The Good Soldiers (31 page)

In January 2008, 234 troops were wounded; in February 2008, the number was 216.

“Sir, would you please tell us a little bit about your current operations?” Mohammed said in Arabic to Izzy, who translated it into English for Kauzlarich, on PEACE 106 FM.

“Security throughout Iraq, and in particular Baghdad, is the best it has ever been since the fall of Saddam Hussein,” Kauzlarich said.

In fact, after the lob bomb attack, things were so quiet as the end of February approached that the battalion went ahead with a contest it did sometimes to choose a soldier of the month.

Thirty soldiers were selected to compete against one another. One at a time, they would appear before a panel of sergeants who would ask a series of questions about anything they felt like asking. Weapons. Current events. First aid. The history of the army. It was an intimidating process that would make one of the thirty so nervous that when he walked in and presented his weapon, he would conk himself in the head with it.

That soldier would not win.

Nor would the soldier who, when asked to name a type of contour line on a map, answered, “Invisible?”

Who would win?

Would it be the soldier who had sweat rolling down his face as he struggled to answer the question “What are the four common points for checking a pulse?”

“The wrist. The neck. The ankle. And the anus,” he would say.

“Did he just say anus?” one sergeant would whisper to another.

“All right. Ready?” Four days before the contest, Jay March, who was one of the thirty, was studying with John Swales, who was another.

“What is AFAP?” March said. He had in his hands a 262-page book called the
U.S. Army Board Study Guide.

“Army Family Awareness Program,” said Swales, who had in his hands a big glass of CytoGainer High-Protein Mix.

“Army Family
Action Plan”
March said. “What are the three phases of physical conditioning?”

“Say again?” Swales said.

“What is the maximum range of the AT4?” March said, moving on to weapons.

“Thirteen hundred meters.”

“Twenty-one hundred meters.”

Four days. Good thing. They’d need it. Swales was a twenty-four-year-old specialist with a college degree who had worked as an accountant, gotten bored, joined the army, ended up in Iraq, and finished second in his one other attempt to be soldier of the month. “It was really, really relaxed,” he said, but this time, with a different panel of sergeants, he didn’t know what to expect. “I hear they’re absolute asses.”

Jay March
knew
they were asses. He had competed twice before, and both times he hadn’t even made it past the pre-contest inspection. As required, he had shown up fully dressed for combat and stood at attention as a sergeant looked him over for flaws. The first time, he got kicked out because his compression bandage wasn’t in its original green wrapper. That’s the way his platoon always rolled, though—bandages ready to go, so no time would be lost—but before he could explain this, he was out the door. “Fucking bullshit,” he said as he walked away. The second time was even worse. He had shown up early and was waiting outside the room with some other soldiers when the sergeant in charge of the panel brushed past and lost his temper because the doors to get into the room were locked. “Why the hell are the doors locked?” he screamed, and when he was let in by the other sergeants, his screaming only continued. “All we heard was ‘fuck this’ and ‘fuck that,’ and we all stood in the hallway and said, ‘Fuck,’” March recalled. His luck: that was the sergeant who had inspected him and kicked him out for not properly wearing the plastic pouch that held his drinking water. More luck: that sergeant would be on the panel again.

“I want to win it—but I just want to get
in
so I can go to the promotion board,” March said to Swales. That was the ultimate point of the competition—to prepare a low-ranking, possibly quivering soldier to face a promotion board one day in order to become a sergeant—and March, who wasn’t as confident as Swales, who wasn’t a college graduate, who because of his family circumstances had barely gotten through high school, fell into the category of the possibly quivering. “I wouldn’t even get in front of my class to read a book report,” he said. “I’d say, ‘I’ll turn it in to you, but I’m not gonna read it. Give me a D, or whatever.’” So nervous did he get that in his two previous attempts to be soldier of the month, as the sergeant approached him for inspection, he had spent his final seconds trying to will his hands to stop shaking.

“I just want to get in,” he repeated, and so for this try he had devised a time line to follow so nothing would go wrong. Two days before the contest, he would spend three hours thoroughly cleaning his weapon, which the sergeants were sure to dismantle and inspect. The day before, he would get his hair cut and clean his weapon again. The day of the contest, he would wake at six, shave, dust the weapon, and dress in the cleanest uniform he had, which would include a helmet he had taken into the shower and scrubbed down with laundry detergent. He would tuck his pants into his boots in such a way that the pants would not blouse past the third shoelace eyelet from the top. He would remove the beaded bracelet his brother gave him as a good-luck charm, which he swore he would never take off. When the time came for his interview, he would knock on the door three times, no more, no fewer, and once inside, he would speak to the sergeants slowly and clearly. He would also keep his goals modest— just finish in the top 50 percent—and to that end, he intended to spend whatever spare time he had between this moment and then studying on his own or with his good buddy Swales.

“Counseling,” he said now, flipping to another section of the study guide. “How many human needs are there?”

“Ten,” Swales said.

“No.”

“Seven.”

“No.”

“Three.”

“No.”

“Five.”

“No. Four,” March said. “Do you know what they are?”

Swales grabbed the book out of March’s hands. “All right,” he said. “What is DA form 3349?”

“Physical Profile,” March said.

“Okay. What is DA form 2442?”

“2442?” March said.

“Not so fucking smart, are you?” Swales said.

Specialist Charles White, a twenty-six-year-old medic, was another of the thirty. Like Jay March, this would be his third attempt just to make it past inspection.

The first time he had forgotten his elbow pads, which he realized as a sergeant closed in on him.

“What are you missing, Ranger White?”

“My elbow pads, First Sergeant.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to leave, First Sergeant.”

Try number two ended when his platoon sergeant told him what time to show up, and then the time was changed and the guy who was supposed to tell him didn’t tell him, and how interesting was it that he was another contestant, and “I was twenty minutes late.”

On to number three.

Unlike March, White’s goal was to win. “I mean, second place is the first loser,” he said, and so he was in his room studying, door locked, not answering any knocks unless it was about a mission. “I’m a loner,” he said. “If they come in my room, I’m not studying with them. Not here.” He lowered his voice. “Because this is the top-secret area.” He had some Motown playing, his study guide open, and he was trying to memorize all of it, right down to the 121 -word Soldier’s Creed, which he had taken to reciting out loud, even if he was walking somewhere with other soldiers. “To the chow hall, that’s five minutes. I can recite the Soldier’s Creed four or five times,” he said, and if the other soldiers thought he was a little off for doing so, that wasn’t going to stop him. “I’m twenty-six. I’m older. They’re eighteen or nineteen. They talk about a lot of stupid stuff. ‘Look at her tits.’ I’ve done that. I can just talk to myself.”

Three days till the competition now, and White was considering what to say when the sergeants asked him to introduce himself. It was an invitation for a soldier to say absolutely nothing more than his name, his birthplace, where he went to school, and his objectives in the army—five sentences, maximum—but White was a thoughtful soldier who wished he could find a way to say something more.

“See, it’s kind of weird,” he said. “I’ve noticed when I’m out there and shit goes down, my hand doesn’t shake. Later, when it’s out of my hands, I do. But when it happens? That’s where you find out what you’re made of.”

Could he say such a thing to a panel of sergeants expecting five by-the -book sentences, assuming he made it past inspection? Not if he wanted to win, he realized, but it was interesting to imagine anyway. “Tell us a little about yourself,” the sergeants would say, and he would say, “In Iraq, I found out what I’m made of,” and then he would give three examples.

The first was from June 11, when his convoy was passing a mosque and an EFP blew into the gun turret of the Humvee two ahead of him in line. It was 1:55 in the afternoon. One moment he’d been riding along thinking,
‘When’s it coming, when’s it coming,’
like everyone else, and in the next moment it had. “Get the fuck out of my way!” he would remember hollering as he ran past soldiers and through sniper fire, and then he was by the side of a dying Cameron Payne, taking inventory of his wounds. The eyes: a bit of an eyelid was gone. The mouth: a bit of the left side was gone. The ears: behind the left one was a puncture wound straight into the brain. “You’re gonna have to move your feet so I can close the door,” he said, and when Payne did so, White closed the door and methodically went to work on the wounds. Covered in so much blood that his hands were slippery, he tore open the packaging around the compression bandage with his teeth, pushed the bandage into place, and held Payne in his arms all the way to the aid station, and only afterward, when he began to shake, did he realize that all during it he hadn’t.

Joshua Reeves—Rustamiyah fuel station, September—would be his second example. “Two casualties. One not breathing. Life threatening,” a soldier yelled into the radio moments after the explosion as White checked Reeves for a pulse. He straddled Reeves and did mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as Rachel the interpreter pushed on Reeves’s chest. Thirty compressions, two breaths. No pulse. Thirty compressions, two breaths. No pulse. On it went until they reached the aid station. Reeves was taken inside, Rachel stood in her blood-filled boots, and White, his work on Reeves done, began to shake. But not a moment before.

As for the third example, it involved James Harrelson, who had died on Outer Berm Road, and a woman White had met and married just before he deployed. He was twenty-five then, and she was nineteen. They were married in a small church in northern Kansas where his mother was the minister, and five days later he’d gone to Iraq, leaving his new wife with his most beloved possession, a silver 2006 Pontiac Grand Am. “Blah blah blah blah I wrecked your car blah blah blah blah,” he remembered her saying when he got to Rustamiyah and called to say he was safe. “I let her finish with the blah blahs. ‘That’s nice. Can we go back to the part where you said
you wrecked my car?’”

And it went on from there, he said. “She wanted me to, like, call her more, and this was when we just got here. Things were crazy. I was calling her once a week, but she wanted more. She’d be all sobby. ‘You don’t call me enough. I’m the only one talking. You don’t care about me.You don’t love me.’

“So, whatever. That didn’t work,” he said. Four months after the wedding, he managed to get it annulled, leaving him with several bad memories and one pood one that would forever bring tears to his eyes: having James Harrelson as his best man. Harrelson had been the first person White became friends with when he arrived at Fort Riley. They roomed together, drove around together, went out dancing and met girls together, and after Harrelson burned to death, White was asked to give the “Soldier’s Tribute” at the memorial service, which was more informally known as the speech by the best friend. “I choose to remember him as a friend and fellow brother in arms who died for something he loved, and that was the army and America,” he said in his speech, and as his words moved through a chapel overflowing with soldiers of all stripes who were looking at him and listening to him, he didn’t shake then, either.

In his imagination, a soldier who deserved to be soldier of the month would be able to talk about examples such as those. “Tell us a little bit about yourself,” they would say, and he would tell them not only that he was the soldier who didn’t shake until afterward, but also the truth of war, that “shit happens,” and that “being paranoid is okay. Because you can get hit anywhere. Paranoid makes you scared, and being scared is okay because it keeps you on edge.”

The reality, though, was that the sergeants would not be interested in such things. “What is the seventh sentence of the Soldier’s Creed?” they were more likely to ask, and if they did, he knew that he would be able to recite the answer perfectly, and that he would win. He was sure of this. Assuming he was finally able to get in.

Sergeant Mays took Jay March’s freshly cleaned helmet, brought it to his nose, and inhaled deeply.

“Tide,” he said after a moment, pleased.

He took Swales’s helmet and pointed to a frayed strap that would need to be replaced if Swales wanted to make it past inspection. He looked over Swales’s ammunition magazines and shook his head. “You got a lot of work to do,” he said, and Swales knew this was true, because Sergeant Mays knew everything about becoming soldier of the month.

As the platoon sergeant, Mays was the one who made the nominations, and all of his soldiers understood how seriously he took it. “I just won’t send anybody,” he said. “I put myself in a private’s shoes: Would I want to be led by this guy? Does this guy inspire me? Does he have the passion? And the knowledge?”

March and Swales—those were the guys this time around whose answers came out to yes, yes, yes, and yes, and now it was down to advice time.

How to knock on the door to enter: “Three times. Loud. Like you’re in charge.”

How to walk in: “You beeline straight to the desk and stop three meters away.”