The Good Soldiers

by David Finkel

  So the interpreters were around to broker behavioral mysteries as well as languages. There were several dozen of them on the FOB. A few were Iraqi Americans who lived in the United States, had a security clearance, and earned more than $100,000 a year. Most, though, like Izzy, were out-of-work Iraqis from nearby neighborhoods who happened to speak some English. They were paid between $ 1,050 and $ 1,200 a month, and in exchange for that they took on a soldier’s risks of EFPs, snipers, rockets, and mortars, and the additional risk of being seen by their fellow Iraqis as pariahs.

  “You’re a spy,” they would say in Arabic to Izzy when he climbed out of an American Humvee wearing the same camouflage as the soldiers.

  “You’re a traitor,” they would say as he stood by during clearance operations, disguised behind large, dark sunglasses and a name tag identifying him as Izzy.

  “You’re one of us. You should explain,” they would say as soldiers searched through cabinets and dressers, sometimes roughly, sometimes breaking things.

  “No, no, no, no,” Izzy said quietly one time to a soldier who was piling a family’s clothing in the middle of a floor. “Why are you doing this?”

  “This man’s lying to us,” the soldier said, and as he stepped on some of the clothing in his dirty boots, Izzy felt ashamed, even though he suspected the soldier was right.

  It was that sense of shame, always nearby, that made being an interpreter feel dishonorable at times, not only for Izzy, but for all of them.

  “Hey, Mike, please tell him I’m going to take off his pants, but I’m going to leave his underwear on,” a soldier said one day to another of the interpreters for the 2-16 as they began a medical screening for a new detainee. A few hours before, five Iraqis had been rounded up for possible involvement with an EFP cell after being pursued through the sewage trenches of Fedaliyah, and now they were standing blindfolded and flex-cuffed, and were being examined one at a time by a soldier wearing protective gloves. This one was the second of the five. He was filthy and wore a knockoff athletic shirt that read abibas. He stood absolutely still as the soldier undid his pants, and when they dropped to his ankles, he continued to stand still in underwear that had a large wet area across the front.

  “Ask him if he peed himself,” the soldier said, by now knowing that the innocent ones often lost control of their bladders, or defecated, or trembled uncontrollably, while the guilty ones tended to smirk.

  “Peed?” Mike said, confused by the term.

  “Ask him if he wet himself,” the soldier said. “Urinated.”

  “No,” Mike said, relaying the answer, after asking and seeming embarrassed to have done so. “It happened when he tried to wash his face.”

  “Does he drink?” the soldier asked now, continuing down a checklist.

  “No drink.”

  “Does he smoke?”

  “No.”

  “Is he on any illegal drugs?”

  “No.”

  “Ask him if he’s cold,” the soldier said. “Ask him why he’s shaking.” Then, directly to the detainee, who couldn’t see him, and couldn’t understand him, he said, “We won’t hurt you,” and waited for Mike to say the Arabic words for that.

  Mike, of course, wasn’t really Mike, just as Izzy wasn’t Izzy and Rachel wasn’t Rachel. They were given American names, army uniforms, a room to sleep in, a cot to sleep on, and free meals at the DFAC, although, unlike soldiers, they were patted down and wanded before they were allowed inside.

  Rachel, who had tried to save Reeves, pushing on his chest as his blood leaked into her boots, was one of the few females who did this work. Twenty-five years old, she had been an interpreter since 2003, when the war seemed as if it would be brief rather than everlasting. “When I began this, it was safe. Everybody loved the Americans. Everybody wanted to work with them,” she said one day, explaining how she had become who she had become, which on this day was one more person in Iraq in tears kept out of sight of the Americans. She was trying to hide her face. She didn’t want the soldiers to see. “I speak English. I love America. I was so excited for them to be here. I wanted to work with them, just to feel victory.”

  Since then, by her own count, she had been in forty explosions, from car bombs to EFPs, including the one that killed Reeves. She had been burned, knocked out, could no longer hear clearly out of her right ear, and was having trouble seeing out of her left eye. “You go through a lot of stress, and then you’re okay,” she said of what each of the explosions had done to her. “You figure out a way to handle it. For me, it’s a lot of crying, and thinking the good is coming. Nothing good has come yet. But I’m staying positive.”

  It was hard, though. Her family was in Syria now, mixed in with the million other Iraqi refugees there and dependent on the money she sent them. They were there and she was here, living a life that offered $ 1,200 a month and little else. “Nobody,” she said of whom she was close to anymore, “just the unit I am working with,” and so her life now was largely imagined. “I am from Syria,” she would tell Iraqis when she was out with the Americans. Or, “I am from Lebanon.” Usually she was married, “with kids,” although sometimes she was just engaged. “Just to make up a story for my safety, because if they know I’m Iraqi, they’ll be mean to me,” she said. But the fact was that she never could be who she actually was, not when she was among Iraqis, or with the soldiers, either, a lesson she had learned when she was working with another battalion and an IED exploded and soldiers who had seemed her friends stopped calling her Rachel after that and began calling her “you bitch.” So far, she said, that was the thing that hurt most of all, and it was why, after Reeves died, she had stood before the platoon with his blood on her and said, “I’m sorry,” and then had said, “I’m not bad like my people,” and then had gone on her own to her room, which she had decorated with twelve photographs of her departed family, an Iraqi flag, an American flag, and a stuffed animal that, if she pressed on its foot, which she did again and again that day, would say, “Oh, you’re a little wild thing, aren’t you?”

  This was an Iraqi life. The soldiers couldn’t understand it, and they didn’t understand Izzy’s, either. But he had a sense of theirs. He had lived in the United States from 1989 to 1992. He knew America, and even though he hadn’t been there in fifteen years, he knew what its soldiers liked because of what one of them had written on the door of a metal locker that was in the room he’d been given to live in. “Sex, potato soup, and Johnny Cash,” it said. It had been written in black marker, just above where, in smaller letters, someone had written, “No Iraqi man, woman, or child is worth one drop of an American soldier’s blood.”

  Izzy remembered the day he got the room. He didn’t get many visitors, but that day a 2-16 soldier stopped by and saw the locker. “No, that’s not right,” the soldier had said apologetically, and had used a wet cloth to wipe away the second set of words until they were smudged enough to be mostly unreadable.

  So that was another thing that Izzy knew, how kind an American soldier could be.

  Though not always.

  “Old man,” one of them said one morning, as Izzy, sleepy-eyed, toothbrush in hand, stepped outside, on his way to the latrines.

  “Faggot,” another said, picking up a rock and tossing it at Izzy.

  “Fuck you,” another said to him, also tossing a rock.

  Izzy laughed, even as one of the rocks skipped off the ground and hit him in the leg. “Bastards,” he said back to them, kidding as much as they were.

  It was a Friday toward the end of October. Two days before his birthday, Kauzlarich was staying in the wire, and Izzy had the day to do whatever he wanted. Not that there were a lot of options. He wouldn’t get time off to go see his family for another week, and he couldn’t contact them, because whenever he entered the FOB his cell phone was confiscated until he left. He wasn’t allowed to have a phone, a camera, a computer, an MP3 player, or anything electronic except for a Chinese TV he had bought on the FOB for thirty dollars. It had
been luck, or Iraqi luck, anyway, that he happened to be home when his daughter was injured and his apartment was ruined, because otherwise he wouldn’t have known. No one could contact him when he was on the FOB. No one knew where he worked or what he did for a living except for his wife, two brothers, and a few friends, and they knew only a little. His wife, for instance, didn’t know about the half-dozen times EFPs had hit his convoy, or the constant rocket attacks on the FOB. She knew only that he had a job as an interpreter, that for their safety no one could know what he did, and that every few weeks he would show up at home, unannounced.

  “Please, can we live in Jordan?” she had been asking him on his recent visits, usually on his last night, as the daughter who had been injured slept between them, which she had been doing since the apartment bombing. “Can we live in Syria? Can we run away? Can we escape?”

  “We don’t have enough money,” he would tell her.

  “I cannot handle this life,” she would say. “What kind of life is this?”

  “Just be patient,” he would say. “You see me working hard.”

  And then he would disappear until the next time he got the chance to go home, bringing with him the money he had been paid that month, minus what he had spent on gifts. He liked bringing his family things, though it was never very much. Whatever he brought had to fit neatly in a backpack, so that Iraqis who saw him walking along Route Pluto, or getting into a taxi once he was a mile or so away from the FOB, or getting out and tying his shoes until the taxi disappeared and then getting into a second taxi, or into a third taxi, or standing on a street near his home for a while smoking cigarettes as he decided whether he had been followed, would have no reason to be suspicious.

  “I swear, every night I spend home, I can’t sleep, because I expect a knock on the door. ‘Come, sir.’ But anyway, this is our life, so we have to deal with it,” he said. He was walking to the PX now, to see what he could buy for his next trip home. He paused at the entrance so he could be patted down, and then, for $25.11, he bought three bottles of shampoo, a tube of cocoa butter lotion, two bags of Cheetos, a bag of Lifesavers Gummis, two packages of Starbursts, two bags of Hershey’s Kisses, one bag of Skittles, one Twix bar, and one bag of M&Ms.

  He took it all back to his room and put it in his locker, next to what he had bought previously: pencils, hair bands, and some lotion for his daughter’s scars. There was a file folder in the locker as well, which contained recommendation letters that he hoped would get him and his family back to the United States, this time as refugees. It was the one promised benefit of being an interpreter, that if you lasted at least a year and had the right recommendation letters, you would be considered for refugee status. The requirement was for five recommendation letters. Izzy had collected nine so far, attesting to how, in one example, his “patriotism landed him in the hospital as he was beaten almost to death for trying to gather information about our area of operations.” The nine were all like that, but he wanted more. He wanted a dozen, if that would help. He wanted two dozen. The notion of escape to his wife might have meant Jordan or Syria, but he wanted the United States, even if it meant the bare-bones existence of a being a refugee. It didn’t matter. This, here, in Baghdad, was a bare-bones existence, and that, there, was the place he had lived for three years as a low-level diplomat and had kept in mind ever since.

  His daughters had American names.

  He had visited thirty-five states.

  He still possessed his Pan American World Airways frequent-flier membership card.

  He’d wanted to stay longer, but in 1992 the government brought him back to Baghdad for what they’d said would be a two-week review of the Iraqi mission, revoked his passport, called him, as he remembered it, “a fucking failure,” and told him that if his family asked for political asylum in the United States he would be killed. “Please pack up your things and come back,” he said on the phone to his wife, still in the United States, without elaborating, and of course she understood the meaning of that sentence and came back.

  Seven years passed.

  Now it was 1999, the daughter who would be injured in the car bombing had just been born, and Izzy was scooped off the street one day by government agents who wanted to know about his feelings toward the United States. They took his shoes, removed his belt, bound his hands, taped his eyes, beat him with electrical cables, kicked him when he fell to the ground, and left him tied-up, blindfolded, bleeding, and alone in a room without food or water. They continued to beat him for several more days, and then they moved him to a jail cell, where he remained for eight months, until his family was able to bribe a judge with money they got by selling their house, their car, and a little boat they would use sometimes on the Tigris River. Freed, unable to sleep, waiting for the middle-of-the-night visitors who would say, “Come, sir,” Izzy made his way to Syria and into Lebanon. His family tried to follow, but they were rounded up at the Syrian border and sent back to Baghdad.

  Four years passed.

  Now it was 2003. The war had begun. The Americans were in Baghdad, and Izzy, watching from Lebanon, realized he could go back. He took a train into Iraq, then a bus into Baghdad, and then began walking, searching for the right apartment building. There was no electricity. Buildings were on fire. There was shooting in the streets. He found the building and knocked on the door, and when it opened, there was his wife, lit by a few candles, peering into the dark hallway, trying to make out who was there, and then seeing him. Thanks to the American invasion, he was home.

  Another four years passed.

  Now it was October 26, 2007, and Izzy was thinking back to those first moments after the door opened. “I could not say any words,” he said as he sat in his room on the FOB. “Just kiss her. Hug her.” His older daughter, the one born in New York, ran to him. The younger one, whom he hadn’t seen since she was a newborn, remained in the room’s shadows. “Who’s this girl?” he said, moving toward her, reaching for her, but she had no idea who he was and didn’t yet know the tenderness of a father’s voice. She shrank from him, frightened. It took her a while to become the girl who would trust him so thoroughly that when she was being worked on in the FOB’s aid station, his hand would be the one she held, and now that he had that trust, the least he could do when he went home was to take her some candy and hair bands and American-made lotion.

  He wondered every so often: What would American soldiers think if they came to his apartment in the middle of the night on a clearance operation? They would see very little furniture. They would see recently painted walls bruised with soot stains. They would see a refrigerator with a deep dent in it, and not know that it came from the flying glass produced by a bomb blast. They would see a young girl with a scar on the side of her head sleeping in the middle of her parents’ mattress. They would see that among the clothing they had piled in the middle of the floor was a pair of purple sandals, and for a fleeting moment a soldier might be reminded of home. Five minutes in, five minutes out. One more Iraqi family. That’s what they would probably think. And they would be right.

  “I hate being alone,” Izzy said now, looking around his little room. “Believe me, this place is killing me.”

  He turned on the TV and fiddled with a piece of wire he’d fashioned into an antenna until a picture appeared. He was hoping for soccer, but all he could get was a snowy image of four men in long beards wearing robes called dishdashas and talking to one another. They seemed angry. They were raising their voices. Jihadists, an American in need of an interpreter might think, but Izzy said they were just four Iraqi men reciting poetry.

  “My life is like a bag of flour, thrown through wind and into thorn bushes,” he said, interpreting what one of them was saying.

  “No, no. Like dust in the wind. My life is like dust in the wind,” he said, correcting himself.

  “It’s like a hopeless man,” he explained.

  “You know,” Kauzlarich said of Izzy, “if you put a monocle and a top hat on him, he’d look l
ike Mr. Peanut.”

  October 28 now. Kauzlarich’s birthday had arrived, and he, Izzy, and Brent Cummings were about to leave to see Colonel Qasim, who had continued to promise a big party.

  “You boys ready?” Kauzlarich asked the soldiers in his security detail.

  “Let’s do the damn thing,” one of the soldiers said.

  “Not many getting hit lately,” said Staff Sergeant Barry Kitchen, who by his own count had been in twenty-five IED explosions and firefights in two deployments, the most recent explosion leaving him with a wrenched back and some minor burns.

  “Shut up, man,” another soldier said.

  Everyone had their doubts about this trip.

  “I don’t think it’s gonna be much of a birthday, sir,” a soldier said. “I think it’s gonna be a bunch of complaining.”

  Cummings, meanwhile, worried that they were being set up. A specific time, a specific place, a specific route—were they going to a party or an ambush? “That Qasim, he’s a great guy—I think,” he had said the night before, wondering.

  And Izzy had his doubts, too, if only because while children had birthday parties in Iraq, adults did not. At least not the adults he knew.

  “To be honest, we don’t even remember our birthdays,” he’d said one day when he was talking to another interpreter about Qasim’s promise to give Kauzlarich a party.

  “When you pass twenty, no one cares about you,” the other interpreter had agreed.

  “For our children, we do things,” Izzy had said. “But even wedding anniversaries, anything, no.” He had no idea even when he was born, he said. His documents gave a date of July 1, 1959, but for the men of his generation, birth dates were nothing more than a way for the government to divide the population for military service. Half of the men had birth dates of January 1, and the other half had birth dates of July 1, and the fact that his was July 1 meant only that he’d been born in the first half of the year. His mother had once told him that he’d been born during the spring harvest, while she was working in the fields, so he supposed he could isolate the date a little further, but what would be the point?