The Good Soldiers (29 page)

No response.

“We’re doing good. We’re winning,” he said, and soon after that, after listening to Meaghun talk about Duncan’s upcoming twentieth birthday and their plans to someday live in Italy, and then listening as she suctioned saliva out of his mouth, he left, promising to be back.

The following day, January 18, Kauzlarich saw the rest of his soldiers, including the one who had told Nate Showman that Kauzlarich was the motherfucker he never wanted to see again.

In fact, several soldiers had been talking among themselves about snubbing Kauzlarich during his visit because of how angry they were. But in the end, they all showed up to see him, and as they rolled toward him in wheelchairs, and walked toward him on artificial limbs, and sat with him at a long table in the hospital cafeteria for lunch, they were a remarkable portrait of how much violence the 2-16 had been through so far.

Joe Mixson was here—he was the fifth soldier in the Humvee on September 4, and now he was trying to adjust to life with two legs amputated above the knee.

Michael Fradera was here—he had lost both of his legs below the knee in August.

Joshua Atchley was here—he was the one who in June had screamed to Sergeant Gietz, “They got my fucking eye.”

John Kirby was here—he had been sitting next to Cajimat way back in April when Cajimat died, and in May had taken a bullet in an arm.

And around the table it went—a lost foot (he
gave
his foot), shrapnel in the groin (he
gave
his groin), another lost foot—until the far corner, where a soldier with an asymmetrical head sat cockeyed and silent in a wheelchair. It was Sergeant Emory. Nine months after being shot in the back of the head, he was here at BAMC. Kauzlarich had seen him earlier, unexpectedly, during one of the tours he was being given of a facility where soldiers there for the long haul could stay with their family. “I love you, Sergeant Emory,” he’d said in a quick conversation and promised that after lunch he would tell him the details of that day in Kamaliyah. And so here Emory was, his right leg shaking as if from tremors, waiting to at last find out what had happened on the roof.

Emory’s leg shook, Andrew Looney chewed on his fingers, Kirby still had nervous eyes. Leland Thompson showed up wearing his Combat Infantryman Badge, which all of them had been awarded for being under fire, and Atchley showed up wearing a fake eye that had been designed to look not like a normal eye but like crosshairs through a rifle scope. In every case, they were not the soldiers they had been as they left Fort Riley, but Kauzlarich didn’t have to be told who any of them were. He recognized every one of them immediately. Part of command is to know a soldier only well enough to send him into battle, but once an injury occurred, that soldier became to Kauzlarich unforgettable. He knew the names, the injuries, the dates. He knew the sounds some of them had made in the aid station and the absolute silence of others. He knew their blood and their insides and what their eyes were doing as they became imprinted in his mind. When they died, he knew the voices of their wives and mothers and fathers when he telephoned them and said words such as
instantly.
Every bit of their damage had become part of him, as clear in his mind as the spoke-and-wheel chart he had shown to General Petra-eus, but this was a chart of a different sort, not a tactical one of “Our Fight,” but of his very own war. He had come to realize that long after Iraq was over and forgotten, this was the war he would be left with, and now, adding new spokes and wheels, he looked around the table.

“It’s Wacky World,” he said with tenderness.

He turned to Kirby and asked how he was, and to answer, Kirby removed the brace on his arm and demonstrated how floppy and useless his hand was. “After we eat, I’ll show off my scars,” he said.

He turned to Joshua Wold. “What’d they do?They ended up amputating half of it?”

“Yes, sir,” Wold said.

“So you have a club foot now?”

“Yes, sir.”

He turned to Fradera. “Have you walked on your hands yet?”

“Many times,” Fradera said. “I tried doing it to get to the toilet a couple of times.”

“Yeah?” Kauzlarich said.

“Not a good idea,” Fradera said.

“Not a good idea.” Kauzlarich laughed.

“It’s crazy when you see fellow amputees, like, doing push-ups,” Loo-ney said.

“Yeah, they do push-ups; their whole body is elevated in the air,” Fradera said. “It’s easier for guys that have above-the-knee to do it.”

“I can’t do it,” Mixson said.

“Give it time,” Fradera said. “How long you been here?”

“Since September,” Mixson said.

“September. Give it time. You’ll be able to do it, man,” Fradera said.

Even though all the soldiers lived at BAMC now, they didn’t see one another that often, not all at once like this. Rehabilitation was mostly a private affair, and as they continued to talk, catching up and comparing injuries, no one seemed angry or embittered in the least. Away from here, it was different, though. In Atchley’s room, for instance, was a specimen cup with a growing pile of shrapnel in it, some plastic, some copper, and all pulled out of Atchley by Atchley himself. The doctors seemed not to want to go after the pieces still inside of him, and so every so often he would stand in his bathroom, where the light was the brightest, take out a knife and tweezers, and start cutting, digging, and pulling. He still had a lot of shrapnel in his right arm and leg, and in his left hand, too, he had just discovered, because the most recent thing he pulled out was a piece of copper from the webbing between two fingers. “Once you get started, it doesn’t hurt,” he insisted, but even if it did, he would have done it regardless. “I take it out because I don’t want a dirty piece of Iraqi anything in me,” he said, and in that attitude was also the explanation for why he wore short-sleeve shirts even though his right arm was terribly scarred: “I want people to know the price of war.” And what he thought of the war: “It’s bullshit. This war is complete bullshit.” And why he wore a fake eye with a crosshair pattern: “Because I don’t like pretending I have an eye.”

In the cafeteria, though, there was no such edginess. Instead, very seriously, Atchley told Kauzlarich that he had a total of four fake eyes— two that looked like regular eyes, one that glowed in the dark, and the one he was wearing. He reached up. He popped it out. He held it out toward Kauzlarich, and everyone at the table started to laugh.

“Put that back in!” Kauzlarich said, laughing, too, and then he decided to give a short speech, the type that soldiers would sometimes make fun of when they talked about him in his absence. Not this time, though. This time they soaked up every word.

“Everything that you guys have done will not be in vain. That’s my sole purpose in life—fighting and winning. But each of you, your sole mission in life is to get better,” he said. “The bottom line is I’m on your team, and I always will be. We are a family. You fought for me; I’ll fight for you the rest of my life. Okay? Is that a deal?”

They nodded.

“Anybody want to come back with me on Sunday?” he asked.

Wold raised his hand.

Mixson, with his two above-the-knees, did, too. “I would go back. I would. Dead serious. I would,” he said.

Kauzlarich got up and thanked them one by one. “It’s all good,” he said when he was finished going around the table, and then, keeping his promise, he went off with Sergeant Emory and his wife, Maria, to tell them everything he knew about what had happened in Kamaliyah, from the moment of the gunshot, in as much detail as they wanted to hear.

“You guys were on top of a roof,” he began.

“I don’t know if it makes you feel any better,” he said when he was done.

Maria Emory, crying, shook her head.

“It changed our lives forever,” she said.

“It’s changing everybody’s life forever. That’s what this war is doing to us,” Kauzlarich said, and as he continued to talk about how that day was the day that people in Kamaliyah found hope, Maria Emory was floating backward, having another moment like the one she’d had when she met President Bush.

She wondered: Should she tell him what
she
knew?

How depressed her husband was?

That one day he had tipped himself over onto a hard tile floor, telling her when she found him that he’d wanted to hit his head and die?

That another day he had begged her to get him a knife?

That another day he had asked for a pen so he could push it into his neck?

That another day, instead of asking for a knife or a pen, he’d tried to bite through his wrists?

She kept crying as her husband said something now to Kauzlarich. His voice was soft and still a little slurry.

“What?” Kauzlarich said, unable to make out the words.

“Have a good trip back,” Emory repeated.

“These guys got me all fucking motivated,” Kauzlarich said once he was outside. He meant Emory. He meant Mixson and Atchley. He meant every one of them, including Duncan Crookston, whom he had seen again just before lunch.

By the time he walked into Crookston’s room for the second visit, Lee and Meaghun Crookston were deep into their daily routine. Lee was usually the first awake, and once the realization seeped in that she was still at BAMC rather than home in Denver with her husband and five other sons, she was out of bed, on her way to the hospital, and moving through the lobby past the portrait she saw every morning of a smiling George W. Bush in front of an American flag.

Duncan had a flag portrait, too, of course; every one of the soldiers did. Some had been taken at Fort Riley and some at Rustamiyah, but the process was always the same: someone would attach a flag to a wall for a backdrop, and one by one, soldiers would stand in front of it while another soldier snapped away with whatever digital camera was handy. None of them had any illusions about what the portrait was for. “I don’t plan on dying, so you don’t need a picture of me,” one soldier protested during one of the sessions. “I’m already dead, so what does it matter what I look like?” another said, laughing and making faces.

Unlike that soldier, or Bush, for that matter, Duncan was solemn in his photograph. He took his place in front of the flag and stared straight into the camera. He had a good, straight nose, ears that slightly protruded, freshly cut hair, and a mouth that closed into a tight, serious expression. He was a handsome young man with a delicateness to some of his features that came directly from Lee, which Kauzlarich had noticed the day before, when he was standing next to Duncan’s bed. “Looks like his mom,” he had said, and it was true. Duncan was very much his mother’s son.

Up the elevator now to the burn unit, and Lee was ready for her 134th day at her son’s side. “I’m here, and I’m going to be here,” she had promised Duncan when she first saw him on September 6. She had said it aloud, even though Duncan was sedated and couldn’t hear, and when Meaghun made a similar promise, Lee worried about the life that this nineteen-year-old woman was promising herself to. Meaghun wasn’t a middle-aged mother, after all, but a girlfriend who had married her boyfriend ten and a half months before because the boyfriend realized he was about to go to Iraq. One day he mentioned it, and the very next day they were married and going to Red Lobster to celebrate, and then he was deploying, and then it was September 4 and her phone was ringing, and then she was making a promise into her husband’s blackened ears. “I’m here, and I love you, and I’m in for the long haul,” she had declared, and the single time she had wavered since then was when she said to Lee one day, sounding defeated, “How do you decide when to freak out?”

“Not until they come to me and tell me there’s nothing else they can try,” Lee answered.

So it was the two of them, the mother and the wife. Over the months, other family members had come to BAMC as they were able to, but Lee and Meaghun had been the ones to stay. Every day they tended to Duncan, and at night they called home with updates, which Meaghun’s parents would occasionally post on a website for a small circle of people who had become interested in Duncan’s progress—family, friends, friends of friends, even a kids’ football team in Colorado that had heard about Duncan and decided to dedicate their season to him. They played wearing his name on their helmets. They took a photograph of themselves that maybe he would see one day in which they were all yelling, “Freedom!” as the shutter snapped. That picture was posted, too, and to see it was to think of how the war really had come to stitch the nation together, that from coast to coast and border to border there were thirty thousand knots of people screaming “freedom” into a camera because they knew somebody, or knew somebody who knew somebody, who had been injured in Iraq.

September 19: “Dear Family & Friends,” Meaghun’s parents wrote, “our soldier is losing the battle. Infection has set in throughout his body and spreading.”

October 11: “Duncan was in surgery yesterday and the doctor has given us FABULOUS news. The mucor infection which set in last month and was eventually going to take his life is now ‘OUT OF THE PICTURE,’ says the doctor,” they wrote. “Of all the patients Dr. White has seen, there was only one other soldier to survive this type of infection. We can now say Duncan is no. 2!”

November 5: “Duncan is amazing, amazing, amazing. He is what you define a true soldier.”

December 10: “Please please please pray for Duncan. He took a turn for the worst last night . . .”

“Ups and downs,” was how Duncan’s days were described, and so they went, from the best day, in early October, when he first spoke, to the worst day, December 10, when as Lee described it, “It was the closest he came to dying in front of us.” The night before his blood pressure had dropped, and when Lee and Meaghun were called to his room early the next morning, his organs had begun shutting down and he was unconscious and in septic shock. Meaghun, seeing this, became so nauseated she nearly passed out, and Lee began to cry because the moment of no options seemed to be at hand. Then some doctor came up with an antibiotic that might save him from infection, but might also thin his blood to the point where he would develop brain bleeds and die. “Okay, if we don’t give him the drug, does he have any chance of survival?” Lee asked. “No,” the doctor answered, and so they gave him the drug, and he didn’t die, and that was the thing about Duncan, Lee said now: he kept finding ways not to die.