The Good Soldiers

by David Finkel

  He walked out from his trailer and headed down the dirt road toward the operations center, where some soldiers who were part of his personal security detail were watching video images of roaming gangs and new tire fires along Route Predators. “This is where we’re going?” one of them said. “This isn’t fucking funny. This is what we’re driving through?”

  “Game on,” Kauzlarich said as he approached them, and then he saw Izzy, who would be going, too, standing on the fringes, smoking a cigarette down to the filter.

  “Izzy, how are you today? As-Salamu Alaykum? Shaku maku?”

  “I don’t know what the fuck is going on,” Izzy said.

  “What the fuck! What’s wrong with your people? They’re out of control,” Kauzlarich said, and when he saw Izzy looking at him with a confused smile, he tried to reassure him. “Today will be a good day,” he said. “You got earplugs?”

  Izzy shook his head.

  “You want some?” Kauzlarich said. “Save your hearing. Might need to.”

  He laughed and handed Izzy an extra pair he had, while one of his soldiers, Sergeant Barry Kitchen, watched from a distance.

  “He thinks he’s gonna change the country. He thinks he’s gonna change all this. But he’s not,” Kitchen said. “I mean, it’s good to believe, to a point, but when it comes to this? The whole country falling apart pretty much? One guy’s not gonna fix it.”

  And off they went.

  Up Route Pluto.

  “I anticipate small-arms fire and possibly EFPs,” Kauzlarich radioed in.

  Onto Route Predators and toward the burning tires.

  “I’ve got to piss. I’ll put one out personally,” he said now.

  Around the burning tires and into a storm of gunfire.

  “We’re going to go ahead and turn around. We’ve taken a considerable amount of small-arms fire.”

  Onto another road and into an exploding EFP that passed between two vehicles.

  “No worries. We’re continuing movement.”

  Onto another road and into a second EFP explosion that went through the back of the Humvee directly in front of him, ruining it and just missing the soldiers in the rear seat.

  “No casualties. The vehicle’s jacked up. We are going to drag it out of here.”

  And on it went, not just for Kauzlarich, but for every convoy and at every COP. Gunfire. Mortars. RPGs. EFPs. “Our worst nightmare is coming true. We have two platoons in heavy contact,” Cummings said at one point as he monitored radio transmissions that were at times inaudible because of all the gunfire. He tried to get some Apache gunships in to help. No luck. The 2-16 soldiers were on their own. They drove up streets and down streets. They got shot at, and they shot back. “Stay slow, stay low, and if you see someone with a weapon, fucking drop him. Don’t even ask questions,” had been Kauzlarich’s instructions, and that was what they did: off of rooftops, in streets, behind buildings. But the Iraqis kept coming and coming. They shot at convoys and launched rockets at Rustamiyah, and when an Iraqi Army Humvee was hit and burst into flames, they swarmed it, reached into the fire, and ran off with whatever they could, even the portable stretcher.

  “Wow,” Kauzlarich said to Cummings when he finally made it back at sunset and walked into the operations center. He shook his head, unable to say anything more. He was furious. He and his soldiers had been in two firelights and had been hit with two EFPs. The soldiers who had been in the Humvee that was crippled in the second explosion, including Sergeant Kitchen, were at the aid station, being examined for signs of hearing damage and concussions. Izzy was there, too, with a terrible headache, looking sad and old, and so Kauzlarich found another interpreter to telephone a sheik who was one of the most powerful in Kamaliyah. “Tell him I’m going to blow up all the pump stations, and the sewage project will be no more,” he said.

  “Are you joking?” the interpreter asked.

  “No. I am serious. Tell him I am going to destroy the Kamaliyah sewage project unless the people calm down. I will blow up your project and you will live in shit for the rest of your life.”

  He started to say more but was interrupted by the warning siren going off.

  Three rockets. Three explosions.

  “We need to take a fucking knee,” he said.

  So, on March 27, they took a fucking knee, staying on the FOB or in COPs “to transition from Counterinsurgency Operations to High Intensity Combat Operations.” That would be the wording in an official synopsis submitted afterward of all that had happened so far and would happen next. It was a lengthy document devoid of any emotion—making no mention, for instance, of the soldier who spent the day double-sandbagging the entrance to his room while saying over and over, “God, I hate this place,” as if reciting a prayer—a document that boiled down to this: even though they were one day closer to being done, they weren’t done yet. There was going to be more.

  On the twenty-seventh, with the Americans mostly tucked away, the targets became the Iraqis who had worked most closely with them and now existed with the indelible taint of that contact. A call came in about Mr. Timimi, the civil manager. “JAM wants to burn down his house, and he wants help,” the interpreter who took the call told Kauzlarich.

  “We’re not gonna protect his house. We don’t do houses,” Kauzlarich said.

  Another call came, this one relaying a message from Colonel Qasim, who said most of his 550-member National Police battalion, known as the 1-4-1, were throwing down weapons, changing out of their uniforms, and defecting. He needed help, too.

  “If One-four-one is going to surrender, no sense going in and saving their ass,” Kauzlarich said.

  Another call: Timimi again. “Mr. Timimi wants to say thank you,” the interpreter told Kauzlarich.

  “For what?”

  “For letting JAM burn his house down.”

  Another call from Qasim: a mob was advancing on the District Area Council building, where his office was, and he was afraid. “He says they’re almost at the fence and they will kill him.”

  “No. They won’t kill him. Tell him he has to defend himself,” Kauzla-rich said. He then radioed Ricky Taylor, the commander of Alpha Company, to go to the DAC and rescue his friend forever who had given him a birthday party, and as a platoon of Taylor’s soldiers shot their way toward Qasim, Kauzlarich made a new prediction: “The whole fucking city is going to erupt tomorrow.”

  But it was only the Shiite parts of Baghdad that continued to erupt. The morning of March 28 came with fresh fires and explosions, and after more than four hundred days here, there was a growing sense of bewilderment within the soldiers. What were they supposed to think of what was happening? How were they to make sense of it? How could they shape it into something understandable? Should it be by pure numbers? If so, the numbers added up to the most attacks on them ever, by far. Every convoy was being attacked now. It was June again, except doubled. Should it be by examples? Because if it was examples, here was one: a report just coming in that the Iraqi spokesman for the surge, a pleasant man who was often at press conferences with U.S. officials saying how well things were progressing, had been kidnapped by insurgents who had killed his bodyguards, burned down his house, and may have hidden him somewhere within the garbage piles and water buffalo herds of Fedaliyah.

  Fedaliyah: once a shithole, always a shithole, and now a platoon was headed toward it to search for a spokesman of the surge. Kamaliyah: that was the shithole where the soldiers had tried the hardest and the violence was now the worst. Mashtal, Al-Amin, Mualameen: shithole, shithole, and shithole, all of them a warscape now, with streets so empty and life so hidden that, for a moment anyway, the most overwhelming thing about all of this was the silence it had brought. It was the silence of bending glass. It was the hush on a Kamaliyah rooftop just before Sergeant Emory received a bullet to his head. It was the quiet of a Kansas snowfall just before some soldiers began to cheer. It was silence just waiting to be broken, like the silence just before Joshua Reeves said, “Oh my God,�
�� like just before Duncan Crookston said, “I love my wife,” and so it was broken now with explosion after explosion, all directed at Kauzlarich and his soldiers as they maneuvered under a sky speckled with high white clouds and spreading black ones beneath.

  Almost everyone was out now, taking fire, dodging RPGs, finding IEDs and EFPs, and somehow, so far, not getting hurt. Kauzlarich was in a convoy headed toward Qasim, whose 550 police were now down to half that and dropping. Meanwhile, another National Police battalion that overlapped some of Kauzlarich’s area was reportedly down to almost zero, and its defectors included the commander himself, whose last words, said in a departing rush, were something about JAM surrounding his house, his family was inside, he had to go, family first, apologies. Qasim, though, was hanging in, his fear gone, his defiance back, and ever so slowly, Kauzlarich and his convoy moved toward him. They found one EFP and detonated it. They received a report that another was hidden in a speed bump somewhere, and here came a speed bump. Here, now, around a corner, coming from the direction of Kamaliyah, careened a van with a coffin strapped to the top. Here, farther along, were a woman and three children, outside, unprotected, walking, crying their eyes out. Here came another speed bump. Here was another family—father, mother, two children—with filthy faces, in filthy clothing, huddled against a filthy wall on a filthy street, and was this the family Kauzlarich had in mind when he was still at Fort Riley talking about success? “The end state, in my opinion, the end state in Iraq would be that Iraqi children can go out on a soccer field and play safely. Parents can let their kids go out and play, and they don’t have a concern in the world. Just like us,” he had said, and then asked: “Is that possible?”

  It was hope as a question, forgivably sweet, and yet even now, with the answer huddled in front of him against a wall, and now, at sunset, with more of the answer exploding around him in the form of a mortar attack that bloodied a few of his soldiers from flying shrapnel, and now, in the dark, as the attacks continued and he prepared to spend the night on Qasim’s couch, he got on the radio and said to his company commanders, “Overall today, a very successful day out on the battlefield.” They were listening to him in COPs that were being mortared and fired upon, at checkpoints abandoned by Iraqis, where they were bracing for imminent attacks, and at the FOB, where the incoming sirens had been sounding all day. “Keep doing what you’re doing,” he continued. “Maintain vigilance. Remember the three Ps: patience, perseverance, and paranoia. There’s a lot of bad guys out here that are trying to get some licks in on us. By the grace of God, today they weren’t successful. We, on the other hand, were very successful, but our luck can run out. So just keep doing what you’re doing and I have negative further. Over.”

  Over, and then out, and then one of the soldiers who had been listening said, “Well, this answers the question. They weren’t attacking because one guy told them not to attack.”

  “If it wasn’t for the cease-fire, it would have been like this the whole time,” another soldier said.

  “If the cease-fire hadn’t been going on, all the surge would have meant is more soldiers to die,” another said.

  “The only thing the past few days have proved to me is that after a year they can still do whatever they please, whenever they please,” another said.

  But Kauzlarich remained adamant. The surge was working, and this, now, was the proof. “They wouldn’t be fighting if we weren’t winning,” he had said in the worst of June. “They wouldn’t have a reason to. It’s a measure of effectiveness.” He believed this even more stubbornly now, on March 29, as the fighting grew worse and he rose from Qasim’s couch and ever so carefully picked his way through the depressing landscape of eastern Baghdad back to the FOB.

  “I don’t think they thought we were gonna do what we did,” he said, in the operations center now, adding up the number of suspected insurgents his soldiers had killed in the past five days. “One hundred,” he said, “one hundred twenty-five,” and kept counting. On maps and by aerial surveillance imagery, he was also tracking the movement of his soldiers. A platoon led by Nate Showman was the latest out there, on a mission to bring fresh water and new radio codes to another platoon defending the DAC building. They had just found an EFP, but Showman, unfazed, had snipped the wires, and they were continuing on their way. Along Route Predators, other soldiers had found eleven EFPs and IEDs just in the past several hours. Sixteen other EFPs and IEDs had exploded on various convoys over the past twenty-four hours, but injuries had amounted to nothing worse than a few bloody cuts and concussions, and in every case the soldiers had continued to fight. The good soldiers. As far as Kauzlarich was concerned, they had become great soldiers.

  Five fifteen p.m. now. Showman’s platoon had made it to the DAC, unloaded, and was heading back to the COP. Predators was quiet. Pluto was quiet. The COPs were quiet. The FOB was quiet.

  “It’s all good,” Kauzlarich said as the entire war seemed to go silent.

  Five sixteen p.m.

  Glass, bending.

  Five seventeen.

  Bending.

  Five eighteen.

  Bending.

  Five nineteen.

  boom.

  The sound was tiny. The walls barely moved. No one seemed to have noticed, except for Kauzlarich.

  “Shit,” he said.

  It took another second or so, but then someone was on the radio, screaming. One vehicle destroyed. Two medevac urgent. Air support needed, now. Ricky Taylor, the commander of Alpha Company, came on the radio for a moment, just long enough to say, “Not good, sir,” and then dropped away. The camera on the aerostat balloon pivoted and found the war’s newest column of rising smoke, and there, beneath it, was Nate Showman’s platoon, and suddenly every piece of glass in the world seemed to be breaking, because they weren’t even supposed to be here, that was the thing. They were supposed to be guarding convoys in western Iraq. They were supposed to have gone home after twelve months. They were supposed to be on the FOB, packing to leave a war that wasn’t supposed to have ever needed a surge, and instead of any of that, they were running toward the ruined Humvee, and now gunfire could be heard over the radio, and now flashes were coming from a building just behind the DAC, and now they were piling into their own Humvees, and now they were barreling toward COP Cajimat, and now the phone in the operations center was ringing and Ricky Taylor was on the line and someone was handing the receiver to Kauzlarich.

  “Hey, Ricky,” he said.

  He listened for a moment.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Roger,” he said.

  “All right, buddy. Hang in there. Standing by,” he said.

  “Thanks,” he said and hung up.

  “What’d he say, sir?” Cummings asked.

  “Two KIA,” he said.

  His eyes filled with tears.

  He dropped his head.

  He stayed that way for a while, hands on his hips, eyes down, and when he was finally able to look up and resume the war, it was to request that the biggest bomb out there at the moment, not a missile on a helicopter, but a guided bomb attached to the underside of a jet, be sent into the building next to the DAC where the gunfire was coming from. After which there was nothing to do but wait.

  Here came the first battle-roster number, over the radio.

  “Bravo-seven-six-one-niner.”

  Fingers traced the manifest until they came to rest on B7619, next to which was the name of Durrell Bennett, and lots of heads dropped now. Everyone liked Bennett.

  Now came the second number.

  “Mike-seven-seven-two-two.”

  Again, fingers traced numbers until they stopped by the name of Patrick Miller.

  “That’s the new kid we just got,” someone said, and everyone thought back to the new soldier who had arrived on the day in September when General Petraeus had visited and Joshua Reeves had died, the one who had been premed, who had run out of money, and whose smile seemed to light up the room.

  Now
came more details.

  There had been five soldiers in the Humvee. The EFP had sliced open one soldier, who was bleeding internally; sliced off the hand of another; sliced off the arm of another; sliced off both of Bennett’s legs; and gone through Miller’s mouth, teeth, and jaw.

  Now came the warning siren as another rocket attack began on Rusta-miyah. Now came a frantic call from Mr. Timimi to the interpreter: “He said they stole his car.” Now came the scream of a low jet, followed by the satisfying sight on the video monitor of an exploding black blossom, somewhere inside of which was a building. “Enjoy your seventy-two virgins,” Kauzlarich said as his soldiers, virgins, too, once, hollered and clapped, and then they got busy planning their very last mission on their very last day of full combat operations, bringing the two dead soldiers back to the FOB.

  A convoy of three platoons and two body bags left at 3:22 a.m. By 3:40 a.m., the first IED had exploded and flattened some tires. By 3:45 a.m., the first gunfight was under way. By 3:55 a.m., soldiers had found and destroyed three EFPs. By 4:50 a.m., they were at the DAC, where the ruined Humvee had been taken. By 5:10 a.m., they were lifting and then scooping Bennett and Miller into the body bags. By 5:30 a.m., they were on their way to COP Cajimat to rendezvous with Nate Showman and his soldiers. By 5:47, they were in another gunfight. By 5:48, the vehicle leading the convoy was hit by some type of IED but was able to keep going. By 5:49, the same vehicle was hit with another IED but was still able to keep going. By 6:00 a.m., the convoy had made it to COP Cajimat. By 7:00 a.m., the soldiers were escorting Showman, his ruined platoon, the ruined Humvee, and the remains of Bennett and Miller to the FOB. By 7:55 a.m., everyone was back, and the mission was officially a success.