The Good Soldiers (30 page)

Some of Duncan’s fellow soldiers following the updates in Iraq wondered if it would have been better if he had died right away. As Michael Anderson had said after visiting him, “All he’s going to be able to do is be left with his thoughts. He’s laying on that bed, not being able to do anything.”

But Lee said that anyone who thought that Duncan would be better off dead was someone who hadn’t been with Duncan every day, as she and Meaghun had been. “Those people haven’t seen this place and what can be done. We have,” she said, and because of that it wasn’t difficult for her to imagine Duncan’s future.

First he would get an artificial left hand and learn to use it.

Then his legs.

Then his right arm.

Then, with rehabilitation, he would become the soldier moving slowly down the hallway as people whispered, “He’s a real success story.”

And then, maybe in five years, or ten, if it took ten, he would be the husband living with his wife in Italy, or Denver, or wherever they decided to settle to raise a family.

“So there’s hope there,” Lee said, and got busy with another day.

She put on her protective clothing. She turned on the TV and read to Duncan from the news crawl. She told him what the weather was like in Denver. She read to him from a book written by a concentration camp survivor, called
Man’s Search for Meaning.
Meaghun came in and read to Duncan, too, and then she and Lee talked about what to get him for his twentieth birthday, which was eight days away, and then Kauzlarich arrived.

He had come back to award Duncan some medals, and as he moved toward the bed, Lee called out, “Are you awake? Duncan? Can you hear us? Duncan, can you hear us?” She turned to Kauzlarich. “He’s still a little bit—”

“Yeah,” Kauzlarich said. At the side of the bed now, he looked down at Duncan, who looked exactly as he had the day before. Unmoving. Unreal. “What’s up, Ranger buddy?” he said. “Good morning. Well, I guess it’s afternoon right now, isn’t it?”

Just like the day before, there was no response, but Kauzlarich went ahead anyway, holding up one of the medals in front of Duncan’s goggle-covered eyes. “Hey, Duncan, what I have right here is what every infantryman wants. The Combat Infantryman Badge. Right? You can see it right here. That’s yours. When you get out of here, you can put it on your ACUs. All right?”

He moved the medal closer to the goggles, but the eyes behind them didn’t seem focused on the medal, or Kauzlarich, or anything at all.

“It says here the reason: ‘For participating in ground combat operations, under enemy hostile fire, to liberate Iraq, in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom,’” Kauzlarich continued, reading the citation. “And like we talked about yesterday, it was your efforts that have allowed Task Force Ranger to do what we do, and we are winning right now. And you’re inspiring us every day to do what we do, so your injuries weren’t in vain.”

Now he held up a second medal.

“The other thing I want to give you is the Army Commendation Medal. And you know what that looks like. Right there. That’s one award that you’ll receive. You’ll also receive the Overseas Service Ribbon and the Iraqi Campaign Medal. So you’ve got a whole row, actually you got two rows now, of medals for your Class As. So just a small thing that we can do for you today, in front of your family, is to award these to you. And I will give them to Meaghun, and your mother, Lee, and we will take pictures of these for you so that when you’re in a little better shape you’ll be able to take a look and watch and see this. All right?”

No movement. Nothing, other than eyes looking through droplets of water.

“I appreciate everything you do, brother,” Kauzlarich continued. “And you’re always in our prayers and in our thoughts. But today I’ll go down and see Joe Mixson, who was with you that day, and all the other thirteen guys who are currently at BAMC. It’ll be good to get you out of here so you guys can all work together to get healthy, because that’s your number one mission right now. It’s to get healthy. Okay? And that’s a direct order from me, your commander. Are you with me?”

And was that a nod?

“Hooah,” Kauzlarich said.

It was. Duncan was nodding.

“Hooah!” Kauzlarich said again.

He was nodding and seemed now to be looking directly at Kauzlarich.

Lee was right. He
could
move. He
could
hear. He
did
understand.

“All
right,
brother,” Kauzlarich said. “It’s good to see you.You’re looking good. You’re getting better every day. So keep doing what you’re doing. You’re always in my prayers, big guy. Hooah?”

Another nod.

So he was aware of everything.

Kauzlarich turned away for a moment to hand the medals to Lee and Meaghun.

“Thank you,” Meaghun said.

“My honor,” he said, and then he turned back to Duncan and reached toward him, searching for a place to touch.

He rested his hand on his side, but only for a moment, and then he lifted his hand, and then left the room, and then left the hospital, and then went to the airport, and then flew back to Iraq, and a week later, on January 25, was in his office in Rustamiyah, back once again on the front lines of a place where an Iraqi mother wants the same thing for her children that an American mother wants, a chance for that child to grow up in peace and to realize dreams, when an e-mail arrived from Lee.

“Dear Friends and Family,” it began.

“It is with great sadness I write to you today—Duncan passed away at 3:46 p.m. today after the decision was made to stop heroic measures. Duncan developed another infection over the past two days, the effects of which were causing him a great deal of pain and causing him to run a fever of 108° F overnight. The doctor who treated Duncan said he had never heard of anyone surviving such a high fever, and that normally the body did not allow itself to sustain such a high temperature for even 15 minutes, let alone the two hours Duncan suffered with it. The doctor said it was an indication the hypothalamus of the brain, which regulates body temperature, was damaged.

“He also advised us that even though Duncan survived, he would have permanent and widespread brain damage that would eventually cause his organ systems to fail, and that his kidneys were already dialysis dependent, and he was quickly becoming ventilator dependent. Meaghun and I were asked to make a decision, and we chose to allow Duncan to die a dignified and peaceful death, so he was given a morphine drip and taken off the ventilator. He died about 45 minutes later surrounded by his beautiful wife, his mother, his battle buddy Joe Mixson and the hospital chaplain he had come to know during his stay. It is the closest thing to a ‘good death’ one could ask for a young man who fought so hard and long, only to have the limits of his body betray him. Once we knew there was no chance of any sort of quality of life, we felt we could not ask this brave young man who lived life to its fullest to spend his remaining days hooked to machines with no chance of recovery.

“Words cannot express the gratitude we feel towards all those who offered support and prayer to Duncan and our families during the past five months. We can take away from this experience the knowledge that good people exist in this world, that evil is worth fighting for that reason, and that Duncan was a proud example of a good person who did not stand by and allow it to flourish by doing nothing. Duncan would have been twenty years old tomorrow—he will be forever nineteen now, and forever missed.

“Love, Lee Crookston.”

Twelve dead now.

“Damn,” Kauzlarich said.

Just under three months left to go.

11

FEBRUARY 27, 2008

So I had a choice to make. Do I suffer the consequences of defeat by withdrawing
our troops, or do I listen to my commanders, the considered judgment of military
experts, and do what it takes to secure victory in Iraq? I chose the latter. Rather than
retreating, we sent 30,000 new troops into Iraq, and the surge is succeeding.
—
GEORGE W. BUSH
,
February 25, 2008

I
n January 2007, when the surge was being announced, 83 American troops died in Iraq. In January 2008, the number was 40.

In January 2007, 647 troops were wounded. In January 2008, the number was 234.

In January 2007, troops were attacked 5,000 times. In January 2008, the number was 2,000.

In January 2007, the number of Iraqi civilians who died was estimated at a minimum of 2,800. In January 2008, the number was a minimum of 750.

In January 2007, some 90,000 Iraqis fled their homes for Syria, Jordan, or other parts of Iraq, joining four million others who had already done so. In January 2008, with the total now approaching five million, the number leaving their homes was 10,000.

“. . . and the surge is succeeding,” George W. Bush said after a month in which 40 American troops died, 234 were injured, troops were attacked 2,000 times, and at least 750 Iraqis died and 10,000 fled their homes, and meanwhile, at Rustamiyah, where things had been quieter lately, soldiers had been thinking the very same thing as Bush, right up until 5:45 p.m., on February 19, when the second lob bomb attack began.

Jay March

“You guys getting hit?” It was another FOB, calling in to the 2-16 operations center.

“Yeah,” said the sergeant who’d grabbed the phone.

“Can you tell us anything about it?”

“Yeah. It sucks,” the sergeant said, and slammed down the phone as another explosion shook the walls.

Fifteen soldiers crowded into the room. Some worked the phones and radios, and the rest stood against the back wall, hoping it was thick enough to stop hurtling pieces of shrapnel and ball bearings.

A captain came running in. He had been over by the motor pool, where a dozen vehicles were now on fire. One was a fuel tanker that had been pierced by shrapnel and was leaking. Burning fuel was everywhere. The captain said he had ducked into a darkened storage shed and discovered three private contractors who worked on the FOB. One had a bloody leg, the second had lost his right arm, and the third was missing the back of his head and was dead. “Nothing we could do,” he said.

Here came another explosion. There had been eight so far.

“Wham!” a soldier said, imitating the sound and laughing nervously.

“Whoosh . . . BOOM!” another soldier said, laughing, too.

Another explosion. Because of weather conditions, no helicopters were flying, which meant no Hellfire missiles. This was going to go on for a while, and there was nothing to do but wait for the next one. Reports came in of barracks that had collapsed, of a breach in the wall surrounding the FOB, of a second attack a few miles to the north and twenty dead Iraqi National Police who’d been trying to defuse a booby-trapped truck. Now Brent Cummings ran in; he’d been at the motor pool, too, taking cover underneath a truck, his face pressed into gravel, the taste of the dust in his mouth, the shudders of the concussions moving through him, until he saw and smelled the burning fuel headed right at him, at which point he ran. “Good thing we’re winning,” he said, out of breath. Now some of the soldiers slid down the back wall and compressed themselves into tight balls. “No matter how many times it happens, it’s scary,” one said. The others looked at him. No one was supposed to say such a thing, even if every single one of them was thinking it.

“It’s scary,” he repeated.

Everyone looked away, quiet now.

“I don’t like it at all,” he said, and he didn’t say much more until the all-clear sounded several hours later, after which the bomb shelters emptied, the fires burned themselves out, the damaged buildings were patched up, some slightly injured soldiers were treated at the aid station, the badly injured contractors were choppered to hospitals, the dead contractor was bagged for shipping home, and soldiers gradually went back to thinking that George W. Bush was right.

In January 2008, 40 U.S. troops died in Iraq; in February 2008, the number was 29.