The Good Soldiers

by David Finkel

  “I thought Johnson was dead, I thought he was KIA, so I tried to focus on Atchley, and out of the blue I heard Johnson moan. So I was like, ‘Oh shit, he’s alive,’ so I went up to him and he was laying on his side and his hand was tucked in underneath him, so I had no idea that his hand had been blown off, so I called to him, ‘Johnson, what’s wrong? Talk to me,’ and at that time he just pulled his arm out, and I remember his hand was completely gone, I mean it was just pieces of skin and bone, but there was no blood. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Wow, there’s no blood, a massive amputation and there’s no blood,’ so I told him he was gonna be all right, and he kept telling me, ‘I’ve lost my fucking hand, Sergeant, I’ve lost my fucking hand.’”

  He would remember turning his attention to another soldier.

  “I said, ‘Lancaster, what’s wrong with you?’ and he goes, he goes, he goes, ‘I got hit in the arm.’ I said, ‘How bad?’ and he goes, ‘I don’t know, but it’s bleeding a lot,’ and he put out his arm and blood just started pouring out.”

  He would remember yelling for someone to tourniquet Lancaster and turning his attention to another soldier, Campbell.

  “I remember Campbell still walking around, just screaming, holding his mouth open because he had shrapnel in his mouth. I remember yelling at him, telling him to get the fuck down.”

  He would remember that, and more gunfire, and shooting back, and killing a total of four people, and going to the hospital and being officially told that Sassman’s head wound was critical, Johnson had lost his right hand, and Atchley had lost his left eye.

  “And it’s funny,” Gietz would say, crying now as he remembered the next thing. “That morning, prior to us rolling out, Johnson had left his NODs inside the vehicle, and I smoked him. I mean I made him do push-ups, crunches, and everything out there in the dirt road for about thirty minutes. I chewed him out. And they let me inside before they medevac’d them out, and I remember Johnson looking up at me and telling me he loved me.”

  On June 9, in Fedaliyah, Gietz killed another seven. Maybe more. Probably more. “At least seven,” he said, but as June deepened and the mission moved away from its beginning clarity and into more maybes and more probablys, it was difficult to keep track. “We’re talking about the firefight of our life,” Ricky Taylor, the captain who commanded Alpha Company, said. “I mean this was out of control.”

  Fedaliyah was the spookiest place in the AO, an area of water buffalo farms and squatter hovels, so vaguely defined that even in crystal clear satellite photos it appeared blurry and smudged, as if it existed inside of its very own sandstorm. The soldiers had gone there after dark because of a tip from a source they’d been cultivating, which seemed the best way to penetrate such an unknowable place.

  “His nickname was Batman,” Taylor said. “He was a seventeen-year-old kid. He was a great guy.”

  Maybe because he was a source—probably because he was a source— seventeen-year-old Batman wouldn’t live to see eighteen, or even July. He would be tortured, presumably by militia members, and then he would be killed. But on June 9, he eagerly directed a convoy of forty-two soldiers and eight vehicles into the heart of Fedaliyah to search for two Jaish al Mahdi leaders he said he might be able to identify.

  He couldn’t, it turned out. But as the convoy eased along Route Tomatoes, intelligence officers picked up chatter that indicated that the two men might be at the local office for Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical cleric who was one of the most powerful Shiites in Iraq, outside of which stood a dozen men. Gietz dismounted to talk to them. So did seven other soldiers. The dozen men began moving. Gietz told them to stop. The men kept moving. “And then, pow, one shot goes off,” Taylor said, and a moment later, when gunfire came at the soldiers from every direction, “that’s when all hell broke loose.”

  Gietz and the others chased the dozen men into a mosque. There was a sign inside indicating that the mosque wasn’t really a mosque, that it was really the Fedaliyah office for the Jaish al Mahdi, and maybe it was. Probably it was. Or maybe it was a mosque with a sign inside and a bunch of men now running through it and a ladder in the rear courtyard, propped against a wall, that two men began to climb. Gietz fired. He watched the one on top tumble off the ladder and over the wall, dead without a doubt. He fired again. He watched the one midway up the rungs fall. He went over and nudged him with his foot to make sure he was dead and went on from there, back out onto the street and into more gunfire, in the next half hour losing count of how many times he and the other soldiers nearly died. There were grenades. There were mortars. A rocket-propelled grenade whooshed in, hit a Humvee, and set it on fire. The soldiers, each of whom carried at least 240 rounds of ammunition, fired so many rounds there was concern they would run out. They fired at doors, windows, roof lines. They fired at whatever shadows seemed to be firing at them. More soldiers, from other platoons, rushed in, and they began running out of ammunition, too.

  “It was an insane night,” Taylor said.

  The final tally: one soldier slightly injured and thirty-five Iraqis dead, including Gietz’s at least seven.

  “The men were fired up. They were fired up,” Taylor said. “It was an infantryman’s dream: close and destroy the enemy.”

  And maybe so. Maybe it was an infantryman’s dream.

  But as Gietz said in his troubled voice as he thought of Sassman, Atch-ley, Johnson, Lancaster, and Campbell, and the fact that he and his soldiers had gone to Fedaliyah to capture two Iraqis and had ended up killing thirty-five: “It’s a thin line between what we’re calling acceptable and not acceptable. It’s a thin line. As a leader, you’re supposed to know when not to cross it. But how do you know? Does the army teach us how to control our emotions? Does the army teach us how to deal with a friend bleeding out in front of you?”

  Maybe.

  Probably.

  “No.”

  On June 11, another soldier died. It was the battalion’s worst day yet, when convoys were hit by EFPs or gunfire nine different times. One of the EFPs was hidden in the courtyard of a mosque just off of Inner Berm Road, and whoever pushed the trigger was aiming directly at the gun turret of the second vehicle, behind which sat Private First Class Cameron Payne, who was twenty-two.

  “You’re gonna have to move your feet so I can close the door,” the medic, Charles White, said to Payne as they prepared to evacuate him, and when Payne tried to move his feet, for a brief moment, there was hope.

  Number three.

  “A devoted family man, Ranger Payne just returned from EML two weeks ago after seeing the birth of his second daughter, Kylie,” Kauzlarich wrote in his memorial speech. “Seeing him in the dining facility a couple nights before he died, he shared with me the joy of having a new baby girl.”

  On June 15, as Lucas Sassman’s medical condition was distilled into a daily update for Kauzlarich to read, Sassman was in a hospital bed at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. A jagged row of stitches ran from the edge of his right eyebrow to his temple; that was where the bullet had gone in. A long row of staples ran along the top of his head where his scalp had been split open like a hair part, all the way from the front to the back and then curving around toward his right ear. That was where doctors had opened his head to try to extract the bullet, and to help with the swelling of his brain.

  Six days after being shot, Sassman was having trouble breathing. It was difficult for him to swallow. He had short-term memory loss. Soon enough, vertigo would set in, and he would develop migraine headaches that rarely went away. But he was conscious, and he could talk a little, and he said to his wife, his mother, and his sister, who were at his bedside, “I’ve lost my boyish good looks.” His words were understandable, if not quite distinct.

  “You look good as ever,” his mother said.

  “You’re a liar, Mom,” he said, and meanwhile, as they continued to talk, in the next bed over, a woman was leaning close to another soldier who had been shot in the head, stroking his fore
head to comfort him.

  This was Maria Emory, the wife of Sergeant Michael Emory. It had been seven weeks since Emory had been shot in Kamaliyah, and just as word of Sassman’s medical condition was being sent to Kauzlarich, so was Emory’s.

  He was in Germany, sedated, critical, feverish, and in an induced coma.

  He was stable enough to be moved to Bethesda.

  His fever was dropping.

  His infection was clearing.

  He was being brought out of the coma.

  He was awake and almost able to breathe on his own.

  “That’s beautiful,” Kauzlarich had said in his office one day in mid-May, reading the latest update on Emory from Bethesda, which had just arrived by e-mail.

  “What, sir?” Cummings had said.

  “Sergeant Emory opened his eyes today,” Kauzlarich had said. “Maria said, ‘I want you to move your head,’ and he did. She said, ‘Look at me,’ and he did. She said, ‘I love you,’ and he started to cry.

  “It’s all good,” Kauzlarich had said.

  So went reality in Iraq—but here in Bethesda, on June 15, was another version:

  “Give me your hand, baby,” Maria Emory said to her husband, who was diapered, who could barely move, who had a ventilator tube inserted into his throat, who was looking in panic at his wife who was armored in a mask and gown and gloves, and when she took his right hand and wrapped it around hers, he emitted a high-pitched whimper.

  “Are you cold?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer. Just looked at her, less panicked now. His head was as misshapen as the moon over Rustamiyah.

  “Baby,” she said, leaning closer.

  “Sweetheart,” she said, even closer.

  She straightened up.

  He whimpered again.

  “So, this is what I do now,” she explained of what life had been since a phone call at 2:30 p.m. on April 28 in which the Department of Defense informed her that her husband had been shot, and now she added details by reading from a diary she had been keeping since then.

  “May the third. I kissed him on his lips. This was in Germany. I told him, ‘I’m going to kiss you on the lips, and if you can feel it, move,’ and I kissed him twice, and he moved both times.

  “May the sixth. We got on the medevac flight and we flew from Germany here to Bethesda.

  “May the seventeenth. He opened his eyes for the very first time.

  “May the nineteenth. He moved his fingers and his legs and I told him that I loved him and he started crying.

  “May the twentieth. He was just sleeping.

  “May the twenty-first. He slept most of the time.

  “May the twenty-fifth. The president came to see him . . .” and now she put the diary down as she thought about the day that President Bush came to visit. About what he had said to her: “He said, ‘Thank you for your husband’s service to his country,’ and he was sorry for what our family was going through.” About what she’d said to him: “Thank you for coming.” About what she wished she’d said to him: “That he didn’t understand what we are going through because he doesn’t know how it feels. And that I didn’t agree with what was going on with the war.” About why she hadn’t said it: “Because I felt it would not have made any difference. And my husband of course had his eyes open and I didn’t want him getting upset.” About what Bush didn’t understand: “I mean, when I saw him, I was so angry I started crying, and he saw me and came to me and gave me a hug and said, ‘Everything’s going to be okay.’”

  That was why he came over to her, she said, because he misunderstood the reason for her tears. He’d had no idea they were because of anger, and he’d had no idea they were because of him. And nothing was okay, she said, so he was wrong about that, too. Her husband was ruined. In seven weeks, she had lost so much weight that her dress size had gone from a twelve to a six, her daughter was now living with a relative, she was now living in a hospital, the doctors were saying it could be years before her husband was better, if ever, and hope, if it existed at all, had to be extracted from wherever it could, from the awful day, for instance, in which he lifted his right hand and placed it on her shoulder, and then tried to move it across her breasts, and then started to cry.

  So many tears in this place, and now there were more as he closed his eyes and dozed off and she knew he couldn’t see her. She stepped out of the room. She removed the gloves, the gown, the mask. She hurried to a vending machine to get something to eat and then came right back so she would be next to him when he woke up. Gown back on. Mask back on. Gloves back on. Waiting. He opened his eyes. For a moment there was alarm, and then he saw her.

  There she was, as if she hadn’t moved.

  “Can you give me a kiss?” she said. “Can you give me a kiss?”

  She leaned in until her mask was against his lips.

  “I love you, baby,” she said, and then drew back, sensing that something was wrong. But what? What could it be?

  “Are you cold?” she guessed.

  He looked at her.

  “Are you cold?”

  He moved his lips, ever so slightly. He seemed to be trying to answer. She moved her ear to his mouth.

  More hope:

  “Yes,” he said.

  On June 20, Kauzlarich was back on the air on PEACE 106 FM.

  “Sir, there is talk that security is bad and getting worse. What is the way ahead to improve security?” Mohammed, whose name was not really Mohammed, asked in Arabic, which was translated into English by an interpreter named Izzy, whose name was not really Izzy and who had replaced Mark, who had been arrested and jailed for extorting money from other Iraqis working on the FOB, all with fake names as well.

  “That’s a very good question, Mohammed,” Kauzlarich said. “Right now, though, I would have to say that I disagree that the security is worse for the Iraqi people in Nine Nissan specifically. I say that because there’s been a minimal number of kidnappings and murders.

  “Security of the coalition forces, however, is becoming an issue. The militia within the Nine Nissan area is biting the hand that is attempting to assist the Iraqi Security Forces and rebuild or build the essential services. As everyone should know by now, militias are illegal in accordance with the Iraqi rule of law and must be dealt with. When was the last time the militia did something positive for you or your neighborhood? Has it provided you essential services? Recently the militia has fired mortars, rockets, and IEDs into your neighborhood. And those actions have either killed or injured innocent women and children. Why are Iraqi citizens allowing that to happen? It must stop soon, as time is running out.”

  “Sir, would you please tell us about some of your recent operations since our last interview?”

  “Certainly. Since the last time I was on the air, Mohammed, and that was approximately five to six weeks ago, we’ve conducted hundreds of combined patrols with our Iraqi Security Forces brothers. The results of those patrols were in excess of fifty militia or criminal detentions. And with each of those detainees we have very strong evidence that they’ve harmed Iraqi citizens, Iraqi Security Forces, or Coalition Security Forces. And each one of them now will face the Iraqi criminal court system.

  “We’ve also found caches of ammunition that were hidden in Kamali-yah and Fedaliyah.

  “With those criminals and caches now gone, Nine Nissan will now become safer for your children and for your children’s children.”

  On June 25, Private First Class Andre Craig, Jr., became the fourth soldier to die when an EFP severed his right arm, fractured his jaw, knocked out his teeth, lacerated his face, and snapped his head against the metal gun turret. He and his platoon were headed from the COP in Kamaliyah to FOB Rustamiyah for a couple of days of rest and relaxation, which had become standard practice once the COPs were built. After a week or so of bad food, hole-in-the-ground toilets, and patrols in 120-degree heat, the soldiers were eager for showers, better food, a chance to sleep, and air-conditioning.

  All t
hey had to do for this was get from the COP to the FOB.

  “I hate this place,” Cummings wrote in a note later that day. “I hate the way it smells, I hate the way it looks, I hate the way these people don’t care about freedom, I hate that human beings want to kill one another for nothing.”

  Kauzlarich wrote some things down, too, for another memorial speech.

  “The thought that the bullet has already been fired at each of us and it is only a matter of time when it will hit, brings comfort to some and terror to others,” he wrote. His intention was to be symbolic rather than literal, to say that as soon as someone is born he is eventually going to die, including poor Craig, whose “courage in the face of danger, his commitment to the task at hand, and his loyalty to his comrades was demonstrated daily and ultimately on the morning of last Monday, 25 June 2007, in the Baghdad suburb of Riassa, when his bullet hit, and took him from our world into the next.”

  He was proud of what he wrote, but when he said it out loud at Craig’s memorial service to a chapel filled with soldiers increasingly on edge, it creeped a lot of them out.

  The bullet has already been fired.

  Only a matter of time.

  On June 27, Kauzlarich was again on PEACE 106 FM.

  “Here’s something I find personally illogical,” he said to Izzy, to Mohammed, to whoever might be listening to their radios instead of out among the trash piles hiding EFPs.

  “On the east side of the river, virtually everyone, the majority of the people, are Shi’a.

  “The Jaish al Mahdi is a Shi’a-based militia.

  “The Coalition Forces on this side of the river are helping all Iraqi people, but most of those are Shi’a.

  “So what makes no sense is why is a Shi’a-based militia trying to destroy the Coalition Forces that are trying to aid the Shi’a people?”

  On June 28, at 6:50 a.m., another EFP hit another convoy of soldiers headed from a COP to Rustamiyah for rest and relaxation, and when reports came over the radio that Private First Class Michael Dunn had lost an arm, Sergeant William Crow had lost an arm and leg, and Ricky Taylor was calling into headquarters and saying, “This is bad. I hear them screaming in the background,” Cummings went down to the aid station, arriving just after Dunn had been medevac’d out by helicopter.