The Good Soldiers (15 page)

They saw more Humvees arriving, one of which drove up onto the trash pile, right over the part containing what was left of Noor-Eldeen’s body.

“That guy just drove over a body.”

“Did he?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, they’re dead, so—”

They watched a soldier emerge from the van cradling the wounded girl and run with her in his arms to the army vehicle that was going to evacuate her to a hospital.

They watched another soldier emerge from the van a few minutes later cradling a second wounded child, this one a little boy who had been discovered under a body presumed to be his father’s, which was draped over the boy, either protectively or because that was how a dead man happened to fall.

And then they flew on to another part of Al-Amin as more and more Bravo Company soldiers arrived, one of whom was Jay March, the soldier who on the battalion’s very first day in Iraq had climbed a guard tower, peeked out at all of the trash, and said quietly and nervously, “We ain’t ever gonna be able to find an IED in all this shit.”

Since then, March had learned how prophetic he was, especially on June 25, when an EFP killed his friend Andre Craig, Jr. Craig’s memorial service had been on July 7, and now, five days later, as March saw all of the bodies scattered around, blown open, insides exposed, so gruesome, so grotesque, he felt—as he would later explain—“happy. It was weird. I was just really very happy. I remember feeling so happy. When I heard they were engaging, when I heard there’s thirteen KIA, I was just
so
happy, because Craig had just died, and it felt like, you know, we got ’em.”

As the Apaches peeled off, he and another soldier went through a gate in the wall that the van had crashed into and against which Chmagh had tried to take cover.

There, in the courtyard of a house, hidden from street view, they found two more injured Iraqis, one on top of the other. As March looked closer at the two, who might have been the two who had been lifting Chmagh into the van, who as far as March knew had spent the morning trying to kill American soldiers, he realized that the one on the bottom was dead. But the one on top was still alive, and as March locked eyes with him, the man raised his hands and rubbed his two forefingers together, which March had learned was what Iraqis did when they wanted to signal the word
friends.

So March looked at the man and rubbed his two forefingers together, too.

And then dropped his left hand and extended the middle finger of his right hand.

And then said to the other soldier, “Craig’s probably just sitting up there drinking beer, going, ‘Hah! That’s all I needed.’”

And that was the day’s third version of war.

As for the fourth version, it occurred late in the day, back on the FOB, after Kauzlarich and the soldiers had finished their work in Al-Amin.

They knew by now about Chmagh and Noor-Eldeen.

They had brought back Noor-Eldeen’s cameras and examined the images to see if he was a journalist or an insurgent.

They had gotten the video and audio recordings from the Apaches and had reviewed them several times.

They had looked at photographs taken by soldiers that showed AK-47s and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher next to the dead Iraqis.

They had reviewed everything they could about what had prefaced the killings in east Al-Amin, in other words—that soldiers were being shot at, that they didn’t know journalists were there, that the journalists were in a group of men carrying weapons, that the Apache crew had followed the rules of engagement when it fired at the men with weapons, at the journalists, and at the van with the children inside—and had concluded that everyone had acted appropriately.

Had the journalists?

That would be for others to decide.

As for the men who had tried to help Chmagh, were they insurgents or just people trying to help a wounded man?

They would probably never know.

What they did know: the good soldiers were still the good soldiers, and the time had come for dinner.

“Crow. Payne. Craig. Gajdos. Cajimat,” Kauzlarich said on the walk to the DFAC. “Right now? Our guys? They’re thinking, ‘Those guys didn’t die in vain. Not after what we did today.’”

Inside the DFAC, the TVs were tuned to Bush’s press conference, which had begun in Washington just a few minutes before.

“Our top priority is to help the Iraqis protect their population,” Bush was saying, “so we’ve launched an offensive in and around Baghdad to go after extremists, to buy more time for Iraqi forces to develop, and to help normal life and civil society take root in communities and neighborhoods throughout the country.

“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,” he continued. “We’re helping the Iraqis take back their neighborhoods from the extremists . . .”

This was the fourth version of war.

Kauzlarich watched as he ate. “I like this president,” he said.

6

JULY 23, 2007

I’m optimistic. We’ll succeed unless we lose our nerve.
—
GEORGE W. BUSH
,
July 19, 2007

E
leven days later, just after midnight, Jay March was gang-tackled by a half dozen other soldiers.

For a moment, it seemed he would get away. He was sitting in a dreary, smoke-filled hookah bar called Joe’s that was located on a quiet part of the FOB. Two soldiers grabbed him, but he shook them off and tried to run. Then all six jumped on him and down he went, banging against a table and landing on his back. The table tipped. Chairs fell. A hookah pipe that a few soldiers had been smoking toppled as did several cans of the drink of choice in this alcohol-free place, a high-energy drink called Boom Boom. March tried to protect himself, but he was quickly overwhelmed. The other soldiers, all members of his platoon, lifted his shirt and began slapping his stomach, hard enough for the slaps to sound like ricocheting gunshots. He squirmed and yelled and tried to use his elbows, but they pinned his arms. Open-handed, they hit him harder and harder on his stomach until he was scraped raw and bleeding in a few places and his entire midsection was a bright pink. Only then, laughing, did they stop and let him go.

“Happy birthday,” one of them said.

“Happy birthday,” said another.

“Assholes,” March said, getting up, gasping, looking at his stomach, wiping at the blood, but he was laughing as well.

The death of James Harrelson

Twenty-one years old and pink-bellied in Iraq. Jay March couldn’t have seemed happier. The other soldiers, too, who now took turns congratulating him.

But their eyes gave them away, every one of them. Even as they laughed, it was clear that something was off. They looked frantic. They looked exhausted. To hear them laugh was to hear that everything was all right, but to see them laugh was to see otherwise.

There had been signs of cracks starting to appear, not just in March’s platoon but across the battalion. As bad as June had been, July had brought the worst weeklong stretch yet—forty-two incidents of IEDs, small-arms fire, and rocket attacks—and even though there were no serious injuries, the relentlessness of it was having a measurable effect. The battalion chaplain was seeing an increasing number of soldiers who would knock on his door late at night for discreet counseling, including two who were talking about suicide. The FOB’s mental health counselors were writing an increasing number of prescriptions for sleep aids and antidepressants—not in alarming numbers, they assured Kauzlarich, but worth tracking. Rumors of rule-breaking were on the increase, too, and so a “health-and-welfare” inspection was held that turned up all kinds of things that good soldiers weren’t allowed to have: packages of steroids manufactured in Iran, a stack of Iraqi currency that might have been taken during a search of an Iraqi’s house, a couple of Iraqi cell phones, a “Vibrating Showgirl Slut” inflatable sex doll, and a boxful of hardcore porn, including a magazine that had been disguised with a glued-on cover of a
Martha Stewart Living
magazine and a DVD that a soldier had helpfully entitled in black marker:
PORN
.

“We got some stupid fuckers,” Kauzlarich said after the inflatable doll had been tossed into a burn barrel and set on fire, which created a thick column of oily black smoke that rose over the center of the FOB.

“We got what we got,” Cummings said—and what he and Kauzlarich were wondering was whether these first cracks were just the effects of war, or also the effects of an army forced to take more and more stupid fuckers.

It was something they had been dealing with since they began forming the battalion. For several years, in order to meet recruiting goals, the army had been accepting an ever-increasing number of recruits who needed some kind of waiver in order to become soldiers. Without the waivers, those recruits would not have been allowed into the army. Some of the waivers were for medical problems and others were for low scores on aptitude tests, but the greatest percentage were for criminal offenses ranging from misdemeanor drug use to felonies such as burglary, theft, aggravated assault, and even a few cases of involuntary manslaughter. In 2006, the year the 2-16 was getting most of its soldiers, 15 percent of the army’s recruits were given criminal waivers. Most were for misdemeanors, but nearly a thousand were for some type of felony conviction, which was more than double the number granted just three years before.

This was the “we got what we got” army that Kauzlarich got. The result, for the army, was enough soldiers to fight a war, but for Kauzlarich it meant that he spent a lot of time that year weeding out soldiers, such as the one who was arrested for aiming a handgun at a man who turned out to be an undercover police officer. And one who drank too much and couldn’t stop crying and talked all the time about all the ways he wished to hurt himself, a level of sadness too destructive for even the army.

Most of the soldiers he got weren’t that way. A lot of them were great, some were brilliant, and almost all were unquestionably courageous: Sergeant Gietz, who was being nominated for a Bronze Star Medal with Valor for what he had done in June. Adam Schumann, who had carried Sergeant Emory on his back. The list went on and on. Every company. Every platoon. Every soldier, really, because now, in July, as the explosions kept coming, and coming, the daily act of them jumping into Hum-vees to go out of the wire and straight into what they knew was waiting for them began to seem the very definition of bravery. “Stupid fuckers,” someone watching them might think, but it was in a prayerful, lump-in-the-throat way. “Here we go,” Kauzlarich, who had now been in three near-misses with EFPs, would say, and there they would go, without hesitation, protecting their hands, lining up their feet, and keeping private their fears, sometimes by listening in silence to the soothing clangs that came from deep inside the frames of the Humvees that sounded like drowsy cow bells, and other times by playing a game of what they wanted their last words to be.

“Kill ’em all.”

“Fuck Nine-eleven.”

“Tell my wife I really didn’t love her.”

They were vulgar. They were macho. (“At no time did he scream. Strong kid.” was the compliment given a soldier who was severely hurt by an EFP.) They were funny. (A conversation between two sergeants: “No matter where you are, kids are kids.” “Kids are the future.” “But I saw a video this morning on the news of a kid, thirteen or fourteen years old, maybe here or in Afghanistan, about to cut off a guy’s head with a knife. What was that kid thinking?” “Probably thinking about cutting that guy’s head off.”) With only a few exceptions, Kauzlarich was enormously proud of the battalion they had become, but what had been essential was his getting rid of roughly 10 percent of them before they deployed. They were the 10 percent he never should have gotten in the first place, a percentage that could have been higher except for his penchant for second chances. The knucklehead who got in a fistfight at Fort Riley because he kept eating the French fries of someone who kept warning him, “Don’t eat my French fries”? He got a second chance and turned out to be a good soldier. The goofball who spilled gasoline on his boots and decided the best way to clean them was to light the gasoline on fire and ended up with leg burns because he didn’t think to take the boots off? He got a second chance, too, as did a soldier who was arrested for driving under the influence as he tried to drive onto Fort Riley, and then insisted to his sergeant that someone else had been at the wheel and the guards at the gate were lying. “Hey, Craig, you know there’s a video camera there, right?” his sergeant had said, and so Andre Craig, Jr., backed down and took responsibility and got to go to Iraq, where on June 25 he was killed by an EFP.