by David Finkel
“All right, March. There’s a chair behind you. Go ahead and have a seat,” McCoy said. “Go ahead and take a minute and tell us a little bit about yourself.”
“My name is Jay March,” he began, and it was at that point that his goggles beganfogging up.” I was born July 23, 1986, in Ashtabula, Ohio . . .” Sweat beads were taking over his forehead. “. . . my near-term goals are to become a leader of soldiers . . .” His goggles were almost entirely fogged over now, but he ignored this and continued: “. . . and my long-term goal is to become a sergeant major.”
“I see you’ve got an ARCOM and two AAMs already,” McCoy said, looking over March’s personnel report, which included his awards and medals. “And you’ve been in how long?”
“I’ve been in a little over two years, Sergeant Major,” March said.
“That’s pretty good. That’s really good. To have that right now, with the time that you’ve got in, that’s good,” McCoy said. “All right. We’ll get started with a little unit history. How many battle streamers does the Second Battalion, Sixteenth Infantry Regiment have?”
“Twenty-two, Sergeant Major,” March said. His answer was quick and confident, and in no way betrayed the fact that he had no idea how many battle streamers the 2-16 had.
“Second battalion?” McCoy, who did know, said.
“Yes, Sergeant Major,” March said.
“Okay,” McCoy said, and moved on to the next question on his list, which was about the unfolding 2008 presidential election. “Current events. Tell us what’s going on with the political race right now.”
“Sir, right now, both Obama’and Hillary Clinton are both trying to say they’re advertising false information, and President McCain, er, no, McCain is the only one still with the Democrats, Sergeant Major,” March said.
Again, confidence.
“Okay. Policies,” McCoy said, moving on. “What’s the standard for the PT uniform inside the gym?”
“You must have your shirt tucked in, shorts, no weapons allowed inside the gym, when you show up at the gym you must be in full PT uniform, when you get in there you can downgrade to tucked-in shirt, shorts, Sergeant Major,” March said, nailing that one.
“All right,” McCoy said, and passed the questioning on to the next sergeant. It was the sergeant who during inspection had told March to relax.
“Still a little nervous, I can see,” he said, looking at March’s goggles, forehead, and, now, his dripping neck.
“A little, First Sergeant.”
“Just relax. We’ll find out what you know. Okay? We’ll start off with uniforms. What DA form is used to recommend or request an award?”
“I don’t know, First Sergeant.”
“Okay. When can soldiers begin wearing the fleece cap in theater?”
He got that one wrong, too. But then he began getting them right.
“What are the team-building stages?”
“Formation, enrichment, sustainment.”
“What are the four common points for checking a pulse?”
“Throat, groin, wrist, and ankle.”
Next sergeant.
“There are seven different types of ammunition for an M-4 rifle. Give me four.”
He gave five.
“Good.”
Next sergeant.
“Okay, let’s go to army programs. What is the motto of ACS?”
“Self-help, service, and stability, First Sergeant.”
“Hooah. What does BOSS stand for?”
“Better Opportunities for Single Soldiers, First Sergeant.”
“Outstanding. Let’s go on to Supply Economy. How long is a temporary hand receipt good for?”
“I don’t know, First Sergeant.”
“Okay. And what is supply economy?”
“Supply economy is all soldiers use it. It’s neither haste nor waste of military equipment, First Sergeant.”
“Okay. No more questions, Sergeant Major.”
“All right,” McCoy said to March. “You’re dismissed,” and that was that. In fourteen minutes, he had been asked thirty-seven questions. He had sweated, shaken, and fogged up his goggles, but after he walked out, McCoy, clearly impressed, said to the others, “He did pretty good.”
Not that March heard that. He was already on his way back to the barracks, where some of the other soldiers were griping about what they had just endured.
“They kicked me out for a fucking grenade,” one said.
“Stupid stuff,” said another, whose dirty gun barrel had turned McCoy’s pinky finger black. “Oil. I had oil.”
“They were just looking to fuck people over,” another said.
“I’m so happy it’s over. Holy shit. I’m just so fucking happy it’s over,” March said, and then saw Swales walking back and ran to him.
“John! John! How’d you do?”
“I’m just glad it’s over,” Swales said and sighed. “Man.”
“Hey, did your eyepro fog up?”
“No.”
“Mine did.”
“I was nervous. I forgot things,” Swales said. “I forgot to mention my wife. I forgot to mention I was married.”
Again and again Swales punched his right fist into his left hand as March, relaxed at last, started to laugh. “It’s over,” he kept saying, and Swales eventually relaxed, too. Tomorrow, they would learn the results. Neither of them would win, but neither of them would come in last, either. Of eleven soldiers, Swales would finish fifth, and March, not so fucking smart, would finish fourth. Not so fucking smart, but not so fucking dumb, either, and he wouldn’t mind a bit, because of something that was happening now in the hallway of the barracks, where he stood in front of the rest of the platoon with his right hand in the air.
He had signed a contract a few days before, just after learning he would receive a bonus of $ 13,500. On such bonus money was the overstretched volunteer U.S. army staying afloat. His family wasn’t happy with the idea, but it was like he told them: there weren’t a lot of options waiting for him back in Ohio. “I, Jay March, do solemnly swear to come back to Iraq at least three more times in my career,” he had joked about saying, but what he said now were the same words he had said before leaving Ohio, going to Fort Riley, and coming to Iraq as a soldier of the surge.
“Congratulations,” said the lieutenant who administered the oath.
“I fucking reenlisted,” March said, as if not quite believing the choice he had made to remain in the army until the year 2014. He wasn’t shaking or blushing. He was just smiling. It was as Phillip Cantu, the dead recruiter, had once told him: there’s nothing like the brotherhood when you deploy.
Those brothers now clapped for him, and then they surrounded him as he stood among them with his eyes momentarily closed.
Harrelson burning.
An Iraqi bleeding from a hole in his head.
A little girl looking at him.
And now there was another slide for his show—him as soldier of the moment and as happy as he had ever felt in his life.
It wasn’t only him. As February ended and the deployment moved into its final months and then weeks, almost everyone was happier. They could sense the end now.
Because this was Iraq, not everything was satisfactory. The air still felt twitchy. The anxious hum was still there. If this had been the twelvemonth deployment the soldiers were told at the beginning they would be headed into, they would be home by now, and that was one thing they thought about every time they climbed into their Humvees. Being dead was bad enough, but being dead when you were supposed to have been safely home and forever alive? One day the chaplain stopped in to tell Brent Cummings that six soldiers had come to him in the past few days saying they were burned out and didn’t want to do this anymore. Over at the hospital, the physician assistant was hearing from soldiers who were headed home to broken marriages and bank accounts that had been cleaned out. At the chapel, there was a mandatory seminar on what to expect in the months ahead. It’s normal to have flas
hbacks, the soldiers were told, normal to have trouble sleeping, normal to be angry, normal to be jumpy—and didn’t that make everyone feel better. Also, the war continued. In February 2008,29 U.S. soldiers died; in March there would be 39. In February, 216 were injured; in March it would be 327. On March 23 the total number of dead U.S. troops passed 4,000.
But still.
It was weeks now. A replacement battalion was on its way in. Soldiers were packing equipment in between missions and counting down the days, even though every one of them knew that to do so was the surest way to bring bad luck. Thirty days. Twenty-five days. Eighteen days.
“It’s all good,” Kauzlarich said one night, walking across a quiet FOB when there were no rocket smears in the sky and the air smelled not of trash or of sewage but just of air, and in this moment the words seemed right. The surge’s counterinsurgency strategy seemed at long last to be working in the 2-16’s favor. All the months of clearance operations, street patrols, arresting insurgents, building COPs, opening markets, starting adult literacy classes, and working with the National Police seemed to be paying off. In Kamaliyah, the sewer project was once again under way. In another part of New Baghdad, a community swimming pool was being built to help Iraqis fend for themselves in the coming summer heat. The National Police seemed to be trying ever harder, even after so many were killed in the lob bomb attack. At the gas stations, lines were down to fifteen minutes, and on some days even less, and on the lower part of Route Predators a new security tower was being built that stretched both physically and symbolically into the sky, as high as a minaret.
All throughout the 2-16’s piece of eastern Baghdad, people seemed to be feeling safer—the very goal that the soldiers had been sent here to achieve.
“Sectarian violence now in Iraq is, I think, something in the past, and Iraqis are looking toward the future for peace and prosperity,” Kauzlarich said on PEACE 106 FM, his voice floating out into that night. “So these different groups that are trying to create this chaos, it should be very evident to them now that they’ll never be able to create that again.”
Choices. Bush made his, the sergeants made theirs, Jay March made his. For fourteen months, Kauzlarich had been making his, and as of March 24, with just seventeen days to go, the insurgents seemed to have made theirs, too.
12
MARCH 29, 2008
And, yes, there’s going to be violence, and that’s sad. But this situation
needed to be dealt with, and it’s now being dealt with.
—GEORGE W. BUSH, March 28, 2008
And then, on March 25, with two weeks remaining in the 2-16’s deployment, everything fell apart.
“Holy shit,” a soldier said, watching images from surveillance cameras of Route Predators, which was shrouded in black smoke from burning tires.
“Fucking assholes. Fucking assholes. Fucking assholes,” Brent Cummings said as report after report came in of EFPs, IEDs, explosions, gunfire, and, now, 140 rockets somewhere out there aimed at Rustamiyah.
“They say if this doesn’t work, they will go to phase three,” Kauzlarich said, telling his command staff about the latest intelligence that had come in of what the insurgents had been overheard saying, and then, shaking his head, he said, “I have no fucking idea what phase three is.”
The situation that George W. Bush said “needed to be dealt with”:
That was the situation.
“Good thing the surge is working,” a soldier said bitterly.
But Kauzlarich saw it differently.
“This is war,” he said of what fourteen months of counterinsurgency strategy had turned into, sounding almost eager. “This is what I do best. Oh my God.”
Nate Showman
It had started that morning, way to the south, in the Shiite city of Basra. Since the American invasion five years and five days before, Basra had steadily descended into an awful place of executions, kidnappings, and some of the harshest interpretations of Islamic law in all of Iraq, carried out mostly by elements of Jaish al Mahdi, the militia of the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Even with the cease-fire that al-Sadr had imposed on his followers in August 2007, Basra had continued to deteriorate violently, especially after the British forces that were responsible for southern Iraq withdrew to Basra’s fringes in December. Finally, Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, concluded enough was enough. Against the advice of U.S. officials who were urging him not to do anything that would tease apart the relative calm that had come to parts of Iraq, Maliki traveled to Basra to bring it under control and to show the world that Iraq was capable of doing things on its own.
Things didn’t quite work out that way. Over six days of fighting, the stories that emerged were of a thousand casualties, JAM fighters refusing to give up, water shortages, food shortages, and swarms of Iraqi Army deserters who looted stores and set fire to them as they ran. Eventually, U.S. and British forces began helping out with long-distance artillery barrages, and after that the fighting slowed, al-Sadr reinstated his ceasefire, both sides declared victory, a thousand funerals commenced, and the offensive fizzled out to an inconclusive ending.
That was what the world saw from various news reports, but what it didn’t see was what happened in eastern Baghdad, beginning with a huge explosion on Route Predators late on the night of March 24.
“What the fuck?” a soldier said as he looked at surveillance images of where the new, mighty, just-completed security tower was supposed to be standing, but all he could see was a sad little pile of rubble.
It was gone, and by dawn, all of the 2-16’s area, so vibrant just the day before, was a ghostly area of shuttered stores, emptied streets, and no people outside other than roaming groups of men who were carrying guns, planting bombs, and setting fires. The spasms of Basra had shivered their way north, straight into the 2-16’s AO, and when al-Sadr lifted his cease-fire, it was as if the residents of Kamaliyah and Fedaliyah and Mashtal and Al-Amin and every other war-ruined patch of ground that the 2-16 had been trying to salvage had been waiting behind their closed doors, guns in one hand, EFPs in the other, for the chance to come out and attack.
There were reports that EFPs were being planted every five meters along parts of Route Predators.
There were reports that JAM members, dressed up as National Police, were taking over checkpoints.
The warning siren sounded: here came seven rockets, followed by seven explosions, just beyond the southern wall of the FOB.
“The key is to seize the initiative,” Kauzlarich said now to his company commanders, who were crowded into his office, “and forget about how many days we have till we go home.”
The company commanders nodded, but every one of them knew that wasn’t going to happen. The schedule had been set, and every soldier was aware of it. The last full day of operations was to be March 30, a mere five days from now, after which it was all supposed to be about final inventory, final packing, final cleaning, and getting out. The flights out had been arranged: the first batch of soldiers was set to fly April 4, and by April 10, no one was supposed to be left.
“What are you guys thinking? What are your thoughts?” Kauzlarich asked, but before anyone could answer, Brent Cummings interrupted to say a route-clearance convoy in another battalion had been hit by an EFP on Predators.
“Anybody hurt?” Kauzlarich asked.
“Unknown,” Cummings said.
“The thing I don’t want is for the enemy to think they can do whatever the fuck they want whenever they want to do it,” Kauzlarich said after a moment. “All right. Tomorrow, we gotta get out there.”
Some of them already were out there, of course, on nervous patrols or bunkered down at COPs that were being hit with occasional gunfire and RPGs, and as the day went on, the threats against them kept increasing in ways that felt cruelly personal.
The school where the 2-16 had tried to develop adult literacy classes was now reportedly being stocked with weapons for an assault on the COP in Kamaliyah.
The swimming pool that was being built in New Baghdad was now filling not with water but with twenty armed men who had arrived in cars reportedly packed with bombs.
Now, near one of the COPs, a surveillance camera that had once tracked a suspicious man into a field where he proceeded to go to the bathroom now tracked another suspicious man, who squatted against a wall with a weapon and began firing. “So, he’s shooting?” a soldier said. “Not shitting?”
And the answer was that everyone seemed to be shooting.
“Glad we’re giving these people sewers,” Cummings said at one point, when an exploding EFP missed a convoy but severed a water main, creating a giant water geyser that would soon flood parts of Kamaliyah, lead to water shortages, and soften the ground so much that some of the new sewer pipes would collapse. A year before, when Cummings had first seen Kamaliyah and peered into a hole in the ground at the cadaver named Bob, he had talked of the goodness here and the need to act morally. “Otherwise we’re not human,” he had said. Eight months before, when he had bent some rules to get Izzy’s injured daughter into the aid station and had watched her smile as Izzy kissed her, he had said, “Man, I haven’t felt this good since I got to this hellhole.” Now, watching the water geyser, he simply said, “Stupid people. I hate ’em. Stupid fucking scumbags.”
“This is the evolution of democracy, what’s going on right now,” Kauzlarich said at another point, late that night, searching for an explanation, and the following morning, as he and most of his soldiers prepared to go out to get things back under control, he was even more certain that his explanation was right. “This has to happen. This whole uprising has to happen. It’s got to happen,” he said as he got dressed. A year before, when he had tried to envision the moment he was now in, he had made a prediction. “Before we leave, I’m going to do a battalion run. A task force run. In running shorts and T-shirts,” he had said, tracing a route on the map in his office that went from Route Pluto to Route Predators and back to the FOB. As it turned out, that route would be the route that he and his soldiers would follow today as they tried to restore some order, and as he covered himself with body armor and double-checked the ammunition in his gun, he said, “This is the last stand of the Shi’a populace. That’s what this is. This is Jaish al Mahdi’s last stand, and that’s why we gotta get ’em. Now is the time. Everybody has their last stand. The Japanese had their last stand. The Germans had their last stand. Everybody has their last stand. And now they’re gonna die.”