The Good Soldiers (3 page)

“Now, it’s not a game, guys,” he said. “You are going to see some horrific things in the next year. You are going to see some things you are not going to understand . . . It’s down to nut-cutting time, and we’re going to get some, but we’re going to do it in a disciplined manner, like we do everything . . . I am absolutely confident in your abilities, absolutely confident . . . The bottom line is this weekend’s your last, okay? So call your parents, love your families, stay focused on them for this weekend. Not later than Tuesday night, as soon as you get on that airplane and that airplane takes off, your sole focus is going to be winning our nation’s war.”

There was a pause, just long enough for the word
war
to finish echoing, and then the soldiers began to cheer, lustily and for a long while, after which they headed inside, filling the room with the wintry smell of boys who have been out in the snow.

One day until departure:

In the Kauzlarich house, the children were running around with stuffed animals purchased over the weekend, each with a memory chip containing a quick-recorded message from their father for them to play over the coming year. “Hi Jacob. I love you.” “Hi Garrett. I sure do love you.” “I love you, Allie-gator.” Allie was seven-year-old Alexandria Taylor Kauzlarich, a name chosen because the initials were ATK, which reminded her father of the word
attack.
The oldest of the three children, she was also the most sensitive to what was at hand. “I don’t want you to leave,” she said at one point, and when her father told her, “I’ll be okay, and if I’m not okay, you’ll be okay, because I’ll be checking on you,” she said, “Then I’ll kill myself so I can be with you.” She climbed onto his lap, and meanwhile, Jacob, five, and Garrett, three, both too young for such sensitivities, continued to run around the house clobbering each other with their stuffed animals, while Stephanie had her own images to contend with. “Gray. Dismal. A very sad place to live,” is how she envisioned the place her husband was going. She had done her time in the army after graduating from West Point and had learned to guard against too much sentimentality, but now came a new image, that of a freshly dead soldier. Meanwhile, Kauzlarich looked at his family and, giving into that sentimentality a bit, said, “I mean, this is a very complex war. The end state, in my opinion, the end state in Iraq would be that Iraqi children can go out on a soccer field and play safely. Parents can let their kids go out and play, and they don’t have a concern in the world. Just like us. Being able to go out and do what we want to do and not being concerned about being kidnapped, accosted, whatnot. I mean, that’s the way the whole world should be. Is that possible?”

Departure day:

The soldiers were due in the battalion parking lot at 1:00 p.m., and by 12:42 the first hug between a soldier and his family was under way, a tangle of moving arms that was still going strong at 12:43. By 12:45, tears had begun in several places, including inside a car where a woman sat motionless against the door, head in her hands, while outside the car a soldier leaned against the trunk and smoked; and so it continued as the afternoon progressed.

The soldiers smoked cigarettes. They lined up their body armor. They signed out their weapons from lockup. They waited with wives, girlfriends, children, parents, and grandparents, and constantly checked their watches. One soldier couldn’t stop kissing a young woman who was up on her tiptoes, while Gietz told his platoon to start wrapping up the goodbyes already, while another soldier loaded his parents’ car with the things he wouldn’t be taking, including a pair of cowboy boots whose top halves had been dyed a beautiful blue. Midafternoon now, and Kauzlarich arrived with Stephanie and the children. “This day sucks,” he said, and when Allie started to cry, that only made things seem worse. He said goodbye to his family in his office. He said goodbye again when he put them in the car. He said goodbye again when they didn’t leave right away, just stayed in the car, and then he went back into his office and into the final hours.

Family photo: packed. Extra tourniquet: packed. Extra compression bandage: packed. He looked out the window. The family car was gone. He turned out the lights, shut the door, went outside, and made his way with his soldiers to a nearby gymnasium to wait for buses that would carry them to the airfield.

Nighttime now.

Here came the buses.

The soldiers stood and moved forward, and Kauzlarich clapped their backs as they funneled by.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Yessir.”

“Good?”

“Yessir.”

“Ready to be a hero?”

“Yessir.”

Out they went, one after another, until there was only one soldier left for Kauzlarich to speak with. “Are we ready for war?” he asked himself, and out he went, too.

A bus to a plane. A plane to another plane. Another plane after that to some helicopters, and at last they arrived at the place where they were to spend the next year, which wasn’t the Green Zone, with its paved roads and diplomats and palaces, and wasn’t one of the big army bases that members of Congress would corkscrew into just long enough to marvel at the Taco Bell before corkscrewing out. It was the place Congress and Taco Bell never got to, a compact forward operating base called FOB Rustamiyah, which some of the soldiers first got a sense of back in the United States by looking at maps. There was Iraq. There was Baghdad. There, marking the eastern edge of Baghdad, was the Diyala River. And there, next to a raggedy U-turn in the river, which to laughing nineteen-year-olds looked like something dangling from the rear end of a dog, was their new home.

Now that they had arrived, jamming in among 1,500 other soldiers from several other battalions, the descriptions would only get worse. Everything in Rustamiyah was the color of dirt, and stank. If the wind came from the east, the smell was of raw sewage, and if the wind came from the west, the smell was of burning trash. In Rustamiyah, the wind never came from the north or the south.

They began learning this as soon as they landed. The air caught in their throats. Dirt and dust coated them right away. Because they arrived in the dead of night they couldn’t see very much, but soon after sunrise, a few soldiers climbed a guard tower, peeked through the camouflage tarp, and were startled to see a vast landscape of trash, much of it on fire. One thing they had been told before they arrived was that the biggest threat in their part of Baghdad would be from homemade roadside bombs, which were referred to as improvised explosive devices or, more simply, IEDs. They had also been told that IEDs were often hidden in piles of trash. At the time it didn’t overly worry them, but now, as they looked out from the guard tower at acres of trash blowing across dirt fields and ashes from burned trash rising in smoke columns, it did.

“We ain’t ever gonna be able to find an IED in all this shit,” a soldier named Jay March said. Twenty years old and eager to fight, he could have been any soldier in the battalion. He said this quietly, and he said it nervously, too.

Several days later, their nervousness deepening, the entire battalion was ordered to gather before sunrise for its first operation: a day-long walk through the sixteen-square-mile area of operations they’d been assigned to bring under control. It was Kauzlarich’s idea. He’d wanted a dramatic way to announce to eastern Baghdad that the 2-16 had arrived, and he’d also wanted a dramatic way to get his soldiers off of the FOB and into their area of operation, or AO, so they would realize that they had nothing to fear. “To pop everybody’s cherry,” as he put it.

“Operation Ranger Dominance” was the name he chose for the walk. “The Kauzlarich Death March” was what his soldiers were calling it.

“Hey, Two-sixteen,” a soldier from a different battalion on the FOB scrawled on their bathroom wall the day before the operation. “Good luck on your Ranger Dumbass walk tomorrow.”

In full body armor, they assembled at 5:00 a.m. near the FOB’s main gate. Humvees would be interspersed here and there in case a soldier needed to be evacuated, but the point of the operation was to walk, to see and to be seen in some of Baghdad’s most hostile neighborhoods, and so the soldiers made sure their ceramic plates were perfectly in place. They put on Kevlar helmets, bullet-resistant glasses, and heat-resistant gloves. They strapped on knee pads and elbow pads in case they had to hit the dirt. Each soldier packed a tourniquet in one pants pocket and first-aid bandages in another pocket, and grenades and 240 rounds of ammunition in pouches attached to their body armor. All carried an M-4 assault rifle, some carried full machine guns, some carried nine-millimeter handguns, some carried good-luck charms, and all were carrying at least sixty extra pounds of weaponry and bulletproofing as they walked out of the FOB to make their first impression on 350,000 people who surely were just waiting to blow the dumbasses up.

As they walked out of the gate, some of the soldiers were visibly shaking. Step by step, however, as they passed people who regarded them quietly, they began to relax, and by the time they got back to the FOB ten hours later, just as Kauzlarich had intended, they felt, if not fearless, then at least a little smarter about things. One platoon had found an unex-ploded mortar shell sticking out of the ground, with Iranian markings on the fins. A lesson, perhaps, in who they would be fighting.

Another platoon had been approached by a frantic woman carrying something bundled in a blanket, and when she didn’t halt, they could have been forgiven for assuming she was a suicide bomber. But now, as she reached them, they saw that she was holding a badly burned little boy with open eyes and blistering skin, and as they knelt to wrap him in clean bandages, the mother they might have shot was instead thanking them in tears.

A lesson, then, in restraint.

And a third platoon got a lesson in stupidity and luck after a soldier said that a piece of foam block on the side of a street looked weird to him, a second soldier went over and gave it a nudge with his foot, and a third picked it up to have a look and saw a hole with wiring inside. Back on the FOB now, astonished, relieved, knowing that it had been an IED packed with nuts and bolts, they still couldn’t believe it hadn’t exploded.

But it hadn’t, and as the first weeks of the deployment went by, that bit of good fortune seemed to set the pattern for them.

They were finding stockpiles of weapons before the weapons could be used against them. They were getting shot at but not hit. Training and standards, Kauzlarich said—that was the difference. Other battalions were getting rocked by IEDs, but not them, and Kauzlarich kept saying, “It’s all good,” and that’s who they had become as March moved into April. They were the good soldiers.

On the FOB, they were the only ones who wore gloves as they walked around, always ready for the just-in-case, and whenever a convoy rolled out of the wire, as one did now on April 6, at ten minutes past midnight, the soldiers always drove slower than fifteen miles per hour, because slower improved the chances of finding an IED. Other soldiers in other battalions who had been around longer sped; but not them. They crept along encased in the very best body armor, eye protection, ear protection, throat protection, groin protection, knee protection, elbow protection, and hand protection available, as well as in the very best Humvees the army had ever built, with armoring so thick that each door weighed more than four hundred pounds.

Slowly, deliberately, they rolled into a neighborhood called Mualameen. They passed darkened apartment buildings. They passed the silhouette of a mosque. They drove with headlights off and night-vision goggles on, which at 12:35 a.m. flared into sudden blindness.

Here came the explosion. It came through the doors. It came through the body armor. It came through the good soldiers. It was perfectly aimed and perfectly timed, and now one of the good soldiers was on fire.

This was Cajimat, who in February had been gung ho to go, who in March had already seen enough to write in an online posting: “I just need some time to think this through,” and who in April was driving the third Hum-vee in a convoy of six, which was the one chosen by someone hiding in some shadow with a trigger in his hand.

A wire ran from the trigger to another shadow, this one at the edge of the road. Almost certainly the man couldn’t see the actual IED, but he’d lined it up beforehand with a tall, tilting, broken, otherwise useless light pole on the far side of the road, which he could use as an aiming point. The first Humvee arrived at the aiming point, and, for whatever reason, the man didn’t push the trigger. The second Humvee arrived, and again he didn’t push. The third Humvee arrived, and, for whatever reason, now he did push, and the resulting explosion sent several large steel discs toward the Humvee at such high velocity that by the time they reached Cajimat’s door, they had been reshaped into unstoppable, semi-molten slugs. At most, the IED cost $100 to make, and against it the $150,000 Humvee might as well have been constructed of lace.

In went the slugs through the armor and into the crew compartment, turning everything in their paths into flying pieces of shrapnel. There were five soldiers inside. Four managed to get out and tumble, bleeding, to the ground, but Cajimat remained in his seat as the Humvee, on fire now, rolled forward, picked up speed, and crashed into an ambulance that had been stopped by the convoy. The ambulance burst into flames as well. After that, a thousand or so rounds of ammunition inside the Humvee began cooking off and exploding, and by the time the Humvee was transported back to Rustamiyah toward sunrise, there wasn’t much left to see. As the battalion doctor noted on Cajimat’s death report: “Severely burned,” and then added: “(beyond recognition).”

Nonetheless, there were procedures to follow in such circumstances, and Kauzlarich now got to learn precisely what those involved.

They began when the Humvee was unloaded at Vehicle Sanitization, a tarped-off area with decent drainage just inside a side gate. There, hidden from view, photographs were taken of the damage, the holes in the door were measured and analyzed, and soldiers did their best to disinfect what was left of the Humvee with bottles of peroxide and Simple Green. “I mean, it’s clean. It’s cleaner than when it comes off the assembly line,” the officer in charge told Kauzlarich of what his soldiers usually accomplished—but in this case, he said, “You’re more consolidating it and getting it ready for shipment, because you can’t really clean that.”