Authors: David Finkel
Tags: #History, #Military, #Iraq War (2003-2011)
The Good Soldiers
The
GOOD SOLDIERS
David Finkel is the National Enterprise Editor of the
Washington Post.
He was awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for his series of stories about U.S.-funded democracy efforts in Yemen. Finkel lives with his wife and two daughters in Silver Spring, Maryland.
‘Outstanding. . . The best work of reportage to emerge from the Iraq war to date. . . Everyone should read it.’
Sunday Business Post
‘[A] riveting “story of the surge” – the blood and guts; the frantic pace; the gallows humour and macho banter, but also the fear and fatigue.’
Scotsman
‘Heart-stopping. . . harrowing. . . immediate and visceral. . .
The Good Soldiers
captures the surreal horror of war: the experience of blood and violence and occasional moments of humanity that soldiers witness firsthand.’
New York Times
‘Unsparing. . . This wrenching account brings alive not only the horror of roadside bombs and mortar blasts, but the oft ignored aftermath of grief and suffering.’
Boston Globe
‘This is the finest book yet written on the platoon-level combat of the Iraq war. . . Unforgettable — raw, moving, and rendered with literary control. . . No one who reads this book will soon forget its imagery, words, or characters.’ Steve Coll, author of
Ghost Wars
‘This is the best account I have read of the life of one unit in the Iraq war. It is closely observed, carefully recorded and beautifully written. David Finkel doesn’t just take you into the lives of our soldiers, he takes you deep into their nightmares.’ Thomas E. Ricks, author of
Fiasco
and
The Gamble
‘Brilliant, heartbreaking, deeply true.
The Good Soldiers
offers the most intimate view of life and death in a twenty-first-century combat unit I have ever read. Unsparing, unflinching, and, at times, unbearable.’ Rick Atkinson, author of
In the Company of Soldiers
The
GOOD SOLDIERS
David Finkel
Atlantic Books
L
ONDON
First published in America in 2009 by Sarah Crichton Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 18 West 18th Street, New York, 10011, USA.
First published in Great Britain in trade paperback in 2010 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
This paperback edition published in 2011 by Atlantic Books.
Copyright © David Finkel, 2009
The moral right of David Finkel to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.
Portions of this book originally appeared, in different form, in
The Washington Post.
Top photograph on page 108 courtesy of the U.S. Army.
All other photographs courtesy of the author.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 84887 327 8
eBook ISBN: 978 1 84887 759 7
Designed by Abby Kagan
Printed in Great Britain
Atlantic Books
An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
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WC1N 3JZ
To Lisa, Julia, and Lauren
CONTENTS
APPENDIX: THE 2-16 ROSTER OF SOLDIERS
A NOTE ON SOURCES AND METHODS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The
GOOD SOLDIERS
1
APRIL 6, 2007
Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous
operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences . . .
—
GEORGE W. BUSH
,
January 10, 2007, announcing the surge
H
is soldiers weren’t yet calling him the Lost Kauz behind his back, not when this began. The soldiers of his who would be injured were still perfectly healthy, and the soldiers of his who would die were still perfectly alive. A soldier who was a favorite of his, and who was often described as a younger version of him, hadn’t yet written of the war in a letter to a friend, “I’ve had enough of this bullshit.” Another soldier, one of his best, hadn’t yet written in the journal he kept hidden, “I’ve lost all hope. I feel the end is near for me, very, very near.” Another hadn’t yet gotten angry enough to shoot a thirsty dog that was lapping up a puddle of human blood. Another, who at the end of all this would become the battalion’s most decorated soldier, hadn’t yet started dreaming about the people he had killed and wondering if God was going to ask him about the two who had been climbing a ladder. Another hadn’t yet started seeing himself shooting a man in the head, and then seeing the little girl who had just watched him shoot the man in the head, every time he shut his eyes. For that matter, his own dreams hadn’t started yet, either, at least the ones that he would remember—the one in which his wife and friends were in a cemetery, surrounding a hole into which he was suddenly falling; or the one in which everything around him was exploding and he was trying to fight back with no weapon and no ammunition other than a bucket of old bullets. Those dreams would be along soon enough, but in early April 2007, Ralph Kauzlarich, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who had led a battalion of some eight hundred soldiers into Baghdad as part of George W. Bush’s surge, was still finding a reason every day to say, “It’s all good.”
Ralph Kauzlarich, Fort Riley, Kansas
He would wake up in eastern Baghdad, inhale its bitter, burning air, and say it. “It’s all good.” He would look around at the fundamentals of what his life had become—his camouflage, his gun, his body armor, his gas mask in case of a chemical attack, his atropine injector in case of a nerve gas attack, his copy of
The One Year Bible
next to his neat bed, which he made first thing every morning out of a need for order, his photographs on the walls of his wife and children, who were home in Kansas in a house shaded by American elm trees and with a video in the VCR of him telling the children the night before he left, “Okay. All right. It’s time to start the noodles. I love you. Everybody up. Hut hut”—and say it. “It’s all good.” He would go outside and immediately become coated from hair to boots in dirt, unless the truck that sprayed sewage water to keep the dirt under control had been by, in which case he would walk through sewage-laden goop, and say it. He would go past the blast walls, the sandbags, the bunkers, the aid station where the wounded from other battalions were treated, the annex where they assembled the dead, and say it. He would say it in his little office, with its walls cracked from various explosions, while reading the morning’s e-mails. From his wife: “I love you so much! I wish we could lay naked in each other’s arms . . . bodies meshing together, perhaps a little sweat :-).” From his mother, in rural Washington state, after some surgery: “I must say, the sleep was the best I have had in months. Everything turned out to be normal, goody, goody. Rosie picked me up and brought me back home because that was the morning our cows were butchered and your Dad had to be there to make sure things were done right.” From his father: “I have laid awake many nights since I last saw you, and have often wished I could be along side you to assist in some way.” He would say it on his way to the chapel, where he would attend Catholic Mass conducted by a priest who had to be flown in by helicopter because a previous priest was blown up in a Humvee. He would say it in the dining facility, where he always had two servings of milk with his dinner. He would say it when he went in his Humvee into the neighborhoods of eastern Baghdad, where more and more roadside bombs were exploding now that the surge was under way, killing soldiers, taking off arms, taking off legs, causing concussions, exploding ear drums, leaving some soldiers angry and others vomiting and others in sudden tears. Not his soldiers, though. Other soldiers. From other battalions. “It’s all good,” he would say when he came back. It could seem like a nervous tic, this thing that he said, or a prayer of some sort. Or maybe it was a declaration of optimism, simply that, nothing more, because he
was
optimistic, even though he was in the midst of a war that to the American public, and the American media, and even to some in the American military, seemed all over in April 2007, except for the pessimism, the praying, and the nervous tics.
But not to him. “Well, here are the differences,” George W. Bush had said, announcing the surge, and Ralph Kauzlarich had thought: We’ll be the difference. My battalion. My soldiers. Me. And every day since then he had said it—“It’s all good”—after which he might say the other thing he often said, always without irony and utterly convinced: “We’re winning.” He liked to say that, too. Except now, on April 6, 2007, at 1:00 a.m., as someone banged on his door, waking him up, he said something different.
“What the fuck?” he said, opening his eyes.
The thing is, he and his battalion weren’t even supposed to be here, and that’s one way to consider everything that was about to happen as Kauzlarich, awake now, dressed now, made the short walk from his trailer to the battalion’s operations center. The March rains that had turned the place sloppy with mud were thankfully over. The mud had dried. The road was dusty. The air was cold. Whatever was happening was only a mile or so away, but there was nothing for Kauzlarich to see, and nothing for him to hear, other than his own thoughts.
Two months before, as he was about to leave for Iraq, he’d sat in his kitchen in Fort Riley, Kansas, after a dinner of ham and double-baked potatoes and milk and apple crisp for dessert, and said, “We are America. I mean, we have all of the resources. We have a very intelligent population. If we decide, just like we did in World War Two, if we all said, ‘This is our focus, this is our priority, and we’re going to win it, we’re going to do everything that we have to do to win it,’ then we’d win it. This nation can do anything that it wants to do. The question is, does America have the will?”
Now, as he entered the operations center a few minutes after 1:00 a.m., the war was in its 1,478th day, the number of dead American troops had surpassed 3,000, the number of injured troops was nearing 25,000, the American public’s early optimism was long gone, and the miscalculations and distortions that had preceded the war had been exposed in detail, as had the policy blunders that had been guiding it since it began. Four injured, he was told. One slightly. Three seriously. And one dead.
“Statistically, there’s probably a pretty good chance I’m going to lose men. And I’m not quite sure how I’m going to deal with it,” he had said at Fort Riley. In nineteen years as an army officer, he had never lost a soldier under his direct command.
Now he was being told that the dead soldier was Private First Class Jay Cajimat, who was twenty years and two months old and who might have died immediately from the blast of the explosion, or a little more slowly in the resulting fire.