The Good Soldiers

by David Finkel

  Three days till the competition now, and White was considering what to say when the sergeants asked him to introduce himself. It was an invitation for a soldier to say absolutely nothing more than his name, his birthplace, where he went to school, and his objectives in the army—five sentences, maximum—but White was a thoughtful soldier who wished he could find a way to say something more.

  “See, it’s kind of weird,” he said. “I’ve noticed when I’m out there and shit goes down, my hand doesn’t shake. Later, when it’s out of my hands, I do. But when it happens? That’s where you find out what you’re made of.”

  Could he say such a thing to a panel of sergeants expecting five by-the -book sentences, assuming he made it past inspection? Not if he wanted to win, he realized, but it was interesting to imagine anyway. “Tell us a little about yourself,” the sergeants would say, and he would say, “In Iraq, I found out what I’m made of,” and then he would give three examples.

  The first was from June 11, when his convoy was passing a mosque and an EFP blew into the gun turret of the Humvee two ahead of him in line. It was 1:55 in the afternoon. One moment he’d been riding along thinking, ‘When’s it coming, when’s it coming,’ like everyone else, and in the next moment it had. “Get the fuck out of my way!” he would remember hollering as he ran past soldiers and through sniper fire, and then he was by the side of a dying Cameron Payne, taking inventory of his wounds. The eyes: a bit of an eyelid was gone. The mouth: a bit of the left side was gone. The ears: behind the left one was a puncture wound straight into the brain. “You’re gonna have to move your feet so I can close the door,” he said, and when Payne did so, White closed the door and methodically went to work on the wounds. Covered in so much blood that his hands were slippery, he tore open the packaging around the compression bandage with his teeth, pushed the bandage into place, and held Payne in his arms all the way to the aid station, and only afterward, when he began to shake, did he realize that all during it he hadn’t.

  Joshua Reeves—Rustamiyah fuel station, September—would be his second example. “Two casualties. One not breathing. Life threatening,” a soldier yelled into the radio moments after the explosion as White checked Reeves for a pulse. He straddled Reeves and did mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as Rachel the interpreter pushed on Reeves’s chest. Thirty compressions, two breaths. No pulse. Thirty compressions, two breaths. No pulse. On it went until they reached the aid station. Reeves was taken inside, Rachel stood in her blood-filled boots, and White, his work on Reeves done, began to shake. But not a moment before.

  As for the third example, it involved James Harrelson, who had died on Outer Berm Road, and a woman White had met and married just before he deployed. He was twenty-five then, and she was nineteen. They were married in a small church in northern Kansas where his mother was the minister, and five days later he’d gone to Iraq, leaving his new wife with his most beloved possession, a silver 2006 Pontiac Grand Am. “Blah blah blah blah I wrecked your car blah blah blah blah,” he remembered her saying when he got to Rustamiyah and called to say he was safe. “I let her finish with the blah blahs. ‘That’s nice. Can we go back to the part where you said you wrecked my car?’”

  And it went on from there, he said. “She wanted me to, like, call her more, and this was when we just got here. Things were crazy. I was calling her once a week, but she wanted more. She’d be all sobby. ‘You don’t call me enough. I’m the only one talking. You don’t care about me.You don’t love me.’

  “So, whatever. That didn’t work,” he said. Four months after the wedding, he managed to get it annulled, leaving him with several bad memories and one pood one that would forever bring tears to his eyes: having James Harrelson as his best man. Harrelson had been the first person White became friends with when he arrived at Fort Riley. They roomed together, drove around together, went out dancing and met girls together, and after Harrelson burned to death, White was asked to give the “Soldier’s Tribute” at the memorial service, which was more informally known as the speech by the best friend. “I choose to remember him as a friend and fellow brother in arms who died for something he loved, and that was the army and America,” he said in his speech, and as his words moved through a chapel overflowing with soldiers of all stripes who were looking at him and listening to him, he didn’t shake then, either.

  In his imagination, a soldier who deserved to be soldier of the month would be able to talk about examples such as those. “Tell us a little bit about yourself,” they would say, and he would tell them not only that he was the soldier who didn’t shake until afterward, but also the truth of war, that “shit happens,” and that “being paranoid is okay. Because you can get hit anywhere. Paranoid makes you scared, and being scared is okay because it keeps you on edge.”

  The reality, though, was that the sergeants would not be interested in such things. “What is the seventh sentence of the Soldier’s Creed?” they were more likely to ask, and if they did, he knew that he would be able to recite the answer perfectly, and that he would win. He was sure of this. Assuming he was finally able to get in.

  Sergeant Mays took Jay March’s freshly cleaned helmet, brought it to his nose, and inhaled deeply.

  “Tide,” he said after a moment, pleased.

  He took Swales’s helmet and pointed to a frayed strap that would need to be replaced if Swales wanted to make it past inspection. He looked over Swales’s ammunition magazines and shook his head. “You got a lot of work to do,” he said, and Swales knew this was true, because Sergeant Mays knew everything about becoming soldier of the month.

  As the platoon sergeant, Mays was the one who made the nominations, and all of his soldiers understood how seriously he took it. “I just won’t send anybody,” he said. “I put myself in a private’s shoes: Would I want to be led by this guy? Does this guy inspire me? Does he have the passion? And the knowledge?”

  March and Swales—those were the guys this time around whose answers came out to yes, yes, yes, and yes, and now it was down to advice time.

  How to knock on the door to enter: “Three times. Loud. Like you’re in charge.”

  How to walk in: “You beeline straight to the desk and stop three meters away.”

  Next: “You salute the sergeant major. You state your name, and you say, ‘Reports to the president of the board as directed,’ and you hold the salute until he renders the salute.”

  And: “Ninety percent of it is confidence. The way you sell yourself to the board. The Q&A is just part of it.”

  The Q&A was actually idiotic, he said, at least the way this panel did it. “It’s supposed to be about leadership. Not memorization.” But that’s what this panel emphasized, so he encouraged March and Swales to study. “If they don’t make it in, I don’t know, it’s horrible,” he said, and then softened. “I mean, I would like them to win it, but if they don’t win it they’re still the best two team leaders in the battalion.”

  “Don’t fidget,” he advised them.

  “No head movement.”

  “No eye movement.”

  “If a fly lands on your nose, you can’t swat it.”

  Two days until the competition now, and Ivan Diaz, another of the thirty, was saying of his first failed attempt to win, “When I walked in there, it was nerve-wracking.” That had been at Fort Riley, as the deployment neared and Diaz was wondering about everything that was about to happen: “Do we go out all day?” “Do we get attacked every day?” “Am I ready for this?”

  Then, on April 6, he was the gunner in a Humvee being driven by Jay Cajimat, and as he explained now, “It turned out I was ready.”

  Ten months after that day, Diaz still had pieces of shrapnel in his leg and awakened every morning to a dull pain that reminded him once more of what had happened. “We’ll get you out in the fight again ricky tick,” Kauzlarich had said to him at Cajimat’s memorial ceremony, but it hadn’t been ricky tick at all. For the first month he couldn’t walk, and in the months after, there was the m
ental part. “I got nervous for a while,” he said. “There were a lot of mortars. The noise got to me more than anything. I couldn’t sleep.”

  He wasn’t the only one awake: the inability to sleep was one of the things that had steered Adam Schumann to ask for help from Combat Stress. It was what Sergeant Mays had tried to remedy after the death of James Harrelson by increasing his nightly dosage of Ambien. In Diaz’s case, he tried to overcome it using the method Jay March would use to try to get his hands to stop shaking: willpower. “It’s going to keep happening,” he told himself one day, after another rocket attack had left him on edge. “You have to become fearless here.

  “So I became fearless.”

  Fearless in his case had translated into always seeming to be rock steady. From a wounded soldier, he had repaired himself into being a team leader who was not going to let anyone define him by a few seconds on April 6, even though the fact was that those few seconds would define him for the rest of his life. He rarely talked about them anymore, but he knew better than to describe them as buried. Better to say they now inhabited the area between silence and dreams. He remembered being up in the turret. He remembered seeing an ambulance approaching and hearing John Kirby yell, “Stop!” He remembered swiveling his head to the right. He remembered the flash. He remembered the boom. He remembered the impact. He remembered falling from the turret and onto his back. He remembered trying to run, looking down at his boot, seeing a hole, and thinking his foot must be gone. He remembered Kirby yelling, “Get a fire extinguisher,” and hopping around in search of a fire extinguisher. He remembered realizing that still inside the burning Humvee was Jay Cajimat. He remembered everything of that night and all of it since, right up to this moment, in which he was a soldier who once was a few inches away from dying and was now thinking that he needed to scrub the black marks from a long-ago explosion off his helmet if he wanted to be soldier of the month.

  So much to do still.

  He needed to memorize a set of index cards he had gotten from another soldier as a study guide, and figure out what he was going to answer when the sergeants asked him for his biography. Maybe he would tell them he was engaged to be married. Maybe he would tell them he had a newborn son. He knew he would not talk about April 6 because why would he, but maybe he would mention what he had learned about himself since the day he had wondered if he was ready for this. “There’s nothing that can hurt me now,” he said.

  The night before the competition, Sergeant Mays decided to check March from head to toe. “All right. Put your shit on,” he ordered.

  On went his clean uniform. On went his Individual Body Armor with optional groin-protector panel. On went goggles, elbow pads, knee pads, throat protector, water source, M-4, eight magazines of ammo, knife, flashlight, compression bandage, tourniquet, earplugs, gloves, and boots, which were a new pair he borrowed from a friend that were two sizes too big. But they were clean.

  A sergeant, watching this, walked over to March and swatted him between the legs, right in the optional groin protector, to make sure it was properly positioned.

  It was. From groin protector to clown boots to a suddenly blushing face, March was ready to go.

  He didn’t sleep well. By six, he was getting dressed, even though the contest wouldn’t be starting for a couple of hours. He went outside for a cigarette. It had rained overnight, and he tried to keep the mud off his boots as he sat under the tree with the bag of fly poison. He smoked one cigarette and then another. What were the eight steps in the functioning of the M-4 rifle? Whose profile was on the Medal of Honor? What were the four types of burns?

  Diaz was up early as well, and so was Swales, who shrugged and said, “So, we’ll see.” Even if nothing came of it, he was glad to be starting a day differently from the usual ritual that so far had kept him and his closest friends alive: “We tell each other we love each other right before we go out,” he said, “and then we jump in the fucking truck.” As for White, he awakened to a computer message from his new girlfriend in Texas. “Baby, I know you’ll do well,” she had written while he was asleep. “Hey, I’m going,” he messaged her now, and she must have been waiting for those words back in Texas, because she wrote to him immediately: “Good luck.” “Luck is for the ill-prepared,” he wrote back, and walked through boot-sucking mud across the FOB to a building where Sergeant Mays, in a final act of kindness, was wiping an anti-fogger cloth on March’s and Swales’s goggles. “Because they’re gonna sweat,” he explained.

  Several dozen soldiers were crowded into a hallway, and by now, this far into the war, every one of them had some kind of story to tell. What they had seen. Whom they had held. What they had done, and what they had not. But anyway, here they were, that was the point, and every one of them fell suddenly silent when Command Sergeant Major McCoy appeared. “We ready?” he barked and, without waiting for an answer, walked past them and into the contest room, shutting the door behind him. He would be in charge of the panel. The three other sergeants on it were already inside. The soldiers listened through the closed door. A good sign: no one in there was yelling, “Fuck.”

  A few minutes later, the door opened, and the soldiers were motioned inside. The time had come. Wordlessly, they formed into lines. “All right, men. If you don’t pass the inspection, you don’t go to the board,” McCoy said, and then he and the three other sergeants fanned out to examine them.

  One of the sergeants approached March. “Nervous?”

  “Yes, sir, sergeant. A little bit,” March said.

  “We haven’t even started asking questions yet. Relax,” the sergeant said and began looking through March’s ammunition magazines as March’s hands started to shake.

  McCoy, meanwhile, bore down on White. “When’s the last time you cleaned your IBA?” he said, looking at White’s armor.

  “It’s been a while, Sergeant Major,” White said.

  He looked at White’s helmet, which was missing its nametag. He looked at White’s compression bandage, which was out of its green wrapper.

  “You’re done,” he said, and just like that White was shaking his head and on his way out the door.

  Next McCoy approached another soldier and discovered a small hole in the wrapper of his compression bandage. Two gone.

  Make it three: a soldier had a grenade in his pocket. “Where’s that supposed to be?” he asked, and when the soldier didn’t answer, he looked at the one standing next to him, who was March. “In the vehicle, Sergeant Major,” March answered for him, his hands continuing to shake.

  Four: when McCoy took his little finger and put it inside another soldier’s gun barrel, his finger came out black. “Okay, stud,” he said.

  Now he approached Diaz and regarded his helmet, which still had streaks on it, even though Diaz had cleaned it the day before.

  “You mean to tell me that won’t come out if you clean it?” he asked.

  In his steady voice, Diaz started to explain its origins, but McCoy cut him off.

  So Diaz was done, too, and as he walked out the door, McCoy said to those who were left, “I don’t expect your IBA to be spotless. I understand. But if it looks like you haven’t fucking washed it since you got here? I mean, I even washed my boots last night to come to this fucking board.”

  He continued to inspect and continued to kick out. “A little saying,” he said. “What’s the difference between ordinary and extraordinary? A little extra.”

  Now he moved toward Swales and gazed with concern at his knees.

  “Swales, are those knee pads or elbow pads?”

  “Knee pads, Sergeant Major,” Swales said and stood still as McCoy examined them, decided they were in fact knee pads, next considered the length of his hair, decided it was an acceptable length, and moved toward March, who had been so upset at the barber who had given him a five-dollar haircut that he stiffed him on a tip.

  But his hair was fine. His big boots were fine. Silently, he asked his hands to be still as McCoy ripped open every Velcro�
��d pocket on his uniform and checked inside. They were fine, too.

  “All right, I guess this is it,” McCoy said to the soldiers still in the room, and that was how March knew he was one of the eleven to make it through. He stopped shaking and turned visibly red.

  Swales, through too, smiled and wiggled his eyebrows.

  White, meanwhile, was back in his room and angry. “Have you ever tried to open a bandage when you have blood on your hands?” he was imagining saying to McCoy. “Well, I have. Have you ever had to rip open a bandage with your teeth?”

  Diaz was back in his barracks, too, once again trying to clean his helmet with laundry detergent and a brush and wondering: “How do you ever scrub out an explosion completely?”

  And March, now in the hallway with the remaining soldiers, watched in silence as the first among them knocked on the door, went inside to be questioned, and was back out three seconds later, sighing deeply and knocking again.

  “Hey,” March said now to Swales as their turns approached, “what was the maximum effective range of the AT4? Three hundred meters?”

  Swales thought for a minute and nodded.

  March began pacing.

  “Relax,” a sergeant said to him.

  “I can’t,” he said, turning red again.

  KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.

  “Come in,” McCoy called.

  “Specialist March reporting to the president of the board, Sergeant Major.”

  This was it—unknown territory. He had never made it this far before. “Knowledge is presentation,” Mays had told him just before he knocked, and now he was presenting himself to four sergeants seated behind a table, three of whom were spitting tobacco juice into plastic cups. He saluted and held it. He presented his M-4 and, unlike the nervous soldier before him, didn’t conk himself in the head with it. He was off to a good start.