The Good Soldiers (17 page)

This was one of the hottest days yet. Midmorning, it was already well above one hundred degrees, but March was outside because he wanted to talk about what had happened when he and Wheeler were in that first house, and he wanted to do it in a place where Wheeler and the others couldn’t hear. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind about the guilt or innocence of the man who’d been killed. There’d been a wire. The wire had led to the man. The man had been turning toward them with an AK-47. Still, on his twenty-first birthday, March sat under a tree, from which hung a sweet-smelling sack of poison filled with dead flies, and sighed. “I also engaged the guy,” he said. “Sergeant Wheeler shot him in the stomach, twice, and as he was falling, I shot him in the head.”

That was what really happened, he said, and the reason he hadn’t said anything the day before was that afterward, when he had run back to the rest of the platoon and another soldier said, “You all right?” and he said, “I got one,” and the soldier said, “Good job, drink this water,” and he drank the water thinking over and over,
‘You’ve just killed someone, You’ve just killed someone,’
he’d realized he didn’t want any soldiers asking him how it felt to kill another human being. So he’d asked Wheeler and the others who’d been in the house not to spread it around, and Wheeler especially understood because he’d been to Iraq before and had gotten the question and knew what it was like, and that was why Wheeler had done all the talking, out of kindness. For five days, March just hadn’t wanted to talk about it, he said, not to anyone. He wasn’t sure why, just as he wasn’t sure why now, on the sixth day, he did want to talk about it. But he did want to, he said, and after months of EFPs, IEDs, RPGs, snipers, rockets, mortars, watching Craig dying, watching the Iraqi rubbing his fingers together, and watching Harrelson’s Humvee flying into the air, there was no swagger in his voice whatsoever.

He described seeing Harrelson: “All you could see, you could see his Kevlar and his body figure and his head against the radio mount, and his whole body was engulfed in flames. I just remember seeing the outline of the Kevlar and his face on fire.”

He described running through the palm groves and seeing the men coming out of the house and firing at them: “I was firing on the run. You could see my rounds hitting by them, but they weren’t hitting them. It was just so weird. I was thinking to myself as I ran up to the house,
‘How did I not hit them?’

He described going into the house: “We hit the door, and we entered the room, and there’s a bunch of females and little kids in a corner, all holding each other, and I looked at them, and Sergeant Wheeler said in plain English, ‘Where the fuck is he?’ And the guy pointed to a back room. You could see the door, and it looked like it was open, like somebody had run in, and we went down the hallway, and it was like an open space, and the only thing in there was a fridge, a big fridge in a corner. And we came in, and the guy hopped up, and he had an AK.”

He described the three shots: “Sergeant Wheeler shot him in the stomach, and he went like this”—he stood and sagged—“and he was coming down, and as his head went like this”—he tucked his chin into his chest— “I shot him. It went in the top. As soon as I pulled the trigger, I immediately saw the hole, and he went from a slow fall to an immediate limp body.”

Finally, he described what happened next: “And I heard a scream. And I was thinking, ‘Is the other guy behind the fridge?’ Because I thought I saw something move. And I turned, and behind the fridge there’s this eight-year-old girl and her mother, just sitting. She’s hugging the daughter, behind the fridge. And I looked at her, and the guy’s head is bleeding, and I stepped in his blood to see—it was the only way—I stepped and I looked, and I seen the little girl, and the little girl immediately saw me, and she just started bawling. And her mom grabbed her, you know, like
please don’t kill us.
And it hit me, like, wow, an eight-year-old girl just saw me shoot this guy. And they don’t even know him. It’s their house, they’re just sitting here one day, and an IED blew up, and somebody got killed in their house, and the fright on their face, like I was gonna murder them, was just so shocking to me. Because they’re supposed to
want
us there.” Another sigh. “And it was like an eight-year-old girl and her mom.”

He fell silent.
Bang,
pause,
bang,
pause,
bang.
The memorial service was supposed to start in eight hours. March had a lot to do before then. He needed to clean his weapon. He needed to straighten his room. He needed to sleep. But he continued to sit.

Here’s something about Harrelson, he said now: he had so much confidence in himself he didn’t need to be drunk to get out on a dance floor. He didn’t drink at all. He was happy to be the designated driver. Something else: he’d come back from leave talking seriously about a girl who’d been a friend in high school. And something else: so far, for whatever reason, he himself hadn’t cried about Harrelson, as he’d done with Craig. With Craig, he said, as soon as Lieutenant Hamel told him, he’d started crying right away. The platoon had been out fighting for several days. His body armor was soaked in sweat and dotted with bits of Craig’s blood, and he cried as he walked away from Hamel and took off his armor and lay down against it and woke up a few hours later with the sinking feeling a person gets when he realizes that nothing changed while he was asleep, that all of it is still true.

“It’s just, I was twenty years old and I’d never seen anything like that,” he said. “I saw him fall from the turret. I seen his eyes roll back in his head. And it sounds weird, and I don’t like telling people this, but the reason I joined the army is because I’ve always looked up to soldiers.”

The soldier he might have looked up to most of all, he said, was one named Phillip Cantu, who had recruited him into the army. He was nineteen at that point and at the tail end of a terrible childhood in a dysfunctional family. This was not an uncommon story in the battalion; one soldier, whose entire family was in prison, said that his brother told him in all sincerity just before he deployed, “I hope you get killed.” In March’s case, he was out of options after high school and wandered one day into the recruiting office in Sandusky, Ohio, where he talked to a recruiter who seemed so old and so sour that March got up and left. A few months later, still out of options, he went in again, and the sour recruiter had been replaced by Cantu, who was twenty-three and recently back from Iraq. They talked that day about all of the options the Army offered, and as March for the first time saw possibilities in his life, he began stopping in several times a week. Each visit left him more inspired, and over time he and Cantu grew increasingly closer. “You’re not supposed to be friends with your recruiter,” he said, “but we were friends.” They started grabbing meals together and hanging out a bit, and once, when he dropped by Cantu’s apartment, Cantu showed him photographs of the day he was outside the spider hole where Special Ops soldiers had just captured Saddam Hussein. It turned out that Cantu had been there, not in the hole, but close to its edge, as Saddam was pulled out, and it had been documented in a hometown newspaper article headlined
SANDUSKIAN HELPED BAG SADDAM
, in which Cantu’s wife said, “Our great-grandkids are going to get to hear about how he captured Saddam,” and his mother said she had telephoned so many people that “my ear was starting to hurt,” and his sister said, “I am just so proud; I am a really proud sister.” “He told me there’s nothing like the brotherhood when you deploy,” March said, and that was it. For a nineteen-year-old from a family of dysfunction, his decision was made. He enlisted in the army brotherhood, got through basic training, was assigned to Fort Riley and the 2-16, and had just arrived when his mother called in tears to say that Phillip Cantu was dead. And it was true. He was. The part of the war he hadn’t told March about had caught up with him, and once again, he was in the newspaper: “A local man whose military unit in Iraq helped capture Saddam Hussein in December 2003 died Saturday morning. Sgt. Phillip Cantu, 24, killed himself,” is how the article began, and thirteen months later, here was March, in Iraq, red-eyed and pink-bellied and unable to sleep because of what he was seeing, day and night, whether his eyes were open or closed. What did
he
see?

“It’s photographs,” he said.

“Like a picture of Harrelson burning, in flames. I can’t get that out of my head right now.

“I see myself shooting the guy. I see a still frame of the guy halfway hitting the ground with the hole in his head.

“I can see the little girl, the face of the little girl. And as much as people say that they don’t care about these people and all that,
I
don’t care about these people—but I do, at the same time, if that makes any sense. They don’t want to help themselves, they’re blowing us up, yeah, that hurts, but it also hurts to know that I’ve seen a girl that’s as old as my little brother watch me shoot somebody in the head. And I don’t care if she’s Iraqi, Korean, African, white—she’s still a little girl. And she watched me shoot somebody.

“I see me walking to the truck, just having my head down and my weapon in one hand, not looking around, not pulling security, not thinking nothing. Just walking to the truck.

“It’s like a slide show in my head,” he said. “Does that make sense?”

A few days before all of this, at just about the time President Bush was speaking in Nashville at the Gaylord Opryland Resort about his optimism concerning the war, Kauzlarich was interviewed in his office by an army historian who was traveling around Iraq asking commanders about the surge.

“Share with me some things that aren’t going well,” the historian had said at one point.

“You know we have not been given a problem that we have not been able to come up with a solution for,” Kauzlarich had said, and then had tried to make a joke. “The only thing I can bitch about right now is that at times we run out of certain flavors of ice cream.”

Now, a few nights later, he and the soldiers he got were crowded into the chapel for the memorial service, which ended with something called the Final Roll Call.

“Sergeant Jubinville,” a sergeant called out.

“Here, First Sergeant,” Jubinville called back.

“PFC Devine,” the sergeant called out.

“Here, First Sergeant,” Devine called back.

“PFC Harrelson,” the sergeant called out.

The chapel was silent.

“PFC James Harrelson,” he called out.

The chapel remained silent.

“PFC James Jacob Harrelson,” he called out.

And the silence continued, unbearably, until it was interrupted by the sharp slap of gunfire.

Bang,
pause,
bang,
pause,
bang.

At the Opryland Resort, President Bush had said, “I’m optimistic. We’ll succeed unless we lose our nerve.”

Here, six versions of what nerve can mean filed out of the chapel.

Mays went back to his Ambien.

Hamel went back to his furniture.

Bailey went back to his loops around the FOB.

Wheeler went back to his what-ifs.

March went back to his slide show.

And Kauzlarich, red-eyed too now, went back to his office.

7

SEPTEMBER 22, 2007

We’re kicking ass.
—
GEORGE W. BUSH
,
September 4, 2007

O
n September 22, General David Petraeus, who was a four-star general, the commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq, and the architect of the surge, came to Rustamiyah to visit the 2-16.

“Ooh, that’s nice!” Kauzlarich said just before Petraeus’s arrival, checking out the second floor of the operations center, which soldiers had spent the morning attempting to clean up. This was where Kauzlarich would brief Petraeus on everything the 2-16 had accomplished. He had never briefed a four-star general before, and he was feeling a little nervous.

There were muffins, cookies, and fresh fruit, all arranged on a table covered with a green hospital bedsheet. “It’s brand new,” a soldier assured Kauzlarich. “We got it from Supply this morning.”

There was an urn of fresh coffee and a bowl of iced drinks, which Kauzlarich noticed didn’t contain Diet Coke. “That’s all he drinks,” he said, always the master of detail, and a soldier hustled off to find Diet Coke.

The long, three-section conference table where Kauzlarich held staff meetings had been broken down and reconfigured into a
U,
and marking Petraeus’s spot at the center of it were a new nameplate, a new pen, a new notebook, a jug of water, a jug of juice, and a coffee mug filled with ceremonial American flags.

General David Petraeus and Ralph Kauzlarich

Everything was ready. “There’s only so many ways to polish a turd,” Cummings said, and with that Kauzlarich went off to meet Petraeus and bring him back to the operations center.