion in 360 degrees—this is what four years of war had led to. Before leaving Fort Riley, the soldiers had been given an introduction to Iraq in the form of a laminated booklet called the Culture Smart Card, which told them, for instance, that “Right hand over heart is a sign of respect or thanks,” and “Don’t make the ‘OK’ or ‘thumbs up’ signs; they are considered obscene.” It also listed phonetic pronunciations for dozens of commonly used words and phrases, including arjuke (please), shukran (thank you), marhaba (hello), and ma’a sala’ama (goodbye).
They were good counterinsurgency terms, but Kauzlarich’s gunner had decided he needed only a few phrases to navigate this war, all of which he’d written in English and phonetic Arabic in black marker on his turret:
“Where are we?”
“Insurgent(s).”
“Where is bomb?”
“Show me.”
It was the language of IEDs and EFPs. All over eastern Baghdad, their numbers were increasing, and while Cajimat and the four other soldiers in his Humvee had so far been the 2-16’s only serious casualties, they hadn’t been the only targets. Just the night before, Kauzlarich and Cummings had been in the dining facility, or DFAC, eating dinner when a loud boom rattled the walls and sent dishes, trays, food, and dozens of soldiers crashing to the floor. At first the explosion seemed like a rocket attack on the FOB, the number of which had also been increasing, but it turned out to be an IED a mile or so away that had hit a 2-16 Humvee out on patrol. Somehow none of the soldiers in the Humvee had been injured more seriously than suffering ringing ears and slight concussions, but the Humvee had been destroyed.