by David Finkel
It was the same attitude he had about death: “We believe that God created us in one day, and God will take our life in one day. No matter if we are staying home, or doing work, by heart attack, by disease, by bullet, by IED—that’s it. One day you’re born, one day you’re going to die. No matter what you do, it’s destiny. That’s it. Nobody can go beyond his age or his destiny.”
And about the dangers of being an interpreter: “Yeah, I know. You can die any minute. You see, I’ll feel happy when I just get killed by a bullet in my head—because I expect worse than that. I expect they will put me in the back of a truck with two cats, hungry cats, to maybe scratch my face, eat pieces of my flesh, and then they will hang me on the walls, nails, like what happened to Jesus Christ, they will put a drill in my head, cut pieces, and then shoot me, torch me, and then throw me to the garbage to be eaten by dogs. It has happened before. So if I get killed, it would be very easy to die from one bullet.”
“So what day is his birthday?” the other interpreter asked Izzy of Kauzlarich.
“Actually, I don’t know,” Izzy said.
“So how are you going to celebrate it?” the other interpreter said.
How? When? Why? Izzy had no idea. But he did think Kauzlarich deserved some sort of tribute. “Cross my mother’s grave, I have never seen an American officer understand what he is doing like Colonel K,” he said. Colonel K was the rare one trying to learn some Arabic, he said. Colonel K handed out candy and soccer balls to children, something an Iraqi colonel would never do. A few weeks before, at the council building, when a woman in a broken wheelchair asked for help, Colonel K brought her a new wheelchair the following day. “Thank you,” the woman had said, overcome with surprise, and Izzy, interpreting, had felt very good about that.
His doubts were simply about whether anyone would know what to do.
“As-Salamu Alaykum,” Kauzlarich said, walking into Qasim’s office. “Shaku maku?”
Qasim rose to greet him. He was the only one there. The office was dark—not to obscure anything, such as people hiding behind a couch about to yell, “Surprise,” but because the electricity was out.
“Please. Sit. Down,” Qasim said in the English he had been trying to learn.
Kauzlarich sat. Izzy sat. Cummings sat. A few of the soldiers from the security detail sat. And that appeared to be it. A few minutes later, two of the people Kauzlarich often met with from Kamaliyah and Fedaliyah wandered in and sat. Izzy interpreted: they were complaining about someone they knew who had been detained the night before on suspicions that he was part of an EFP cell.
“Okay. I will release him today,” Kauzlarich said facetiously.
The two were surprised.
“I don’t think so,” Kauzlarich said, the facetiousness gone, and as the two resumed complaining, he felt himself being overtaken by a feeling of lonesomeness. It wasn’t the absence of a party. Some days just had a built-in feeling of rootlessness, or maybe it was yearning. Christmas. Thanksgiving. All the holidays, really, even though there’d be decorations in the DFAC. Cardboard cutouts of turkeys. Cardboard cutouts of fireworks. Maybe the cardboard cutouts made it worse. And birthdays, for which there were no decorations. Just before leaving, he had checked his e-mail and there’d been nothing new from Kansas, so this was what his birthday would be: this dark room and these oblivious strangers, none of whom would be in his life if there hadn’t been the surge.
The door opened, and in came one more, a member of Qasim’s National Police battalion, balancing a tray filled with cans of 7UP. In meeting after meeting, serving 7UPs was all he ever seemed to do. He was young and timid and so obviously unworldly that a few of Kauzlarich’s soldiers had taken on his maturation as a personal project, one day presenting him with a gift they had ordered for him online. It was a sex toy product called a “pocket pussy.” He had looked at it quizzically and then with some embarrassment, but since it was a gift from guests, he had accepted it graciously and never spoken of it since. Now, just as graciously, he went around the room serving cans of soda, and when he was done, he put the extra cans in a refrigerator in a corner of Qasim’s office.
The door opened again and in came Mr. Timimi with two more of the chronic complainers, both of whom took seats and started right in. There were two large windows on the far side of the room, and as sounds came through them of more men gathering, Cummings seemed to be looking at the drapes covering them, wondering perhaps if they would suppress a grenade.
Now the doorknob rattled and someone came in with a camera, and Qasim walked across the room to his desk.
The door opened yet again, and two more of Qasim’s men wrestled a giant table inside. They were followed by men bringing in plates of chicken and bread and salad. It was the same meal Kauzlarich had been served many other times—no utensils, everyone reaching in with their wet fingers, leftovers taken out at the end for the policemen waiting outside the closed door—and so it wasn’t until what happened next that Kauzlarich realized this was different.
Qasim reached under his desk, pulled out a square box with the word Crispy on top, placed it on the table, and said to Kauzlarich in perfect English, as if he had been practicing the sentence:
“This is your pizza.”
And it was. It was a pizza.
It had tomatoes on it, and cheese, and probably sausage, and almost certainly that was chicken.
“I have never had Iraqi pizza,” Kauzlarich said, beginning to laugh, and as a second pizza came out from under the desk, Qasim declared with pride, “Iraq is the first country in everything. In insurgency. In food.”
In broken promises, too, it could seem. But on this day, one was being kept. Kauzlarich was getting his birthday party.
“It’s a small thing,” Qasim said, standing off to the side now, looking pleased. He had paid for this himself, even though in his haphazard life he had no money to spare. “Colonel K deserves much more than this.”
Someone blew up three balloons, which Izzy taped to the ceiling.
There were gifts: A pen. A watch. A knife. A framed rendering of the Gates of Babylon. A dishdasha.
The complainers stopped complaining and offered congratulations.
“Colonel K. One of our dearest friends,” one said.
“Do you think America and Iraq have a long future together?” another asked.
“I think we’ll be friends forever,” Kauzlarich said.
“Friend,” Mr. Timimi said, kissing Kauzlarich on the cheek.
“Friend,” Kauzlarich said back.
Most astonishing, though, more so than even the pizza, was the cake. It was three chocolate tiers that were covered in icing shaped into swirls and flowers. Each tier had candles, and sparklers, too, and propped on the very top was a big cardboard heart with writing on it.
“HAPPY Birthday KoLoNiL K!” it read.
Out came cigarette lighters to light the candles and sparklers, and as the candles flared, and the sparklers burned, and some people began singing “Happy Birthday,” and some grabbed aerosol cans of artificial snow and sprayed them into the air, only a cynic wouldn’t have been delighted. And since turning forty-two, Kauzlarich had yet to become a cynic.
“Unbelievable,” he said as the artificial snow came down on his head. He ate cake. He posed for photographs. “This will go down as the very best birthday I’ve had in Iraq,” he said, and then it was time to go.
He walked over to Qasim to thank him and kissed him on each cheek.
“When is your birthday?” he asked.
“The first of July,” Qasim said.
Body armor on now, Kauzlarich headed outside. He had his gifts and balloons with him, and as he turned a corner, he was all of a sudden face-to-face with the Iraqis that Cummings had heard gathering outside of the windows. There were several dozen of them. They were Qasim’s soldiers, some Sunni, some Shi’a, some trusted by Qasim and some not, and when they saw Kauzlarich and his gifts and balloons, many of them began to shout.
K
auzlarich kept walking. So did Cummings and the other soldiers.
And so did Izzy, who once again found himself in the middle of the Americans he worked for and the Iraqis he lived among.
Such was the life the war had given him. But for once in that life, he felt neither conflicted nor ashamed. Instead, as their shouting continued, he laughed.
“Christmas! Christmas!” they were shouting to KoLoNiL K.
9
DECEMBER 11, 2007
This month, more of our troops will return home as a result of the
success we’re seeing in Iraq. People are coming home.
—GEORGE W. BUSH, December 3, 2007
Jeffrey Sauer was about to be one of them. All he had to do was get through a few more weeks.
A lieutenant colonel like Kauzlarich, Sauer commanded another battalion on the FOB that had arrived a few months before the 2-16 and always seemed to be that much ahead of whatever Kauzlarich and the 2-16 were experiencing. When Cajimat died in April, for instance, Sauer and his battalion were in the midst of a period in which nine soldiers were killed in thirty-one days. “Look at these kids,” he had said after the ninth, going through their photographs one by one. “A great kid . . . Had a fiancee . . . Four hundred push-ups, four hundred sit-ups . . . Frigging Silver Star winner . . .
“We all come here thinking we can achieve a lot,” he then said, knowing something that Kauzlarich at that point did not.
Now, in November, knowing even more about the limits of achievement, he was just about done. “Am I counting the days?” he said one day, which soldiers weren’t supposed to do, because it was as much of a jinx as picking up the white tray at the DFAC rather than the brown one, or stepping through a doorway with their left foot rather than their right foot. “Yes.” But he couldn’t help it, he said. Home was so close now that every soldier of his was thinking, “I don’t want to be the last guy,” he said, and he was thinking it, too, because for the first time since arriving, he’d finally had the EFP nightmare, the one where you see the explosion coming at you, and then everything goes blank. “Oh, it fucking woke me up, for sure.”
Adam Schumann
A few days later, as he drove along Route Predators, the explosion actually occurred, and it was just as he had dreamed. It came from the left, enshrouding the Humvee in dust until he couldn’t see, and afterward he said that he now knew the answer to the question of whether a person hears what might be the moment of his death: no.
Then, a few days later, came another explosion, of which he hadn’t dreamed and he couldn’t help but hear.
It happened soon after sunrise on a quiet Sunday morning and shook every building on the FOB. Doors bowed from the concussion. Windows broke and blew out. It wasn’t the usual rocket or mortar, but something louder and scarier. There’d been no siren, no warning at all, just a sudden explosion that felt like the end of the world had arrived, and before anyone had a chance to do anything, such as run for a bunker or crawl under a bed, there was a second explosion, and a third.
The day of the lob bombs, this would be called. Soldiers counted fifteen explosions in all, although some may have been mixed in with the roars of missiles being fired from Apache gunships or their own racing hearts. Whatever the true number, the explosions went on for twenty minutes, and only as calm returned did the audacity of what had just happened become clear.
There had been two long dump trucks. They had pulled off Route Pluto across from the FOB, into a dirt area beyond which was a cement factory. Each was carrying a load of thousands of brightly colored bags of chicken-flavored potato chips that had been manufactured in Syria, but hidden beneath were propane tanks on launching rails, which became visible only as the backs of the trucks rose and the bags of potato chips fell away.
These tanks were the bombs. Each had been packed with ball bearings and explosives. A 107-millimeter rocket booster attached to the bottom was just strong enough to lob a tank over the high wall surrounding the FOB, at which point it turned nose down and plummeted onto its detonator, exploding with the noise and force of a five-hundred-pound bomb and spraying shrapnel and ball bearings in every direction for hundreds of yards. One after another, the bombs exploded in terrifying succession, until the two launching trucks were finally destroyed by Hellfire missiles, and when the wreckage had cooled enough to be searched, soldiers discovered an inscription on one of the trucks that read, when translated: “A statement from the Holy Koran. Victory is coming from God, and the entire triumph is near.” Other statements had been left, too, in the form of text messages on cell phones. “Little Hiroshima is going to happen to you,” was one. “How was your morning now? Surprises are coming.”
This was the very first use in Iraq of a weapon that would eventually spread across much of Baghdad and be described by the military as “the greatest threat right now that we face” because of its capacity to kill “scores of soldiers” at once. If there was any good news to this first attack, it was that no one was seriously injured. But the damage to the FOB was significant, perhaps in the millions of dollars, and after the attack ended, Kauzlarich went to survey the extent of it, eventually arriving at a collapsed trailer outside of which stood Jeffrey Sauer.
The trailer had been his. He had been inside, waking up, when the lob bombs began landing nearby. Blast walls surrounding the trailer had stopped the shrapnel, but concussions caved in the roof and walls, and as the trailer came down he covered his head and waited to die. Explosion after explosion—this time Sauer heard them all. Finally, he crawled outside into a smoking landscape of broken buildings and vehicles, and when Kauzlarich arrived, he was standing with a dazed expression, staring at something crawling across the ground.
“See that bug?” he said to Kauzlarich.
Kauzlarich nodded.
“A week ago, I would have crushed it. But it’s Sunday, and I almost got my ass waxed, so I’m gonna let it live,” he said, and as he continued to watch the bug, Kauzlarich continued to watch the face of a man who soon would be going home.
Home: it was less a place than an act of imagination now, a realm fundamentally disconnected from what life had become. The time difference was part of it—dawn in America was dusk in Iraq—but after nine months it was more than that. Soldiers had a hard time explaining Iraq to one another; how could they explain it to someone whose life had nothing to do with the pucker factor of climbing yet again into a Humvee? Or being caught in a flimsy-walled shitter during a rocket attack? Or busting into a building at 3:00 a.m. and finding a little torture room with blood-spattered walls and a bloodstained mattress and a rubber hose and scratch-ings on a wall of a crazed face and a partly eaten piece of bread? Or touching the bread with a boot and realizing with additional horror that it was still fresh? Or developing the absolute need, as Brent Cummings had developed, of never, never, ever standing in his room with half of his foot on the floor and half of it on the cheap rug he’d bought to make his room feel homier, because the one time he stood that way was the day of a KIA?
If Cummings told his wife that, was there any way she would understand?
If he told a soldier that, was there any way he wouldn’t?
Nine months along, where was home now? Was it back there, where Kauzlarich’s wife, Stephanie, recorded a video for him of their three children on his birthday, or was it here, where he interrupted the rhythms of a day in order to watch it?
“Happy birthday, cha-cha-cha,” they sang.
“My little buddies,” he said. He played it again. And again, amazed at how much taller they had become.
Was home the place where children grew so steadily it was invisible, or here, where their father noticed it in increments, like a distant relative?
Jumpy videos, slapdash e-mails, occasional phone calls, Internet messaging—these were the tether lines from here to there, and there to here, that were becoming ever more frayed by distance and time.
“The weather this weekend has been glorious!” Kauzlarich’s mother wrote
in October. “The leaves are all turning color, no wind, and temperatures in the upper 60’s, low 70’s! Are there any other signs of Fall in Iraq except the more reasonable temperatures? Your lovin’ Mom and Dad.”
“Dear Mom and Dad,” Kauzlarich wrote back. “It’s still 100 degrees here. The leaves are not turning color. Love, Ralph.”
“Hi Love! I Love you! Well, today I’ve spent in vacation research crazi-ness . . .” Stephanie began an e-mail in early December, and she went on from there to describe different scenarios for Kauzlarich’s upcoming leave and their plans to go to Florida. She had found flights, ticket packages, hotels, and resorts, and she laid out the prices of each. Would he prefer this hotel or that hotel? Standard room or suite? A hotel or acondo? With meals or without meals? Disney or Universal? And what about Sea World? “SOOOO THOUGHTS???????”
“Stephanie Corie,” he wrote back. “As long as I get to spend all the time with you and the kids we can do it in a bungalow upside down for all I care. Money ain’t an issue. Do need a heated pool. Your choice on all . . . Hugs, Ralph Lester.”
“OK!!” she wrote back, and before he could fully absorb that she hadn’t started with the word love, he was reading: “I stayed up 2 extra hours last night to get all the details straight for you so that you could be a part of making the decision on our trip. I know you’re making lots of decisions over there & I shouldn’t bother you with this. I’ve been making all the decisions here for 10 months by myself . . .”