The Good Soldiers (12 page)

“They stopped doing CPR, and I walked out. I didn’t stay. I didn’t go up to the body. I just stayed back, and I went outside and went through those doors, and Sergeant King was there. He was in the far corner. I walked by Sergeant Kitchen, and Sergeant King looked at me, and I shook my head, and he was like, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘No. He didn’t make it. Sorry.’ And then Sergeant Kitchen ran up and grabbed me and turned me and said,
‘What? What?’
And I said, ‘Sergeant, he didn’t make it. I’m sorry.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry.’ I said, ‘You guys did everything you could do.’ I said, ‘You guys did a good job.’ And he just kept saying,
‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!
And then the platoon was down at the end of the ramp, around the corner, and Sergeant Kitchen went out and told them, and there was just rage and tears. They were in a rage at this bullshit. They wanted to hit something. They were just mad. I said, ‘Hey man, I’m sorry,’ to a couple of them standing there. And a bunch of them, I noticed, their boots were stained with blood. That’s what I remember, too. So many guys had blood on their boots.

“And then I walked back and told Colonel Kauzlarich, ‘Sir, Sergeant Crow didn’t survive.’”

“This past Monday night,” Kauzlarich said in his memorial speech, “at Ranger Craig’s memorial ceremony I made mention that the bullet had already been fired at each of us, and it was only a matter of time when it would hit. I also said that knowing the bullet had already been fired brings comfort to some and terror to others. I sincerely believe that Sergeant Crow was the kind of soldier and noncommissioned officer that found comfort knowing that his fate was predetermined by a force much greater than himself. I can say that confidently by Will Crow’s reputation and the way he lived his life.”

On June 30, in the final minutes of a month in which four soldiers died, one lost a hand, one lost an arm, one lost an eye, one was shot in the head, one was shot in the throat, eight were injured by shrapnel, eighty IEDs or EFPs detonated on passing convoys, soldiers were targeted by gunfire or rocket-propelled grenades fifty-two times, and Rustamiyah and the COPs were hit with rockets or mortars thirty-six times, Kauzlarich had a dream.

He was in a hunting lodge of some sort. He went into the bathroom, shut the door, locked it, and was alone at the urinal when he realized someone had come in and was standing by the sink.

“How’d you get in here?” he said.

“I just came in,” was the reply.

“Yes, but are you a ghost or something?” he asked. “Am I dead?”

“No,” was the reply. “Not yet.”

Kauzlarich had never had a dream like this. “Never,” he would say. “Never, never.”

It woke him up. He couldn’t get back to sleep. Eventually he checked the time. It was after midnight.

The hopeful signs of June were over, and now it was July.

5

JULY 12, 2007

We’re helping enhance the size, capabilities, and effectiveness of the Iraqi
security forces so the Iraqis can take over the defense of their own country.
We’re helping the Iraqis take back their neighborhoods from the extremists.
—
GEORGE W. BUSH
,
July 12, 2007

W
hat’s happened that has turned everything into a fight?” Kauzlarich had wondered in June. “What the hell is going on?” Now, in July, as the daily explosions continued, he had his answer.

“We’re winning,” he explained. “They wouldn’t be fighting if we weren’t winning. They wouldn’t have a reason to. It’s a measure of
effectiveness”

Cummings believed it, too, although he said it differently.

“Good thing we’re winning,” he’d begun reciting on the five-minute walk from his desk to the DFAC as he continuously scanned for the closest place to run to for cover in case of a rocket attack. “Because if we were losing . . .”

Meanwhile, at Alpha Company’s COP, which had been renamed COP Cajimat, someone put up a handmade morale meter with seven different settings.

“Embracing the suck,” was one.

“Fuck this shit, I quit,” was another.

“Bend over. Here it comes again,” was another.

But it wasn’t as if they had a choice. They were soldiers whose choices had ended when they had signed contracts and taken their oaths. Whether they had joined for reasons of patriotism, of romantic notions, to escape a broken home of some sort, or out of economic need, their job now was to follow the orders of other soldiers who were following orders, too. Somewhere, far from Iraq, was where the orders began, but by the time they reached Rustamiyah, the only choice left for a soldier was to choose which lucky charm to tuck behind his body armor, or which foot to line up in front of the other, as he went out to follow the order of the day. Order: “enhance the size, capabilities, and effectiveness of the Iraqi security forces so the Iraqis can take over the defense of their own country.” So out they went to do that, day after day, even though the fact was that the Iraqi Security Forces were a joke.

Al-Amin, Baghdad, Iraq

Every one of the soldiers knew it. How could they not? Just about every time an EFP exploded, it seemed to be within sight of an Iraqi Security Forces checkpoint, and did the Iraqis manning those checkpoints not see someone who was two hundred feet away digging in the dirt, emplacing an EFP, and unspooling some wire? Did they know the EFP was there and not say anything because they were in partnership? Were they merely incompetent? Was there another explanation that would make them worthy of an American soldier’s respect? Did they ever come running to help? No. Even once? No.

And yet in the strategy of the surge, Americans and Iraqis were supposed to work together, so Kauzlarich began building a relationship with a man named Qasim Ibrahim Alwan, who was in charge of a 550-member National Police battalion whose AO overlapped the 2-16’s. It was Colonel Qasim’s men who were often the ones suspiciously nearby when the EFPs went off. Qasim himself, however, seemed to be sincerely trying to work with Kauzlarich and his soldiers, even though he was in constant jeopardy for doing so. He received frequent text messages on his cell phone telling him that he was going to be killed. He was a Sunni, and most of his soldiers were Shiite, and for all he knew they were the ones sending the text messages.

As a result, Qasim led a wary, uneasy life. But instead of running away from Baghdad and becoming one of Iraq’s three million internally displaced people, or running away from Iraq entirely and becoming one of the war’s two million refugees, he continued to align himself with the Americans, even showing up to pay his respects at Cajimat’s memorial service. As he took his seat, some soldiers openly seethed that an Iraqi was in their midst. But he seemed genuinely moved by the display of a dead soldier’s empty boots and the mournful tone of eulogies, and when the Americans bowed their heads in silent prayer and he raised his palms and lifted his eyes skyward, the splendor of the moment was not lost on Kauzlarich. “If I lose Qasim, I’m fucked,” he told his soldiers one day. “We’re fucked.” That’s how deeply Kauzlarich was coming to trust Qasim.

But Qasim was the only one. The rest were to be suspicious of, starting with the very first Iraqi some of them had met back at Fort Riley, just before they deployed, a visiting general who couldn’t have seemed less interested as soldiers performed an exercise for him in which they showed how they had been trained to enter a building. Flawlessly, they did it once for the general, and then again, and what the general did for them was to stuff his hands in his overcoat, look down at some melting snow, kick at it with his polished maroon shoes, and make some perfunctory comments about how he was “very hopeful” that the Iraqi and American soldiers would be able to work well together.

Five months later, that hadn’t yet happened. It was now the Americans’ turn to watch Iraqi soldiers in training, and what they were seeing was a sorry collection of thirty Iraqi Army soldiers and twenty National Police officers who didn’t even have the rudimentary skills that were taught to American soldiers in basic training. Their uniforms didn’t quite fit. Their hair was shaggy. Their helmets were on cockeyed. They were at a weedy, rundown Iraqi military academy adjacent to Rustamiyah, doing an exercise in which they were supposed to learn the American way of patrolling, and one soldier who was walking backward swiveled around just in time to walk face first into a tree trunk. Now they were supposed to rest by kneeling down on one knee—“Take a knee” was the instruction— and one who was clearly too old to be a soldier, and too overweight to be a soldier, instead sprawled on the ground and began plucking at some weeds.

“Pretty good,” a major named Rob Ramirez, who was observing the training for Kauzlarich, called out, and when the soldier on the ground smiled and waved at Ramirez, Ramirez smiled and waved back, while saying under his breath, “When we leave, they’re going to get whacked.”

It was a hot day, above 110 degrees. Everyone was sweat-soaked, the old, overweight soldier most of all. He had been a tank driver in the days of Saddam’s army, but now, with unemployment rates in this part of Iraq said to be over 50 percent, he was just trying to hang in there with the others, all of whom were trying to hang in, too. In spite of the heat, they were glad to have been selected for this training course. Their rooms were air-conditioned. The toilets and showers worked. They would be here a total of four weeks before having to go back to their regular, post-invasion lives in Baghdad, and they wondered sometimes if the Americans understood what life for them had become. The lack of electricity. The lack of equipment and money. The lack of everything, really, other than threats. “We are afraid,” an Iraqi Army lieutenant colonel named Abdul Haitham confided, and did the Americans understand that?

Break over, the Iraqis stood and moved down a dirt road with their mismatched guns as Haitham stayed back to ask Ramirez a question.

“If anything happens to us, what will happen to our families?” he asked, and then explained that when word circulated that he worked with the Americans, his name was read aloud in a mosque, a death threat was issued, and, as he and his family fled to the safety of a relative’s house, his house was destroyed. “Even my kids’ photos,” he said of what he saw when he was able to return briefly. “They used a knife. They cut the neck. They burned the eyes. They cut the ears.” Then they set the house on fire, he said, and three months later his family was still with relatives and he was living in a room at the academy. “I am waiting for a visa to America,” Haitham said. “Because I hate this country.”

He looked at Ramirez anxiously, the question of help implicit, and Ramirez looked back at him, at his worried face, at his sweat-stained uniform, at his thick chest, at his big hands, at his fat fingers, and finally at a shiny ring on one of those fingers, a ring with a large stone. It was a stone favored by members of Jaish al Mahdi, and, in particular, Jaish al Mahdi triggermen.

Who is this man?
Ramirez wondered, and so he changed the subject. “On a good note, training is going good, I think,” he said.

Haitham sighed. “For thirty-five years I built that house step by step. I buy it with my own money, and then I built it, and then I lose it,” he said, and then excused himself so he could catch up with his men.

On they went, through a series of tests that were supposed to prepare them for leading patrols in Baghdad. The first involved the discovery of a suspicious box. They noticed it hidden in some weeds and cordoned it off. The second involved celebratory gunfire at a wedding. They guessed what it was and didn’t shoot the bride or the groom. The third involved an assault by rock throwers, which turned out to be a couple of guys halfheartedly lobbing a few small stones that the Iraqis picked up and laughingly threw back. Then came a fourth scenario that hadn’t been planned, an actual rocket attack. The Iraqis heard the warning horn drifting over from Rustamiyah, where radar had picked up the approaching rockets, and as several came down in the distance and exploded, some of the Iraqis used the occasion to grab a leisurely smoke until the all-clear.

A few hours later, the exercises done for the day, the temperature even higher, everyone gathered on some bleachers next to a sun-beaten field to review how had they done. Suddenly one of them collapsed.

It was the old, overweight tanker. He was quickly surrounded by other Iraqis, but there wasn’t much they could do. Not only were they a collection of mismatched uniforms and weapons, but they had no supplies on hand other than useless bottles of hot drinking water, which they dumped onto the man, and the man’s sweat-soaked shirt, which they removed and used to wipe down his face.

It was the ready-for-anything Americans who came to the rescue. Ramirez’s medic had cool water and a portable IV kit. He uncoiled the plastic tubing and prepared the IV bag as the collapsed Iraqi watched through half-open eyes. Next the medic began readying the needle, and now the Iraqi was trying to sit up.