by David Finkel
In the army, every event gets recorded on an “event storyboard,” from which a kind of clarity can emerge. This was who. This was what. This was where. This was when. This was the task. This was the purpose. This was the time line. Pictures are included, and diagrams, and when a storyboard is finished, a narrative has formed that will forever make the event seem different from anything ever before it. An operation to get a soldier’s remains becomes entirely different from another operation to get another soldier’s remains. An EFP exploding from a trash pile is nothing like an EFP exploding from a water buffalo carcass. Every gunfight becomes unique. Every battle is original. All wars aren’t actually all the same.
But by 7:55 a.m., even though another storyboard was being assembled about the successful mission to get Bennett and Miller, the war, the battles, the gunfights, the explosions, the events, had finally become a blur. Is war supposed to be linear? The movement from point A to point B?The odyssey from there to here? Because this wasn’t any of that anymore. The blur was the linear becoming the circular.
The Humvee was unloaded at Vehicle Sanitization (there, hidden from view, photographs were taken of the damage, the holes in the door were measured and analyzed, and soldiers did their best to disinfect what was left of the Humvee with bottles of peroxide and Simple Green . . .).
The remains of Bennett and Miller were at Mortuary Affairs (being prepared for shipment behind the locked doors of the little stand-alone building in which there were sixteen storage compartments for bodies, a stack of vinyl body bags, a stack of new American flags, and two Mortuary Affairs soldiers whose job was to search the remains for anything personal that a soldier might have wanted with him while he was alive . . .).
And so on, from Cajimat forward to now. The air stank, the flies were swarming, and now Brent Cummings was walking across the FOB to see the Humvee. He looked at the holes in the door, and it was Joshua Reeves’s Humvee and it was William Crow’s Humvee. He crawled inside and looked at the gouges in the turret ring, where Bennett had been standing and gunning, and it was Gajdos and Payne and Craig and Shelton. He looked at the ruined rear seats, and that was where Miller had been sitting, and Crow, and Crookston. He looked at the dried blood on the floor. It smelled like iron. It smelled like iodine. It smelled like blood. It was Miller, Bennett, Doster, Reeves, Crookston, Shelton, Lane, Murray, Harrelson, Crow, Craig, Payne, Gajdos, and Cajimat. It was all of them. He thought he might vomit. He got out and walked away and cried and kicked rocks, and then he circled back to the operations center, where they were continuing to track the war, including, now, Kauzlarich’s convoy, which was nearing Route Predators.
“I gotta go out,” Kauzlarich had explained before leaving, “just to see how fucked up it is out there.”
He’d waited until Bennett and Miller were back, and then he had gone. Battlefield circulation was what he called this kind of thing, and even though this was the last day of full operations, the battlefield was still out there and the war was still waiting to be won. The explosions continued, especially along Predators. The gunfire attacks continued on the COPs, the DAC, and the Iraqi-abandoned checkpoints, where his soldiers would remain until the replacement battalion could fully relieve them. He wanted to visit as many of the soldiers as possible, that was part of it, and he also simply wanted to be out there and in it. Counterinsur-gency may have been the strategy he got, but who he was at heart was a soldier who wanted in, and in all likelihood, this would be his final trip out of the wire.
“Everyone’s in the fight,” he’d said. “Everyone.” His intention was to go up Route Predators to Kamaliyah, and as he’d pulled away saying he’d be back in a few hours, it was hard not to think of a story he had related once about the nature of belief. He’d been at Fort Benning, Georgia, for some advanced coursework, and at the end of an exercise, as he and other soldiers waited outside for a ride, a visiting soldier from Sierra Leone explained how he had survived that country’s various wars: “In my country, we put on a blouse. It is a magic blouse. When I wear it, I know bullets cannot harm me.” The Sierra Leonean then rolled up a sleeve of the shirt he was wearing and said, “Give me a knife.” Someone gave him a knife. “Watch,” he said, and he then swung the knife toward his arm. It went through the skin. It went through muscle. It might have cut clean to the bone as far as Kauzlarich knew, but what he remembered more clearly was how for one belief-filled moment everyone was waiting for the magic, hoping for it, right up until blood began gushing and the Sierra Leonean looked at them in panic. “That’s a form of belief,” Kauzlarich would say of what he learned that day. “That’s also a form of jackassery.”
Now, as his convoy came to a stop on Route Pluto because of a possible EFP, the moment of the magic blouse seemed to have arrived again. “Can you squirt around to the right?” Kauzlarich radioed the lead vehicle. Or maybe it was a moment from the other story he liked to tell every so often, the heroic battle of Ia Drang.
They waited.
Over the radio came word that a route-clearance team ahead of them on Route Predators was in heavy contact and getting slammed.
A few minutes later came orders from the route clearance’s battalion to turn back because Predators was too dangerous.
An EFP. A firelight. A road that had become so dangerous that other soldiers were being ordered to leave it. A convoy, paused, awaiting a leader’s decision on what to do next.
The situation:
That was the situation.
It was the heroic situation that Kauzlarich had in various ways dreamed of since he was a boy who romanticized the idea of being a soldier: the final day of full combat, the final trip out of the wire, down to the bucket of old bullets, a final chance to prove greatness. Here was the moment of true belief, beyond which would be only victory.
“Trust your instincts,” Hal Moore had said.
“I’ll never forgive myself—that my men died, and I didn’t,” Mel Gibson had said.
“Tsk tsk,” the Iraqi had said.
“Watch,” the Sierra Leonean had said, swinging the knife.
“Bottom line,” Kauzlarich said, and then came his heroic decision:
The 2-16 had given enough.
It would be jackassery to go up Route Predators, “absolute jackassery,” and as relief spread through the soldiers in his convoy, who just wanted to go home, he guided them safely back to Rustamiyah and closed himself in his office to write his memorial speech.
In another part of the FOB, Nate Showman was writing, too.
“Rae baby,” he wrote to his new wife.
He had come in at 7:55 a.m. with blood on his boots and a sadness so thorough that he’d been unable to speak, even when a few soldiers asked him how he was doing. His answer was to shake his head and stare at the ground. He had spent the rest of the day in isolation, and only now had he found some words he wanted to say, writing to his wife, “I’m gonna need some help when I get home.”
He slept only a little that night, even though he was exhausted, and the next day, at Kauzlarich’s request, he went reluctantly to the operations center for a debriefing. The two of them had always been able to talk more easily than most commanders and junior officers, maybe because Showman’s self-confidence and methodical thinking in some ways reminded Kauzlarich of himself. “I’m just trying to figure out what the hell happened,” Kauzlarich said now to Showman, getting right to it, and when Showman looked at him in silence, Kauzlarich said quietly, “If you would, just talk me through.”
So Showman began by telling Kauzlarich about what Patrick Miller was doing just before he died, that he was standing outside of his Humvee eating a date that he’d been given by an Iraqi National policeman.
“The last thing I saw of Little Miller,” is how he put it, and he didn’t bother to explain that Miller was called Little Miller to differentiate him from Big Miller, a soldier with a back so hairy that there would be bets among soldiers over who would be brave enough to lick it. Or about the night his soldiers wok
e him up and there was Little Miller dancing in front of him, naked except for sunglasses, an M-4, a bandana, and a thong, and laughing hysterically as he chanted, “I’m ready to fight terrorists .” All of the soldiers were laughing. He laughed, too. He had been crazy about Miller.
“Little Miller was putting a can of gas in the trunk. The National guy gave him a date,” he said, and he didn’t bother with the rest of it: that the reason the Iraqi gave him a date was out of gratitude; and the reason for the gratitude was that the Americans had come to save him; and the reason that the Americans had come to save him was because they had been trying to save him since 2003, when the number of dead American soldiers was zero and Patrick Miller was nineteen years old and about to start college and thinking that he was going to become a doctor. And instead:
“He took a date and ate it and gave the guy the thumbs-up and got back in the truck,” Showman said, and then the truck took off on a route that Showman had just thought of, which led straight into an exploding EFP.
“We had two options,” he explained to Kauzlarich, “either go back the exact same way we came, or try to get down Florida.” He recounted a conversation he’d had with a soldier named Patrick Hanley, who was the truck commander in the lead vehicle and would typically be the one to choose the route.
“Hey, dude, we’ve got these two options,” he’d said. “I’d like to try it on Florida because I don’t think they’ll be expecting it.”
“All right,” replied Hanley, who was about to give his entire left arm to the cause of freedom, as well as part of the left temporal lobe of his brain, which would leave him unconscious and nearly dead for five weeks, and with long-term memory loss, and dizziness so severe that for the next eight months he would throw up whenever he moved his head, and weight loss that would take him from 203 pounds down to 128. “Let’s do it.”
And so they did it.
Truck number one: Hanley was right front. A soldier named Robert Winegar, who was about to be broken open by shrapnel in his arm and his back, was driving. A soldier named Carl Reiher, who was about to lose one of his hands, was right rear. Bennett, up in the turret, was gunner. Miller, the taste of a date still fresh on his tongue, was left rear.
Truck number two: Showman was right front, watching truck number one through his windshield as it squeezed between some barriers and rolled over what seemed to be an old, rusted piece of a gate.
“Got through fine,” Showman said to Kauzlarich.
Now Showman’s Humvee rolled over the gate and lost a tire. “We were still rolling fine on the flat. I thought, ‘We’re a click and a half out. Fuck it.’ Kept on rolling.”
Now truck number one, moving along Route Florida, saw something suspicious and swerved.
“He took a real wide berth around it. All of the trucks did. Swung off the road, actually; went around and back on the road.”
Got through fine.
Kept on rolling.
“Twenty meters up the road, right at the intersection, there’s a little mud hut right there, off to the left, and then there’s a light pole. They set it right in front of the light pole,” he continued. “They must have camouflaged it real good because—”
“It’s where those fuckers sell gas all the time?” Kauzlarich interrupted. “That mud hut?”
“Roger,” Showman said.
“So it was on the ground, you think?”
“Roger,” he repeated, and then stopped talking. Maybe he was seeing what was next.
“You guys did the battle drill,” Kauzlarich said after a bit, trying to help him.
“I mean, I probably don’t remember thirty seconds of this,” Showman said. His voice had been getting quieter and quieter. Now he could barely be heard. “I was right on Hanley’s ass. The next thing that I really do remember is the radio being in my hands, and I was hollering, ‘Outlaw Six, we got hit at the intersection of Florida and Fedaliyah,’ and then I told Mannix”—his driver—“to stomp the gas and haul ass. I couldn’t see the truck at the time. The road ahead of me was clear back to the COP. We shot through the kill zone and then we got up just a little ways, probably thirty meters. The truck had rolled off the road to the left. There’s like a garden and courtyard, and there’s nothing past it, just a big dirt yard. The truck had pulled behind that courtyard. I told Mannix to pull up right alongside. We started taking heavy small-arms fire. I told Mannix to pull up. There was a house and the truck, and then just everything else.”
Everything else:
“He was just white, with blood running down the side of his head, his eyes were vacant.”
That was Winegar.
“I thought he was dead. Dead weight. Just completely unresponsive. Eyes were wide open. I grabbed his ass to boost him into the truck, and my hand just slipped away. It was covered with blood.”
That was Reiher.
“And then Hanley?” Kauzlarich asked.
“Yeah. You could tell right away that it was severe head trauma because of the way his eyes were rolled back in his head, and he was foaming at the mouth,” Showman said.
And Bennett?
And Miller?
“I told Outlaw Six we needed a medevac at COP Cajimat,” Showman said of what he did next. He started to say something else, to explain why he hadn’t directed the convoy to the FOB, where a medevac would have had an easier time landing, but his voice trailed off. “Because it was close,” he said, and his voice trailed off again.
“It was the right call. It was the right call, Nate,” Kauzlarich said. “And then the route you took—you had two choices.You picked the least of two evils, given the Ranger rule of never going out the same way you came in.”
Showman looked at him, said nothing.
“It’s fucked up. But you did the right thing,” Kauzlarich said.
“The boys were still inside,” Showman said.
“There’s nothing you could do for them,” Kauzlarich said.
“Yes, sir,” Showman said, and that could have been the end of the conversation, confession made, forgiveness received, but for whatever reason, he needed to say it out loud.
“It took Little Miller’s head right off,” he said. “It went right through Bennett. When I opened that back door where those two were sit-ting . . .
“They didn’t know what hit them,” Kauzlarich said.
But that wasn’t the point. The point was that they had been hit.
Showman was looking at the floor now. Not at Kauzlarich. Not at the box of dust-covered soccer balls waiting to be given out. Not at the wall map of Iraq fucking itself. Just the floor.
The point was that he had thought of the route.
“So,” he said, sighing.
Four hundred and twenty days before, when they were all about to leave for Iraq, a friend of Kauzlarich’s had predicted what was going to happen. “You’re going to see a good man disintegrate before your eyes,” he’d said.
Four hundred and twenty days later, the only question left was how many of the eight hundred good men it was going to be.
On one end of the FOB, the soldier who had spent hours stacking sandbags until the entrance to his room was a tunnel pronounced himself ready for the next rocket attack.
In another part of the FOB, soldiers were learning that one of the rounds they had fired after being hit by two IEDs on their way to get Showman’s platoon had gone through a window and into the head of an Iraqi girl, killing her as she and her family tried to hide.
In another part, a soldier was thinking about whatever a soldier thinks about after seeing a dog licking up a puddle of blood that was Winegar’s, or Reiher’s, or Hanley’s, or Bennett’s, or Miller’s, and shooting the dog until it was dead.
The good soldiers.
They really were.
“The war’s over for you, my friend,” Kauzlarich said now to Showman, and of all the things he had ever said, nothing had ever seemed less true.
13
APRIL 10, 2008
I want to
say a word to our troops and civilians in Iraq. You’ve performed with
incredible skill under demanding circumstances. The turnaround you have made
possible in Iraq is a brilliant achievement in American history. And while this
war is difficult, it is not endless. And we expect that as conditions on the ground
continue to improve, they will permit us to continue the policy of return on success.
The day will come when Iraq is a capable partner of the United States. The day will
come when Iraq is a stable democracy that helps fight our common enemies and promote
our common interests in the Middle East. And when that day arrives, you’ll come home
with pride in your success and the gratitude of your whole nation. God bless you.
—GEORGE W. BUSH, April 10, 2008
You know what I love? Baby carrots. Baby carrots and Ranch dressing,” a soldier said. “I think I’m going to be eating some baby carrots when I get home.”
“Shhh,” another soldier said, eyes shut. “I’m on a pontoon boat right now.”
They were done. They were all done. It was April 4. In a few hours, once it was dark, some Chinook helicopters would cut across the night shadows toward Rustamiyah. Soon after that, the first 235 of them would be on their way out, and by April 10, all of them would be gone.
Rustamiyah to the Baghdad airport.
Baghdad to Kuwait.
Kuwait to Budapest.
Budapest to Shannon, Ireland.
Shannon to Goose Bay, Canada.
Mortuary Affairs
Goose Bay to Rockford, Illinois.
Rockford to Topeka, Kansas.
Topeka to Fort Riley, by bus.
And then a welcome-home ceremony from a grateful nation in a small, half-filled gym.