by David Finkel
He described seeing Harrelson: “All you could see, you could see his Kevlar and his body figure and his head against the radio mount, and his whole body was engulfed in flames. I just remember seeing the outline of the Kevlar and his face on fire.”
He described running through the palm groves and seeing the men coming out of the house and firing at them: “I was firing on the run. You could see my rounds hitting by them, but they weren’t hitting them. It was just so weird. I was thinking to myself as I ran up to the house, ‘How did I not hit them?’
He described going into the house: “We hit the door, and we entered the room, and there’s a bunch of females and little kids in a corner, all holding each other, and I looked at them, and Sergeant Wheeler said in plain English, ‘Where the fuck is he?’ And the guy pointed to a back room. You could see the door, and it looked like it was open, like somebody had run in, and we went down the hallway, and it was like an open space, and the only thing in there was a fridge, a big fridge in a corner. And we came in, and the guy hopped up, and he had an AK.”
He described the three shots: “Sergeant Wheeler shot him in the stomach, and he went like this”—he stood and sagged—“and he was coming down, and as his head went like this”—he tucked his chin into his chest— “I shot him. It went in the top. As soon as I pulled the trigger, I immediately saw the hole, and he went from a slow fall to an immediate limp body.”
Finally, he described what happened next: “And I heard a scream. And I was thinking, ‘Is the other guy behind the fridge?’ Because I thought I saw something move. And I turned, and behind the fridge there’s this eight-year-old girl and her mother, just sitting. She’s hugging the daughter, behind the fridge. And I looked at her, and the guy’s head is bleeding, and I stepped in his blood to see—it was the only way—I stepped and I looked, and I seen the little girl, and the little girl immediately saw me, and she just started bawling. And her mom grabbed her, you know, like please don’t kill us. And it hit me, like, wow, an eight-year-old girl just saw me shoot this guy. And they don’t even know him. It’s their house, they’re just sitting here one day, and an IED blew up, and somebody got killed in their house, and the fright on their face, like I was gonna murder them, was just so shocking to me. Because they’re supposed to want us there.” Another sigh. “And it was like an eight-year-old girl and her mom.”
He fell silent. Bang, pause, bang, pause, bang. The memorial service was supposed to start in eight hours. March had a lot to do before then. He needed to clean his weapon. He needed to straighten his room. He needed to sleep. But he continued to sit.
Here’s something about Harrelson, he said now: he had so much confidence in himself he didn’t need to be drunk to get out on a dance floor. He didn’t drink at all. He was happy to be the designated driver. Something else: he’d come back from leave talking seriously about a girl who’d been a friend in high school. And something else: so far, for whatever reason, he himself hadn’t cried about Harrelson, as he’d done with Craig. With Craig, he said, as soon as Lieutenant Hamel told him, he’d started crying right away. The platoon had been out fighting for several days. His body armor was soaked in sweat and dotted with bits of Craig’s blood, and he cried as he walked away from Hamel and took off his armor and lay down against it and woke up a few hours later with the sinking feeling a person gets when he realizes that nothing changed while he was asleep, that all of it is still true.
“It’s just, I was twenty years old and I’d never seen anything like that,” he said. “I saw him fall from the turret. I seen his eyes roll back in his head. And it sounds weird, and I don’t like telling people this, but the reason I joined the army is because I’ve always looked up to soldiers.”
The soldier he might have looked up to most of all, he said, was one named Phillip Cantu, who had recruited him into the army. He was nineteen at that point and at the tail end of a terrible childhood in a dysfunctional family. This was not an uncommon story in the battalion; one soldier, whose entire family was in prison, said that his brother told him in all sincerity just before he deployed, “I hope you get killed.” In March’s case, he was out of options after high school and wandered one day into the recruiting office in Sandusky, Ohio, where he talked to a recruiter who seemed so old and so sour that March got up and left. A few months later, still out of options, he went in again, and the sour recruiter had been replaced by Cantu, who was twenty-three and recently back from Iraq. They talked that day about all of the options the Army offered, and as March for the first time saw possibilities in his life, he began stopping in several times a week. Each visit left him more inspired, and over time he and Cantu grew increasingly closer. “You’re not supposed to be friends with your recruiter,” he said, “but we were friends.” They started grabbing meals together and hanging out a bit, and once, when he dropped by Cantu’s apartment, Cantu showed him photographs of the day he was outside the spider hole where Special Ops soldiers had just captured Saddam Hussein. It turned out that Cantu had been there, not in the hole, but close to its edge, as Saddam was pulled out, and it had been documented in a hometown newspaper article headlined SANDUSKIAN HELPED BAG SADDAM, in which Cantu’s wife said, “Our great-grandkids are going to get to hear about how he captured Saddam,” and his mother said she had telephoned so many people that “my ear was starting to hurt,” and his sister said, “I am just so proud; I am a really proud sister.” “He told me there’s nothing like the brotherhood when you deploy,” March said, and that was it. For a nineteen-year-old from a family of dysfunction, his decision was made. He enlisted in the army brotherhood, got through basic training, was assigned to Fort Riley and the 2-16, and had just arrived when his mother called in tears to say that Phillip Cantu was dead. And it was true. He was. The part of the war he hadn’t told March about had caught up with him, and once again, he was in the newspaper: “A local man whose military unit in Iraq helped capture Saddam Hussein in December 2003 died Saturday morning. Sgt. Phillip Cantu, 24, killed himself,” is how the article began, and thirteen months later, here was March, in Iraq, red-eyed and pink-bellied and unable to sleep because of what he was seeing, day and night, whether his eyes were open or closed. What did he see?
“It’s photographs,” he said.
“Like a picture of Harrelson burning, in flames. I can’t get that out of my head right now.
“I see myself shooting the guy. I see a still frame of the guy halfway hitting the ground with the hole in his head.
“I can see the little girl, the face of the little girl. And as much as people say that they don’t care about these people and all that, I don’t care about these people—but I do, at the same time, if that makes any sense. They don’t want to help themselves, they’re blowing us up, yeah, that hurts, but it also hurts to know that I’ve seen a girl that’s as old as my little brother watch me shoot somebody in the head. And I don’t care if she’s Iraqi, Korean, African, white—she’s still a little girl. And she watched me shoot somebody.
“I see me walking to the truck, just having my head down and my weapon in one hand, not looking around, not pulling security, not thinking nothing. Just walking to the truck.
“It’s like a slide show in my head,” he said. “Does that make sense?”
A few days before all of this, at just about the time President Bush was speaking in Nashville at the Gaylord Opryland Resort about his optimism concerning the war, Kauzlarich was interviewed in his office by an army historian who was traveling around Iraq asking commanders about the surge.
“Share with me some things that aren’t going well,” the historian had said at one point.
“You know we have not been given a problem that we have not been able to come up with a solution for,” Kauzlarich had said, and then had tried to make a joke. “The only thing I can bitch about right now is that at times we run out of certain flavors of ice cream.”
Now, a few nights later, he and the soldiers he got were crowded into the chapel for the
memorial service, which ended with something called the Final Roll Call.
“Sergeant Jubinville,” a sergeant called out.
“Here, First Sergeant,” Jubinville called back.
“PFC Devine,” the sergeant called out.
“Here, First Sergeant,” Devine called back.
“PFC Harrelson,” the sergeant called out.
The chapel was silent.
“PFC James Harrelson,” he called out.
The chapel remained silent.
“PFC James Jacob Harrelson,” he called out.
And the silence continued, unbearably, until it was interrupted by the sharp slap of gunfire.
Bang, pause, bang, pause, bang.
At the Opryland Resort, President Bush had said, “I’m optimistic. We’ll succeed unless we lose our nerve.”
Here, six versions of what nerve can mean filed out of the chapel.
Mays went back to his Ambien.
Hamel went back to his furniture.
Bailey went back to his loops around the FOB.
Wheeler went back to his what-ifs.
March went back to his slide show.
And Kauzlarich, red-eyed too now, went back to his office.
7
SEPTEMBER 22, 2007
We’re kicking ass.
—GEORGE W. BUSH, September 4, 2007
On September 22, General David Petraeus, who was a four-star general, the commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq, and the architect of the surge, came to Rustamiyah to visit the 2-16.
“Ooh, that’s nice!” Kauzlarich said just before Petraeus’s arrival, checking out the second floor of the operations center, which soldiers had spent the morning attempting to clean up. This was where Kauzlarich would brief Petraeus on everything the 2-16 had accomplished. He had never briefed a four-star general before, and he was feeling a little nervous.
There were muffins, cookies, and fresh fruit, all arranged on a table covered with a green hospital bedsheet. “It’s brand new,” a soldier assured Kauzlarich. “We got it from Supply this morning.”
There was an urn of fresh coffee and a bowl of iced drinks, which Kauzlarich noticed didn’t contain Diet Coke. “That’s all he drinks,” he said, always the master of detail, and a soldier hustled off to find Diet Coke.
The long, three-section conference table where Kauzlarich held staff meetings had been broken down and reconfigured into a U, and marking Petraeus’s spot at the center of it were a new nameplate, a new pen, a new notebook, a jug of water, a jug of juice, and a coffee mug filled with ceremonial American flags.
General David Petraeus and Ralph Kauzlarich
Everything was ready. “There’s only so many ways to polish a turd,” Cummings said, and with that Kauzlarich went off to meet Petraeus and bring him back to the operations center.
Every once in a while a day in Iraq would feel good. As Kauzlarich approached with Petraeus, this seemed one of those days. The temperature was under one hundred degrees. The sky was a wonderful, dustless blue. The air stank neither of sewage nor of burning trash. The only odor, in fact, was the comparatively pleasant chemical bouquet wafting from some portable latrines near where Petraeus paused to shake hands with a few soldiers who had been selected to meet him and were lined up at attention.
Petraeus and Kauzlarich entered the operations center, which, thanks to the work of a bomb-sniffing dog that had been brought by earlier, had been certified as booby-trap free.
They climbed steps that had been swept clean of the dust that came in through cracks every time there was a close explosion.
They entered the conference room, and Petraeus sat in a high-backed chair that had been wiped down to a shine. Kauzlarich took the chair next to his. Cummings took a chair nearby. Various junior officers filled chairs behind them. All eyes were on Petraeus as he ignored the muffins, cookies, coffee, Diet Cokes, pen, notebook, and flags, and simply reached for a grape.
He popped it into his mouth.
“Okay,” he said, swallowing. “Fire away, Ralph.”
David Petraeus at that moment was one of the most famous people in the world. He had just returned to Baghdad from a trip to the United States where he had testified before Congress about the surge. All summer long, the anticipation of his testimony had grown to the point of frenzy, and by the time he showed up on Capitol Hill, he had been so written about, analyzed, profiled, and politicized that he was no longer just a general. He had become the very face of the Iraq War, its celebrity and star.
It would be difficult to overstate his fame, just as it would be difficult to overstate how in need Kauzlarich was of this good day. Eighteen days before, on September 4, another perfectly aimed EFP had torn into the first Humvee of a five-truck convoy on Route Predators, and three soldiers had died—Sergeant Joel Murray, twenty-six; Specialist David Lane, twenty; and Private Randol Shelton, twenty-two. The other two soldiers in the Humvee had survived but were in terrible shape, with burns and multiple amputations, and Kauzlarich, who was in a convoy nearby, had been seeing images of dying soldiers and body parts since. It was something he didn’t talk about openly, because subordinates didn’t need to know such things about their commander. But other commanders would have understood if he had said it to them, including General Petraeus himself, who once, in a moment of reflection on a day when the death count of American troops was nearing 3,800, had said, “The truth is you never get used to losses. If anything, I almost think sometimes there’s sort of a bad-news vessel, and it’s got holes in the bottom, and then it drains. In other words, you know, it’s really your emotions, but I mean there’s so much bad news you can take. And it fills up. But if you have some good days, it sort of drains away.”
So Kauzlarich was in need of some draining away.
Did anyone else understand that, though, other than those in the war? Because while the news in Rustamiyah on September 4 was all about three dead soldiers and a fourth who had lost both legs, and a fifth who had lost both legs and an arm and most of his other arm and been severely burned over what remained of him, that wasn’t the news in the United States. In the United States, the news was all macro rather than micro. It was about President Bush arriving in Australia that morning, where the deputy prime minister asked him how the war was going and he answered, “We’re kicking ass.” It was about a government report released in the afternoon that noted the Iraqi government’s lack of progress toward self-sustainability, which Democrats seized on as one more reason to get out of Iraq pronto, which Republicans seized on as one more reason why Democrats were unpatriotic, which various pundits seized on as a chance to go on television and do some screaming.
Sometimes, in the DFAC, the soldiers would listen to the screaming and wonder how the people on those shows knew so much. Clearly, most of them had never been to Iraq, and even if they had, it was probably for what the soldiers dismissively referred to as the windshield tour: corkscrew in, hear from a general or two, get in a Humvee, see a market surrounded by new blast walls, get a commemorative coin, corkscrew out. And yet to listen to them was to listen to people who knew everything. They knew why the surge was working. They knew why the surge wasn’t working. They not only screamed, they screamed with certainty. “They should come to Rustamiyah,” more than one soldier said, certain of only one thing: that none of them would. No one came to Rustamiyah. But if they did, they could get in the lead Humvee. They could go out on Route Predators. They could go out on Berm Road. They could experience the full pucker. They could experience it the next day, too, and the day after that—and then maybe they could go back on TV and scream about how bewildering all of this really was. At least then they would be screaming the truth.
The soldiers would laugh about this, but after more than half a year here, one thing they had lost sight of was how different the Iraq War was in Iraq as opposed to in the United States. To them, it was about specific acts of bravery and tragedy. The firefight in Fedaliyah—that was the war. Three dead inside a fireball on Pred
ators—what else could a war be?
But in the United States, where three dead on Predators might be mentioned briefly somewhere inside the daily paper under a heading such as FALLEN HEROES or IN OTHER NEWS, and the firefight in Fedaliyah wouldn’t be mentioned at all, it was about things more strategic, more political, more policy-driven, more useful in broad ways. Three dead? Yes, damn, how sad, and God bless the troops, and God bless the families, too, and this is exactly why we need to get out of Iraq, to honor the sacrifice, and this is precisely why we need to stay in Iraq, to honor the sacrifice, but you know what? Have you seen the numbers? Have you seen the metrics? Have you seen the trend lines?
“We’re kicking ass,” said President Bush.
“. . . it is unclear whether violence has been reduced,” said the GAO report.
A third assessment: “One boom and an entire fire team was gone” was what Kauzlarich said that very same day, but six days later, as Petra-eus made his first appearance on Capitol Hill, Kauzlarich’s was the one that mattered least of all to what was about to happen. It was footnote material. Soldiers such as Kauzlarich might be able to talk about the war as it was playing out in Iraq, but after crossing the Atlantic Ocean from one version of the war to the other, Petraeus had gone to Washington to testify about the war as it was playing out in Washington.
It was a distinction that Petraeus was well aware of. A West Pointer with a doctorate in international relations from Princeton University, he had ascended to the top ranks of the army on the strength of his intellect, and on his political skills as well. He knew how to analyze and prepare for just about any situation, and if he had any illusions about the political nature of this one, they were taken care of when he awakened on the morning of his first day of testimony to a full-page ad in The New York Times headlined GENERAL PETRAEUS OR GENERAL BETRAY us? The ad was taken out by a left-leaning political organization called MoveOn.org. It accused Petraeus of “cooking the books for the White House,” and went on to assert that “Every independent report on the ground situation in Iraq shows that the surge strategy has failed.”