The Good Soldiers

by David Finkel

  With Schumann, though, there was no such pronouncement, because it was obvious to everyone what had happened, that a great soldier had reached his limit. “He is a true casualty of battle,” Ron Brock, the battalion’s physician assistant, said one day as Schumann was preparing to leave Rustamiyah for good. “There’s not a physical scar, but look at the man’s heart, and his head, and there are scars galore.”

  You could see it in his nervous eyes. You could see it in his shaking hands. You could see it in the three prescription bottles in his room: one to steady his galloping heart rate, one to reduce his anxiety, one to minimize his nightmares. You could see it in the Screensaver on his laptop—a nuclear fireball and the words fuck iraq—and in the private journal he had been keeping since he arrived.

  His first entry, on February 22:

  Not much going on today. I turned my laundry in, and we’re getting our TAT boxes. We got mortared last night at 2:30 a.m., none close. We’re at FOB Rustamiyah, Iraq. It’s pretty nice, got a good chow hall and facilities. Still got a bunch of dumb shit to do though. Well, that’s about it for today.

  His last entry, on October 18:

  I’ve lost all hope. I feel the end is near for me, very, very near.

  Day by day my misery grows like a storm, ready to swallow me whole and take me to the unknown. Yet all I can fear is the unknown. Why can’t I just let go and let it consume me. Why do I fight so hard, just to be punished again and again, for things I can’t recall? What have I done? I just can’t go on anymore with this evil game.

  Darkness is all I see anymore.

  So he was finished. Down to his final hours, he was packed, weaponless, under escort, and waiting for the helicopter that would take him away to a wife who had just told him on the phone: “I’m scared of what you might do.”

  “You know I’d never hurt you,” he’d said, and he’d hung up, wandered around the FOB, gotten a haircut, and come back to his room, where he now said, “But what if she’s right? What if I snap someday?”

  It was a thought that made him feel sick. Just as every thought now made him feel sick. “You spend a thousand days, it gets to the point where it’s Groundhog Day. Every day is over and over. The heat. The smell. The language. There’s nothing sweet about it. It’s all sour,” he said. He remembered the initial invasion, when it wasn’t that way. “I mean it was a front seat to the greatest movie I’ve ever seen in my life.” He remembered the firelights of his second deployment. “I loved it. Anytime I get shot at in a firelight, it’s the sexiest feeling there is.” He remembered how this deployment began to feel bad early on. “I’d get in the Humvee and be driving down the road and I would feel my heart pulsing up in my throat.” That was the start of it, he said, and then Emory happened, and then Crow happened, and then he was in a succession of explosions, and then a bullet was skimming across his thighs, and then Doster happened, and then he was waking up thinking, “Holy shit, I’m still here, it’s misery, it’s hell,” which became, “Are they going to kill me today?” which became, “I’ll take care of it myself,” which became, “Why do that? I’ll go out killing as many of them as I can, until they kill me.

  “I didn’t give a fuck,” he said. “I wanted it to happen. Bottom line—I wanted it over as soon as possible, whether they did it or I did it.”

  The amazing thing was that no one knew. Here was all this stuff going on, pounding heart, panicked breathing, sweating palms, electric eyes, and no one regarded him as anything but the great soldier he’d always been, the one who never complained, who hoisted bleeding soldiers onto his back, who’d suddenly begun insisting on being in the right front seat of the lead Humvee on every mission, not because he wanted to be dead but because that’s what selfless leaders would do.

  He was the great Sergeant Schumann, who one day walked to the aid station and went through the door marked combat stress and asked for help from James Tczap and now was on his way home.

  Now he was remembering what Tczap had told him: “With your stature, maybe you’ve opened the door for a lot of guys to come in.”

  “That made me feel really good,” he said. And yet he had felt so awful the previous day when he told one of his team leaders to round up everyone in his squad.

  “What’d we do now?”

  “You didn’t do anything,” he said. “Just get them together.”

  They came into his room, and he shut the door and told them he was leaving the following day. He said the hard part: that it was a mental health evacuation. He said to them, “I don’t even know what I’m going through. I know that I don’t feel right.”

  “Well, how long?” one of his soldiers said, breaking the silence.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “There’s a possibility I won’t be coming back.”

  They had rallied around him then, shaking his hand, grabbing his arm, patting his back, and saying whatever nineteen- and twenty-year-olds could think of to say.

  “Take care of yourself,” one of them said.

  “Drink a beer for me,” another said.

  He had never felt so guilt-ridden in his life.

  Early this morning, they had driven away on a mission, leaving him behind, and after they’d disappeared, he had no idea what to do. He stood there alone for a while. Eventually he walked back to his room. He turned up his air conditioner to high. When he got cold enough to shiver, he put on warmer clothes and stayed under the vents. He started watching Apoc-aljpse Now on his computer and paused when Martin Sheen said, “When I was here, I wanted to be there; when I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle.” He backed it up and played it again. He packed his medication. He stacked some packages of beef jerky and mac-n-cheese and smoked oysters, which he wouldn’t be able to take with him, for the soldiers he was leaving behind and wrote a note that said, bnjoy.

  Finally it was time to go to the helicopter, and he began walking down the hall. Word had spread through the entire company by now, and when one of the soldiers saw him, he came over. “Well, I’ll walk you as far as the shitters, because I have to go to the bathroom,” the soldier said, and as last words, those would have to do, because those were the last words he heard from any of the soldiers of the 2-16 as his deployment came to an end.

  His stomach hurt as he made his way across the FOB. He felt himself becoming nauseated. At the landing area, other soldiers from other battalions were lined up, and when the helicopter landed, everyone was allowed to board except him. He didn’t understand.

  “Next one’s yours,” he was told, and when it came in a few minutes later, he realized why he’d had to wait. It had a big red cross on the side. It was the helicopter for the injured and the dead.

  That was him, Adam Schumann.

  He was injured. He was dead. He was done.

  “You okay?”

  Laura Cummings asked this.

  “Yeah. Just watching the storm,” Cummings said. He was home, too, now, sitting on his front porch since waking up in the dark to the sound of explosions. Just thunder, he’d realized, so he’d gone outside to see his first rainstorm in months. He’d watched the lightning flashes come closer. He’d felt the air turn moist. The rain, when it came down on the roof, and fell through the downspouts, and washed across his lawn, and flowed along his street, sounded musical to him, and he listened to it, wondering what time it was in Iraq. Was it two in the afternoon? Three in the afternoon? Had anything happened? Unlikely. Anything bad? Anything good?

  “We’re going to have to get the umbrellas out for the girls,” Laura said now, and he wondered whether the umbrellas were still kept in the same place as when he had left.

  At Radina’s, the coffee shop he liked to go to, one of the regulars clapped him on the back and motioned to a friend. “Come on over and meet Brent Cummings,” he said. “He’s just back from Iraq. He’s a hero.”

  Before a Kansas State University football game, as he stood in the stadium parking lot, dressed in school colors, just like always,
and wondering if he would ever again think of a football game as life and death, people had questions.

  “How are things in Iraq?”

  “It’s been difficult—but we’re doing good,” he said.

  “Is the war worth it?”

  “Yeah, I think it’s worth it,” he said.

  “You can ask him,” he overheard a man saying to a woman, who then asked, “Is Bush a good man?”

  Sometimes he would look at his daughters and think about the day that a little Iraqi girl waved at him and a man standing next to the girl saw this and slapped her hard across the face, and he grabbed the man and called him a coward and said if he ever did that again he would be arrested or killed. “It felt good to say it,” he had said that day, right afterward. “It felt good to snatch him off the street in front of people. It felt good to see the fear in his eyes. That felt good.”

  He would sit on the porch and listen to the automatic lawn sprinklers that Laura had mentioned in an e-mail that she was having installed.

  He would sit in the living room and listen to his daughters play the piano that Laura had mentioned she was thinking of buying.

  Back at Radina’s, someone said, “We saw a few soldiers in the paper,” and he knew what they meant and wished they would talk about something else. And soon they did. The conversations were once again about football or vacations or the weather or, for the thousandth time, how good the coffee was, and he was grateful.

  One day he said to Laura, “How much do you want to know?”

  They were in the bedroom, just back from a memorial service at the Fort Riley chapel, where he had delivered a eulogy for Doster, who had died a few hours after Cummings had flown out of Rustamiyah to begin his leave. “Whatever you do, when you get up to speak, don’t look at the family,” the chaplain had said beforehand, advising Cummings on how not to lose his composure, and he hadn’t looked, but he had heard them, as had everyone in the chapel, including a few of the 2-16 soldiers who had been injured and sent back to Kansas. The soldier who had been shot in the chest at the gas station and dragged to safety by Rachel the interpreter was there. A soldier who had been shot in the throat and appeared to Cummings as if he were in the midst of a perpetual flashback was there. A soldier who had been in Cajimat’s Humvee way back when and now spent his days watching one of his arms wither away was there. There were five in all, and Cummings had made plans after the service to see them again, maybe for lunch, and then he and Laura had gone home to the one place in the world where he didn’t worry about whether his foot was halfway on the carpet and halfway on the floor. “How’d I sound?” he’d asked as he hung up his uniform. “You were good,” Laura had answered, sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at him, and suddenly he was crying and saying, “It’s so stupid, Laura, it’s so stupid, it’s so stupid,” and feeling as if the rainstorm he had watched the first night was now moving through him.

  He felt better after that. He went for bike rides. He got his daughters ready for school. He drank the best beer he had ever tasted. He went to the gym with Laura. He sat on his porch with his dogs. He went to Ra-dina’s and saw the man with the big beard who always sat in the corner reading a novel, there as ever, as if there weren’t a concern in the world.

  “Oh man, it was so good, just to be home,” he said, back in Baghdad now, about to take an Ambien, hoping he would be able to sleep. “It was the best time of my life.”

  He had not seen the injured soldiers again, even though he’d intended to.

  He’d also intended to go to the Fort Riley cemetery and visit the grave of the lone 2-16 soldier who had been buried there. Back in the war again, he wondered why he hadn’t.

  But he hadn’t.

  The grave was that of Joel Murray, one of the three soldiers who died on September 4 and whose home now was an old cemetery filled to its edges with dead soldiers from half a dozen wars. On December 11, his grave and that cemetery were covered in ice from a massive storm that was blowing through Kansas on its way from the Great Plains into the Midwest. Seventeen people so far were dead. Hundreds of thousands were without electricity. Trees were crashing down everywhere. Down came a huge limb in the cemetery, collapsing onto a line of headstones and just missing Murray’s. Down came more limbs all over Fort Riley, including in the front yard of a house near the cemetery, where a sign out front read, LT COL KAUZLARICH and where the morning newspaper with a story about the two most recent battle deaths in Iraq was buried under a layer of ice.

  Stephanie Kauzlarich would get to the paper eventually, but at the moment she had too much to do.

  “Next time I’ll buy the Jungle Pancakes,” she was saying to Allie, who was eight years old now and bored with her Eggos.

  “You want more syrup?” she was saying to Jacob, who was six now.

  “You gonna eat breakfast?” she was saying to Garrett, who was four now and racing around the house in a T-shirt and underpants while screaming, “I can’t stop running!”

  Last night’s pizza slices were still in the sink. Flash cards were on the counter. Lego pieces were everywhere. Stephanie opened the refrigerator and the orange juice came tumbling out, which somehow caused the Eggos to fall out of their box and go skidding across the floor. “It’s snowing waffles!” Jacob hollered as Stephanie, who had turned forty since the deployment began, ran after them.

  Here was home in its truest form, when the soldier who lived there was not on the front porch watching a thunderstorm, or proposing, or passing out on the couch, or buying a truck, but was still in Iraq. It was what home was like not on the eighteen days that Kauzlarich would be there, but on the four hundred days he would not.

  It was boxes of Christmas decorations that Stephanie had hauled down from the attic and needed to put up. It was thickening ice on the sidewalk and steps, and where in the world was the big bag of ice melter they bought last year? It was the lights flickering in the storm, and where were the AA batteries for the flashlight, in case the electricity went out? Here were the C batteries. Here were the AAAs. But where were the AAs? The framed photograph of Ralph on top of the refrigerator also needed batteries to power the motion sensor that triggered the memory chip on which he had recorded a message so the kids wouldn’t forget his voice. “Hey. Whatcha doin’ over there? I seeeee you,” he had recorded, trying to be funny, after Stephanie had said that his original message, about how much he missed them, might be too sad. And it worked. He got on a plane to go to Iraq, and the kids came home and walked into the kitchen and heard him saying, “I seeeee you.” They went out and came back in. “I seeeee you.” They woke up the next morning and came into the kitchen for breakfast. “I seeeee you.” Every morning, there he was, even before Stephanie had coffee. “I seeeee you.” She went upstairs to get dressed and came back. “I seeeee you.” She went to get the mail and came back. “I seeeee you.” She began ducking when she came into the kitchen. “I seeeee you.” What could she do, though? She couldn’t turn the photo upside down. She couldn’t take the batteries out, or cover the sensor, or do anything that would seem disrespectful of the circumstances that had led to the buying of the frame and the recording of the message. “I seeeee you.” “I seeeee you.” “I seeeee you.” “I seeeee you.” And then, one day, the batteries ran out, and she meant to replace them, but now it was months later, and anyway they were probably AAs, and if she could find any AAs she’d better put them in the flashlight, because the storm was getting worse. Down came a branch. “I wonder if I should move the car,” she said. But it was miserable out there. Down came more branches. “I should move the car,” she said.

  His war, her war. They were vastly different and largely unshared with each other.

  In April, when he wrote to tell her that Jay Cajimat died, he didn’t go into detail about learning what an EFP could do, and when she wrote back she didn’t go into detail about painting Easter eggs with the kids.

  In July, when the 2-16 was being attacked several times a day, she didn’t dwell on her own
drama: that she and the kids were driving home from out of state, and the car died and had to be jump-started, and they went to a Wendy’s, and the kids had to go to the bathroom, and she couldn’t turn off the car because she was afraid it would die again, and she couldn’t let them go in by themselves . . .

  In September, she didn’t tell him much about the colonel’s wife who’d approached her and asked, “How are you doing?” “I’m doing okay.” “Are you sure?” “Yes.” “Are you sure?” “Yes, I’m doing okay.” “No, you’re not. You’re not doing okay.” It would have been an uncomfortable conversation anytime, but making it worse was the setting: the memorial service for the three dead soldiers. “And what am I supposed to say?” she said now, sitting in her kitchen. “I’m sick of being a single parent? I’m sick of not having sex? Is that what I say? That life sucks?”

  Instead, she kept anything like that to herself. She wasn’t going to tell a colonel’s wife that, and she wasn’t going to tell Ralph, who she was sure needed her to be nothing other than upbeat.

  “Happy birthday, cha-cha-cha,” the kids sang, and there was no way she was going to tell him how much work those videos were: that the boys preferred to be watching TV or playing with friends, that no one would say anything and she’d have to prompt them with whispered commands.