by David Finkel
Meanwhile, Brent Cummings called home and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry as his wife, Laura, told him she had just come back from taking their two daughters to the sports bar the family would go to every Friday afternoon when he was there. It was a tradition of theirs, and it moved him that she had done this, but then Laura was saying that their four-year-old daughter, who has Down syndrome, began vomiting all over herself at the table, and their eight-year-old daughter kept saying, “Gross gross gross,” and the waitress was horrified, and Laura couldn’t find enough napkins, and as the vomit kept coming, people all over the sports bar were averting their eyes and covering their mouths and noses as they realized it wasn’t the aroma of French fries drifting their way . . .
Meanwhile, a soldier who was one of the snipers was storming around in a rage because he had telephoned his wife at one o’clock in the morning her time and no one had answered and where the hell was his wife at one o’clock in the morning? So he called her again at two o’clock in the morning and she didn’t answer and where the hell was she at two in the morning?
“For a lot of soldiers, home is a place of disaster right now,” a mental health specialist named James Tczap, who worked in Combat Stress and was a captain, said one day. “It’s a broken relationship, a fractured relationship, a suspicious relationship. Even the functional relationships are challenged by the disconnect.” Worse, even, he said, was the belief soldiers held that when they went home on their mid-deployment leave, everything would be better than it ever was. “There’s an anger in guys when they go back. They want to go home and be normal, and they’re not quite normal,” he said, and added, “Coming back from leave is the worst part of the deployment.”
On their leaves, they got eighteen days at home to not wear camouflage, not wear armor, not wear gloves, not wear eye protection, and not drive around wondering what was in that pile of trash they were passing, although most of them did wonder, because eighteen days is not enough time to shake such a thing. It was a point of honor with Kauzlarich that he would be among the last to go, and so he stayed put month after month as his soldiers disappeared on helicopters and returned three weeks later with all manner of stories to tell.
A specialist named Brian Emerson ended up in Las Vegas at the Sweethearts Wedding Chapel with his girlfriend of two years, getting married as her mother listened in on a cell phone. He spent $5,000, he said when he got back, ring not included, much of it at the Bellagio. “The penthouse suite,” he said proudly. “It was like five-hundred-and-something dollars a night. We stayed for two.” And then it was time to go. “Worse than leaving the first time,” he said.
Sergeant Jay Howell ended up in Branson, Missouri, at a place called the Dixie Stampede. “It’s like a rodeo while you’re eating, but the theme is the Civil War,” he said. “You go in, you pick a side, North or South, they do some singing and dancing, then they do some horse races; they got weapons, they have pigs even; then they pull out kids from the audience and the kids chase chickens. The North versus the South. We’ve been there a few times, and it always ends in a tie. The kids love it.” And then it was time to come back.
Sergeant Major Randy Waddell simply went home, and as glad as he was to be there, his heart sank when he saw that his seventeen-year-old son, Joey, was driving around in a truck that had 160,000 miles on it, was leaking oil and transmission fluid, and had a plastic bag taped over a broken-out window.
“So we go looking for a truck,” Waddell, back now, told Brent Cummings of what he had done on leave, “and golly, these cars are so expen-sive.” The one they liked the most was at a Toyota place, he said, a used gray Dodge with 25,000 miles on it, but the price was $17,000. Only $17,000, the salesman, a little ball of energy, had said, but there was no only about it.
Cummings shook his head in sympathy.
“And one night I was sitting out on the porch by myself and I was thinking about it,” Waddell continued. “I was thinking, ‘You know, Randy, if you don’t make it back, for whatever reason, if you don’t come back, what will Joey have to drive if you don’t get him something before you leave?’” Alone on the porch, he went back and forth, he told Cummings. Fix the old truck?That he could afford. “Or I could go buy him something and be done with it, and at least when I go back to Iraq I’ll have a clear conscience that I did the right thing when I was home.
“So I bought him a seventeen-thousand-dollar truck.”
“Wow,” Cummings said.
“And let me tell how I did this,” Waddell said. “This is great. This is how I surprised him. We find this truck and we drive it and then we go away for a couple of days, and I do all the paperwork while he’s at school. So the day that we’re ready to sign all the paperwork—because I did it over the phone—I said, ‘Joey,’ I said, ‘Let’s drive back up to the Toyota place and see if that truck’s still there.’ He said, ‘There ain’t no need in going up there, Dad. We can’t afford it. We’ve already talked about it. It costs too much.’ I said, ‘Well, let’s go talk to him. Let’s see if we can get him down to fifteen instead of seventeen.’ So we pull up there, and the truck’s moved, because they’re getting it ready for me to pick up. So we walk up to one of the salesmen, and that guy didn’t know me. I said, ‘So, what’s going on with that gray Dodge?’ ‘Oh, somebody came by this morning and bought it.’ Aww, you shoulda seen Joey’s face. ‘I told you, Dad! I told you somebody already bought it! I told you!’ I said, ‘Well let’s go in and talk to the guy and see.’ So we go inside, and the little guy comes running up to me, ‘Hey, Mr. Waddell, how you doing? Blah blah blah.’ And I said, ‘So, I hear you sold that truck out there today.’ He said, ‘Yeah. We did. We sold it to you!’ And Joey turned around and looked at me, and I said, ‘Oh yeah, you own that truck outside.’
“And that’s how we got the truck.”
“That’s awesome!” Cummings said.
“It turned out well,” Waddell said.
“I spent seven grand,” said Jay March, who was just back from leave and once again beneath the tree from which hung the sack of poison filled with dead flies.
“You’re shittin’ me,” a sergeant he was sitting with said.
“Nope,” March said, and then went on to describe what he had done after he turned twenty-one, left James Harrelson’s memorial service, and went home to Ohio in search of new slides for the continuing show in his head.
“The first thing I did was take fifteen hundred dollars and take my two brothers to the mall,” he began, and then backtracked to say that the very first thing he did was strip off his uniform in the airport parking lot, put on shorts and a T-shirt that his brothers had brought him, and then go to the mall. For three hours, they bought whatever they wanted, sale or no sale, as if they weren’t poor, and what he bought were new pants, a new shirt, and new athletic shoes, all in white, pure white, because he wanted to feel clean.
From the mall, he went home to see the rest of his family, where the questions began. “So what do you do?” they asked. “Well, we go out,” he said, and unsure of how to describe it, he showed them photographs instead. There was Harrelson’s Humvee, on fire. There was Craig’s Humvee just after Craig died. There were some kids in Kamaliyah. “And my grandma started crying,” March said. “She knew about the deaths, but this was seeing how people lived. The shit trenches and stuff. I showed her a picture of a Humvee stuck in a shit trench, and she asked if that was mud, and I tried to explain it was shit, and that those lakes on the sides were shit and piss, and she didn’t want to see anymore. She got up and went in the other room and she got busy ordering me my favorite dinner, which is chicken Parmesan.”
And his first day went from there, he said. He ate some marvelous chicken Parmesan, he bought his first legal six-pack of beer, and then he went with his brother and some friends to a place called the Yankee Bar and Grill for the Friday night wet T-shirt contest.
He danced. He drank a beer. He drank tequila. He drank Crown Royal. He drank another beer. He drank
a Flaming Dr Pepper. He drank something else: “I don’t even know what the fuck it was, but they put something on fire and dropped it in the beer.”
He danced with a girl and mentioned he was home from Iraq, and danced with another girl and mentioned it again. He was wearing his new white shirt and white pants and white shoes and was feeling pretty good about things, and yes, he was drunk, totally drunk, but not so drunk that he didn’t hear them calling out his name and telling him to come up on the stage.
So he and his brother went up onstage and sat back to back in two chairs with a stripper’s pole in between, and as six women in T-shirts came onstage and began dancing in a circle around them, he yelled to his brother, “Dude, there’s no fucking way.” Here came the water hoses now, and soon the women were soaked head to toe and dancing through puddles while pulling off their shirts, and was that the moment he had a new slide for the show inside his head, or was it from what came next? Because now one of the women was stepping onto his new white shoes and leaning toward him and pushing her chest toward his face, and now she was climbing onto his lap and standing on his thighs with her wet dirty feet to get to the stripper’s pole, and now she was trying to step onto his shoulders, and now, drunk as he was, all he could think about was:
My new white shoes!
My new white pants!
My new white shirt!
Once again, he was filthy.
“But I remembered it didn’t matter,” he said. “I had more money. I could buy more clothes tomorrow.” So he began laughing, and then cheering as someone yelled into the microphone, “Welcome back from Iraq,” and then a woman was saying, “I’ll give you a ride home tonight,” and then they were in front of his house kissing, and then she was removing her shirt, and then “I passed out on her chest. Drunk. Done. She woke me up. ‘Maybe we should do this another night.’ ‘Yeah.’”
So he went inside, passed out again, and dreamed of an explosion.
“Dude, what’s wrong?” his brother said as he sat up wide-eyed.
He passed out again and then the phone began ringing.
“They’re trying to call me! They’re trying to call me!” he began screaming, and then he had a cigarette, and then he passed out again, and then it was morning and his grandmother was the one leaning toward him, saying, “Here’s some orange juice,” and he was thinking:
Seventeen days to go.
In the first hours of his leave, Nate Showman walked through the Atlanta airport and couldn’t look anyone in the eye. The businessmen on cell phones, the families on vacation—all of it was too strange. The normal abnormal, Cummings called Iraq, but this was exactly the opposite: the abnormal normal. Eyes down so he wouldn’t betray any emotion, Showman made his way to a connecting flight home and a girlfriend he wasn’t sure he knew how to talk to anymore.
In the final hours of his leave, he ended up getting married, the last thing he had gone home intending to do.
Showman was the twenty-four-year-old lieutenant whose earnestness and optimism about the war had made people think of him as a young version of Kauzlarich. But by the time he headed home, that optimism had been tempered. After being in charge of Kauzlarich’s personal security detail for the first few months of the deployment, he was promoted to a platoon leader in Alpha Company, directly responsible for the lives of two dozen men who in horrible June, and horrible July, and horrible August, and horrible September, would roll their eyes at Kauzlarich’s “It’s all good” pronouncements. Over time, he began to see their point. “I think it’s difficult for them, and difficult for me, to hear about these strides we’re making, these improvements we’re making, when we know—when I know—for a fact, that this place hasn’t changed a damn bit since we set foot here in February,” he said one day.
Mid-August was the worst of it, when two of his soldiers were severely wounded in an EFP attack. Two days later, the rest of his soldiers decided they’d had enough. They were tired of waiting to be blown up, they were tired of being mortared every day at the COP, they were tired of being told they were winning when they knew they weren’t. Among themselves, they decided that the following morning they weren’t going to go out of the wire. Maybe they would sabotage their Humvees. Or maybe they would just refuse orders to go, even if it meant charges of insubordination. Either way, when Showman heard whispers of it, he realized he had a potential mutiny on his young hands, and he went to Kauzlarich for advice.
“Fix it,” Kauzlarich suggested.
He did in the end, by hatching a plan with two of his platoon sergeants to wake up the soldiers in the middle of the night, when they would be at their groggiest, and get in their faces until they were on their way. It would not go down in military history as the most sophisticated plan of all time, but to Showman’s relief, it worked. One sleepy soldier headed toward a Humvee, another followed, then another. Problem solved. But of course it was not.
By the time Showman flew to the United States at the end of September, an effusive young man who would write earnest letters home—“We are holding a snake by the tail here . . . Keep the faith . . . Let us finish the fight”—had become largely silent. He and his girlfriend headed to a cabin deep in the woods, but even there, safe and sealed off, he was reluctant to talk. One day he did, though, and when he found himself unable to stop, as if he had become one more war wound in need of a tourniquet, he came up with another plan, this one more elaborate.
It involved a limousine to a restaurant and a bouquet of roses waiting on a chair. Out came a bottle of wine and two glasses, one etched with the words Will you marry me? and the other with Say yes.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
“What if we did it now?” he said.
“What if we did it now?” she repeated, and so it was that on day seventeen of his leave, in the backyard of her house, as their families and a few friends watched, Nate Showman’s optimism returned.
They spent one night together, and then they were at the airport saying goodbye. It would be six months before he would see her again, and he wanted to find the right words that would last that long, or if it were to come to that, longer.
“My wife,” he finally said, saying those words for the first time.
She laughed.
“My husband,” she said.
And then he came back.
Adam Schumann was going home, too. But unlike the others, he was not coming back. Five months after carrying Sergeant Emory down the stairs in Kamaliyah, his bad-news vessel, as David Petraeus might describe it, was no longer able to drain.
This was Schumann’s third deployment to Iraq. He’d been here thirty-four months by his own count, just over a thousand days, and it didn’t matter anymore that he was one of the 2-16’s very best soldiers. His war had become unbearable. He was seeing over and over his first kill disappearing into a mud puddle, looking at him as he sank. He was seeing a house that had just been obliterated by gunfire, a gate slowly opening, and a wide-eyed little girl about the age of his daughter peering out. He was seeing another gate, another child, and this time a dead-aim soldier firing. He was seeing another soldier, also firing, who afterward vomited as he described watching head spray after head spray through his magnifying scope. He was seeing himself watching the vomiting soldier while casually eating a chicken-and-salsa MRE.
He was still tasting the MRE.
He was still tasting Sergeant Emory’s blood.
He needed to go home. That was what Combat Stress had said after he finally gave in and admitted that his thoughts had turned suicidal. The traveling psychiatrist who spent a few days a week on the FOB diagnosed him as depressed and suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, a diagnosis that was becoming the most common of the war. There had been internal studies suggesting that 20 percent of soldiers deployed to Iraq were experiencing symptoms of PTSD ranging from nightmares, to insomnia, to rapid breathing, to racing hearts, to depression, to obsessive thoughts about suicide. They also suggested that those symptoms increa
sed significantly with multiple deployments and that the cost of treating the hundreds of thousands of soldiers suffering from them could eventually cost more than the war itself.
Every study that had been done indicated the seriousness of this, and yet in the culture of the army, where mental illness has long been equated with weakness, there remained a lingering suspicion of any diagnosis for which there wasn’t visible evidence. A soldier who lost a leg, for instance, was a soldier who lost a leg. Losing a leg couldn’t be faked. Same with being shot, or pierced by shrapnel from a lob bomb, or incinerated by an EFP. Those were legitimate injuries. But to lose a mind? Early in the deployment, a soldier had one day climbed onto the roof of an Iraqi police station, stripped off everything he was wearing, then ascended a ladder to the top of a guard tower, and in full view of a busy section of New Baghdad began hollering at the top of his lungs and masturbating. Was it an act of mental instability, as some thought, or was it the calculated act of someone trying to get home, which was Kauzlarich’s growing suspicion? Trying to figure it out, Kauzlarich kept returning to the fact that the soldier had paused in the midst of his supposed meltdown to remove sixty pounds of clothing and gear before climbing the ladder, which suggested a deliberateness to his thinking. Perhaps he hadn’t been so out of control after all. Perhaps he was just a lousy, disloyal soldier. And so, in the end, he was sent home not with a recommendation for treatment, but for a court martial and incarceration.
Kauzlarich himself was another example of the army’s conflicted attitude about all this. On one hand, he endorsed the idea of his soldiers being debriefed by the FOB’s Combat Stress team after witnessing something especially traumatic. But when Kauzlarich was the one in need of debriefing after he saw the remains of three of his soldiers scattered along the road on September 4, he made it clear that he needed no help whatsoever. “I don’t need that bullshit,” he told Cummings, and so Cummings, who knew better, discreetly arranged for a Combat Stress specialist to casually drop by Kauzlarich’s office. An hour later, he was still leaning in Kauzlarich’s doorway, tossing out questions, and afterward Kauzlarich mentioned to Cummings that he was feeling a lot better. He understood what had just happened and was glad for it, and yet even with that he had no intention of ever being seen walking into the aid station and disappearing through the doorway marked COMBAT STRESS. And as reports of soldiers supposedly having problems continued to reach him, he continued to reduce some of those reports to the infantry’s historically preferred diagnosis: “He’s just a pussy.”