The Good Soldiers (18 page)

Every once in a while a day in Iraq would feel good. As Kauzlarich approached with Petraeus, this seemed one of those days. The temperature was under one hundred degrees. The sky was a wonderful, dustless blue. The air stank neither of sewage nor of burning trash. The only odor, in fact, was the comparatively pleasant chemical bouquet wafting from some portable latrines near where Petraeus paused to shake hands with a few soldiers who had been selected to meet him and were lined up at attention.

Petraeus and Kauzlarich entered the operations center, which, thanks to the work of a bomb-sniffing dog that had been brought by earlier, had been certified as booby-trap free.

They climbed steps that had been swept clean of the dust that came in through cracks every time there was a close explosion.

They entered the conference room, and Petraeus sat in a high-backed chair that had been wiped down to a shine. Kauzlarich took the chair next to his. Cummings took a chair nearby. Various junior officers filled chairs behind them. All eyes were on Petraeus as he ignored the muffins, cookies, coffee, Diet Cokes, pen, notebook, and flags, and simply reached for a grape.

He popped it into his mouth.

“Okay,” he said, swallowing. “Fire away, Ralph.”

David Petraeus at that moment was one of the most famous people in the world. He had just returned to Baghdad from a trip to the United States where he had testified before Congress about the surge. All summer long, the anticipation of his testimony had grown to the point of frenzy, and by the time he showed up on Capitol Hill, he had been so written about, analyzed, profiled, and politicized that he was no longer just a general. He had become the very face of the Iraq War, its celebrity and star.

It would be difficult to overstate his fame, just as it would be difficult to overstate how in need Kauzlarich was of this good day. Eighteen days before, on September 4, another perfectly aimed EFP had torn into the first Humvee of a five-truck convoy on Route Predators, and three soldiers had died—Sergeant Joel Murray, twenty-six; Specialist David Lane, twenty; and Private Randol Shelton, twenty-two. The other two soldiers in the Humvee had survived but were in terrible shape, with burns and multiple amputations, and Kauzlarich, who was in a convoy nearby, had been seeing images of dying soldiers and body parts since. It was something he didn’t talk about openly, because subordinates didn’t need to know such things about their commander. But other commanders would have understood if he had said it to them, including General Petraeus himself, who once, in a moment of reflection on a day when the death count of American troops was nearing 3,800, had said, “The truth is you never get used to losses. If anything, I almost think sometimes there’s sort of a bad-news vessel, and it’s got holes in the bottom, and then it drains. In other words, you know, it’s really your emotions, but I mean there’s so much bad news you can take. And it fills up. But if you have some good days, it sort of drains away.”

So Kauzlarich was in need of some draining away.

Did anyone else understand that, though, other than those in the war? Because while the news in Rustamiyah on September 4 was all about three dead soldiers and a fourth who had lost both legs, and a fifth who had lost both legs and an arm and most of his other arm and been severely burned over what remained of him, that wasn’t the news in the United States. In the United States, the news was all macro rather than micro. It was about President Bush arriving in Australia that morning, where the deputy prime minister asked him how the war was going and he answered, “We’re kicking ass.” It was about a government report released in the afternoon that noted the Iraqi government’s lack of progress toward self-sustainability, which Democrats seized on as one more reason to get out of Iraq pronto, which Republicans seized on as one more reason why Democrats were unpatriotic, which various pundits seized on as a chance to go on television and do some screaming.

Sometimes, in the DFAC, the soldiers would listen to the screaming and wonder how the people on those shows knew so much. Clearly, most of them had never been to Iraq, and even if they had, it was probably for what the soldiers dismissively referred to as the windshield tour: corkscrew in, hear from a general or two, get in a Humvee, see a market surrounded by new blast walls, get a commemorative coin, corkscrew out. And yet to listen to them was to listen to people who knew everything. They knew why the surge was working. They knew why the surge wasn’t working. They not only screamed, they screamed with certainty. “They should come to Rustamiyah,” more than one soldier said, certain of only one thing: that none of them would. No one came to Rustamiyah. But if they did, they could get in the lead Humvee. They could go out on Route Predators. They could go out on Berm Road. They could experience the full pucker. They could experience it the next day, too, and the day after that—and then maybe they could go back on TV and scream about how bewildering all of this really was. At least then they would be screaming the truth.

The soldiers would laugh about this, but after more than half a year here, one thing they had lost sight of was how different the Iraq War was in Iraq as opposed to in the United States. To them, it was about specific acts of bravery and tragedy. The firefight in Fedaliyah—that was the war. Three dead inside a fireball on Predators—what else could a war be?

But in the United States, where three dead on Predators might be mentioned briefly somewhere inside the daily paper under a heading such as
FALLEN HEROES
or
IN OTHER NEWS
, and the firefight in Fedaliyah wouldn’t be mentioned at all, it was about things more strategic, more political, more policy-driven, more useful in broad ways. Three dead? Yes, damn, how sad, and God bless the troops, and God bless the families, too, and this is exactly why we need to get out of Iraq, to honor the sacrifice, and this is precisely why we need to stay in Iraq, to honor the sacrifice, but you know what? Have you seen the numbers? Have you seen the metrics? Have you seen the trend lines?

“We’re kicking ass,” said President Bush.

“. . . it is unclear whether violence has been reduced,” said the GAO report.

A third assessment: “One boom and an entire fire team was gone” was what Kauzlarich said that very same day, but six days later, as Petra-eus made his first appearance on Capitol Hill, Kauzlarich’s was the one that mattered least of all to what was about to happen. It was footnote material. Soldiers such as Kauzlarich might be able to talk about the war as it was playing out in Iraq, but after crossing the Atlantic Ocean from one version of the war to the other, Petraeus had gone to Washington to testify about the war as it was playing out in Washington.

It was a distinction that Petraeus was well aware of. A West Pointer with a doctorate in international relations from Princeton University, he had ascended to the top ranks of the army on the strength of his intellect, and on his political skills as well. He knew how to analyze and prepare for just about any situation, and if he had any illusions about the political nature of this one, they were taken care of when he awakened on the morning of his first day of testimony to a full-page ad in
The New York Times
headlined
GENERAL PETRAEUS OR GENERAL BETRAY
us? The ad was taken out by a left-leaning political organization called MoveOn.org. It accused Petraeus of “cooking the books for the White House,” and went on to assert that “Every independent report on the ground situation in Iraq shows that the surge strategy has failed.”

And that was just the beginning. A few hours later, when Petraeus entered a U.S. House of Representatives hearing room, the scene was of Washington at its most starstruck. Could there have been more photographers surrounding someone walking into a congressional hearing? And when in this war had so many members of Congress shown up for a hearing? Typically a handful might make a brief appearance; for this—a joint hearing involving two committees—there were 112, each of whom would get five minutes to question Petraeus and Ryan C. Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. If everyone took his full five minutes, that was nine hours right there, and it didn’t include bathroom breaks and delays for protests, the first of which came right away, from several women who had waited in line since dawn for some of the twenty-three seats allotted to the public, all so they could immediately stand up and yell, “War criminal,” and get hauled off by the police.

“Out they go!” the Missouri Democrat who was running the hearing, Representative Ike Skelton, bellowed. “No disturbances will be tolerated.” And it went on from there, into opening statements, in which the chairman said to Petraeus, and live TV cameras, and that night’s newscasts, and the next morning’s newspapers: “In a poll of Iraqis released this morning, sponsored by ABC News, the BBC, and the Japanese broadcaster NHK, we learned that at least 65 percent of Iraqis say the surge is not working and 72 percent say the U.S. presence is making Iraqi security worse. This is troublesome . . . I hope, General Petraeus, and I hope, Ambassador Crocker, that you can persuade us that there is a substantial reason to believe that Iraq will turn around in the near future.”

He talked for a while, and then another Democrat talked for a while (“We need to get out of Iraq, for that country’s sake and for our own. It is time to go—and to go now”), and then a Republican talked for a while (“. . . and the idea that this Congress is going to arbitrarily overlay a requirement for a reduction in America’s forces when we are moving toward a maturing of the Iraqi forces and a successful hand-off, which will be a victory for the United States, I think should not be supported by this body”), and then another Republican talked for a while (“I am distressed by the accusations leveled by some in the media and by some members of Congress during hearings like these, calling into question the integrity of our military, accusing the military of cherry-picking positive numbers to reflect a dramatic decline in sectarian violence”), and forty-five minutes into the hearing, Petraeus still hadn’t said a word.

Not that his testimony was going to be a surprise. There’d been hints and leaks for weeks that he would say the early signs were good, but that more time, and money, were needed. As he had written in a letter to the troops that had been leaked three days before, “We are, in short, a long way from the goal line, but we do have the ball and we are driving down the field.” He was going to be specific. He was going to be pragmatic. He was going to use graphs and charts about attack trends, and none of them would be depicting his bad-news vessel, not on this day. Washington wasn’t that kind of crowd.

Still, when the committee chairman announced, “General David Petraeus, the floor is yours,” there was so much anticipation in the room that even the remaining protesters in their
GENERALS LIE, SOLDIERS DIE
T-shirts were absolutely silent in their seats.

Petraeus began speaking. But there was a problem. His mouth was moving, but no one could hear what he was saying.

“We will have to ask you to stand a bit closer to the microphone, because the acoustics in here are not—well, not good at all,” the committee chairman said.

Petraeus moved closer to the microphone and began again.

Again, nothing.

“Would somebody please fix the microphone?” the chairman said.

Hours later, the microphone fixed, the sun setting, the last of the protesters hauled away, the questioners pretty much repeating questions and Petraeus wearily repeating answers and gobbling down Motrins on breaks, because sitting still and straight for so long had become painful, the hearing came to an end.

The next day, though, on September 11, after a moment of silence for the victims of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Petraeus was at it again, this time before the Senate. There were two hearings that day, and the buzz was about how the various senators who had announced they were running for president would do when their turn came to question Petraeus. Would Hillary Clinton use the occasion to explain why she had initially been in favor of the war? Would Barack Obama use it to remind people he’d been adamantly against it? What about Joe Biden, what would he say? And what about John McCain?

Such were the interests in Washington this day about the war. They were political interests. And yet every so often the war as the 2-16 saw it would make an appearance.

“Let’s just put on the table as honestly as we can what lies ahead for the American people and U.S. military if we continue to stay in Iraq,” Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina who had been one of the most consistent supporters of the surge, said to Petraeus at one point. “Now, I know you’re not—you can’t predict with certainty the numbers we’re going to have, but can you agree with this statement, General Petraeus, ‘It’s highly likely that a year from now we’re going to have at least 100,000 troops in Iraq’?”

“That is probably the case, yes, sir,” Petraeus said.

“Okay,” Graham said. “How many people have we been losing a month, on average, since the surge began, in terms of killed in action?”

“Killed in action is probably in the neighborhood of sixty to ninety,” Petraeus said. “Probably on average, eighty to ninety, average, killed in action. That does not include the nineteen soldiers, for example, tragically killed last month in that helicopter crash.”

“But here’s what lies ahead for the American military,” Graham said. “If we stay in Iraq and continue to support the surge through July, we’re going to lose somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty military members, most likely hundreds more.”

“Yes, sir,” Petraeus said.

“We’re spending $9 billion a month to stay in Iraq, of U.S. dollars,” Graham continued. “My question for you: Is it worth it to us?”

“Well, the national interests that we have in Iraq are substantial,” Petraeus said. “An Iraq that is stable and secure, that is not an al Qaeda sanctuary, is not in the grip of Iranian-supported Shi’a militia, that is not a bigger humanitarian disaster, that is connected to the global economy, all of these are very important national interests.”