The Good Soldiers (35 page)

“I don’t think they thought we were gonna do what we did,” he said, in the operations center now, adding up the number of suspected insurgents his soldiers had killed in the past five days. “One hundred,” he said, “one hundred twenty-five,” and kept counting. On maps and by aerial surveillance imagery, he was also tracking the movement of his soldiers. A platoon led by Nate Showman was the latest out there, on a mission to bring fresh water and new radio codes to another platoon defending the DAC building. They had just found an EFP, but Showman, unfazed, had snipped the wires, and they were continuing on their way. Along Route Predators, other soldiers had found eleven EFPs and IEDs just in the past several hours. Sixteen other EFPs and IEDs had exploded on various convoys over the past twenty-four hours, but injuries had amounted to nothing worse than a few bloody cuts and concussions, and in every case the soldiers had continued to fight. The good soldiers. As far as Kauzlarich was concerned, they had become great soldiers.

Five fifteen p.m. now. Showman’s platoon had made it to the DAC, unloaded, and was heading back to the COP. Predators was quiet. Pluto was quiet. The COPs were quiet. The FOB was quiet.

“It’s all good,” Kauzlarich said as the entire war seemed to go silent.

Five sixteen p.m.

Glass, bending.

Five seventeen.

Bending.

Five eighteen.

Bending.

Five nineteen.

boom.

The sound was tiny. The walls barely moved. No one seemed to have noticed, except for Kauzlarich.

“Shit,” he said.

It took another second or so, but then someone was on the radio, screaming. One vehicle destroyed. Two medevac urgent. Air support needed,
now.
Ricky Taylor, the commander of Alpha Company, came on the radio for a moment, just long enough to say, “Not good, sir,” and then dropped away. The camera on the aerostat balloon pivoted and found the war’s newest column of rising smoke, and there, beneath it, was Nate Showman’s platoon, and suddenly every piece of glass in the world seemed to be breaking, because they weren’t even supposed to be here, that was the thing. They were supposed to be guarding convoys in western Iraq. They were supposed to have gone home after twelve months. They were supposed to be on the FOB, packing to leave a war that wasn’t supposed to have ever needed a surge, and instead of any of that, they were running toward the ruined Humvee, and now gunfire could be heard over the radio, and now flashes were coming from a building just behind the DAC, and now they were piling into their own Humvees, and now they were barreling toward COP Cajimat, and now the phone in the operations center was ringing and Ricky Taylor was on the line and someone was handing the receiver to Kauzlarich.

“Hey, Ricky,” he said.

He listened for a moment.

“Okay,” he said.

“Roger,” he said.

“All right, buddy. Hang in there. Standing by,” he said.

“Thanks,” he said and hung up.

“What’d he say, sir?” Cummings asked.

“Two KIA,” he said.

His eyes filled with tears.

He dropped his head.

He stayed that way for a while, hands on his hips, eyes down, and when he was finally able to look up and resume the war, it was to request that the biggest bomb out there at the moment, not a missile on a helicopter, but a guided bomb attached to the underside of a jet, be sent into the building next to the DAC where the gunfire was coming from. After which there was nothing to do but wait.

Here came the first battle-roster number, over the radio.

“Bravo-seven-six-one-niner.”

Fingers traced the manifest until they came to rest on B7619, next to which was the name of Durrell Bennett, and lots of heads dropped now. Everyone liked Bennett.

Now came the second number.

“Mike-seven-seven-two-two.”

Again, fingers traced numbers until they stopped by the name of Patrick Miller.

“That’s the new kid we just got,” someone said, and everyone thought back to the new soldier who had arrived on the day in September when General Petraeus had visited and Joshua Reeves had died, the one who had been premed, who had run out of money, and whose smile seemed to light up the room.

Now came more details.

There had been five soldiers in the Humvee. The EFP had sliced open one soldier, who was bleeding internally; sliced off the hand of another; sliced off the arm of another; sliced off both of Bennett’s legs; and gone through Miller’s mouth, teeth, and jaw.

Now came the warning siren as another rocket attack began on Rusta-miyah. Now came a frantic call from Mr. Timimi to the interpreter: “He said they stole his car.” Now came the scream of a low jet, followed by the satisfying sight on the video monitor of an exploding black blossom, somewhere inside of which was a building. “Enjoy your seventy-two virgins,” Kauzlarich said as his soldiers, virgins, too, once, hollered and clapped, and then they got busy planning their very last mission on their very last day of full combat operations, bringing the two dead soldiers back to the FOB.

A convoy of three platoons and two body bags left at 3:22 a.m. By 3:40 a.m., the first IED had exploded and flattened some tires. By 3:45 a.m., the first gunfight was under way. By 3:55 a.m., soldiers had found and destroyed three EFPs. By 4:50 a.m., they were at the DAC, where the ruined Humvee had been taken. By 5:10 a.m., they were lifting and then scooping Bennett and Miller into the body bags. By 5:30 a.m., they were on their way to COP Cajimat to rendezvous with Nate Showman and his soldiers. By 5:47, they were in another gunfight. By 5:48, the vehicle leading the convoy was hit by some type of IED but was able to keep going. By 5:49, the same vehicle was hit with another IED but was still able to keep going. By 6:00 a.m., the convoy had made it to COP Cajimat. By 7:00 a.m., the soldiers were escorting Showman, his ruined platoon, the ruined Humvee, and the remains of Bennett and Miller to the FOB. By 7:55 a.m., everyone was back, and the mission was officially a success.

In the army, every event gets recorded on an “event storyboard,” from which a kind of clarity can emerge. This was who. This was what. This was where. This was when. This was the task. This was the purpose. This was the time line. Pictures are included, and diagrams, and when a storyboard is finished, a narrative has formed that will forever make the event seem different from anything ever before it. An operation to get a soldier’s remains becomes entirely different from another operation to get another soldier’s remains. An EFP exploding from a trash pile is nothing like an EFP exploding from a water buffalo carcass. Every gunfight becomes unique. Every battle is original. All wars aren’t actually all the same.

But by 7:55 a.m., even though another storyboard was being assembled about the successful mission to get Bennett and Miller, the war, the battles, the gunfights, the explosions, the events, had finally become a blur. Is war supposed to be linear? The movement from point A to point B?The odyssey from there to here? Because this wasn’t any of that anymore. The blur was the linear becoming the circular.

The Humvee was unloaded at Vehicle Sanitization (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 . . .).

The remains of Bennett and Miller were at Mortuary Affairs (being prepared for shipment behind the locked doors of the little stand-alone building in which there were sixteen storage compartments for bodies, a stack of vinyl body bags, a stack of new American flags, and two Mortuary Affairs soldiers whose job was to search the remains for anything personal that a soldier might have wanted with him while he was alive . . .).

And so on, from Cajimat forward to now. The air stank, the flies were swarming, and now Brent Cummings was walking across the FOB to see the Humvee. He looked at the holes in the door, and it was Joshua Reeves’s Humvee and it was William Crow’s Humvee. He crawled inside and looked at the gouges in the turret ring, where Bennett had been standing and gunning, and it was Gajdos and Payne and Craig and Shelton. He looked at the ruined rear seats, and that was where Miller had been sitting, and Crow, and Crookston. He looked at the dried blood on the floor. It smelled like iron. It smelled like iodine. It smelled like blood. It was Miller, Bennett, Doster, Reeves, Crookston, Shelton, Lane, Murray, Harrelson, Crow, Craig, Payne, Gajdos, and Cajimat. It was all of them. He thought he might vomit. He got out and walked away and cried and kicked rocks, and then he circled back to the operations center, where they were continuing to track the war, including, now, Kauzlarich’s convoy, which was nearing Route Predators.

“I
gotta
go out,” Kauzlarich had explained before leaving, “just to see how fucked up it is out there.”

He’d waited until Bennett and Miller were back, and then he had gone. Battlefield circulation was what he called this kind of thing, and even though this was the last day of full operations, the battlefield was still out there and the war was still waiting to be won. The explosions continued, especially along Predators. The gunfire attacks continued on the COPs, the DAC, and the Iraqi-abandoned checkpoints, where his soldiers would remain until the replacement battalion could fully relieve them. He wanted to visit as many of the soldiers as possible, that was part of it, and he also simply wanted to be out there and in it. Counterinsur-gency may have been the strategy he got, but who he was at heart was a soldier who wanted in, and in all likelihood, this would be his final trip out of the wire.

“Everyone’s in the fight,” he’d said. “Everyone.” His intention was to go up Route Predators to Kamaliyah, and as he’d pulled away saying he’d be back in a few hours, it was hard not to think of a story he had related once about the nature of belief. He’d been at Fort Benning, Georgia, for some advanced coursework, and at the end of an exercise, as he and other soldiers waited outside for a ride, a visiting soldier from Sierra Leone explained how he had survived that country’s various wars: “In my country, we put on a blouse. It is a magic blouse. When I wear it, I know bullets cannot harm me.” The Sierra Leonean then rolled up a sleeve of the shirt he was wearing and said, “Give me a knife.” Someone gave him a knife. “Watch,” he said, and he then swung the knife toward his arm. It went through the skin. It went through muscle. It might have cut clean to the bone as far as Kauzlarich knew, but what he remembered more clearly was how for one belief-filled moment everyone was waiting for the magic, hoping for it, right up until blood began gushing and the Sierra Leonean looked at them in panic. “That’s a form of belief,” Kauzlarich would say of what he learned that day. “That’s also a form of jackassery.”

Now, as his convoy came to a stop on Route Pluto because of a possible EFP, the moment of the magic blouse seemed to have arrived again. “Can you squirt around to the right?” Kauzlarich radioed the lead vehicle. Or maybe it was a moment from the other story he liked to tell every so often, the heroic battle of Ia Drang.

They waited.

Over the radio came word that a route-clearance team ahead of them on Route Predators was in heavy contact and getting slammed.

A few minutes later came orders from the route clearance’s battalion to turn back because Predators was too dangerous.

An EFP. A firelight. A road that had become so dangerous that other soldiers were being ordered to leave it. A convoy, paused, awaiting a leader’s decision on what to do next.

The situation:

That was the situation.

It was the heroic situation that Kauzlarich had in various ways dreamed of since he was a boy who romanticized the idea of being a soldier: the final day of full combat, the final trip out of the wire, down to the bucket of old bullets, a final chance to prove greatness. Here was the moment of true belief, beyond which would be only victory.

“Trust your instincts,” Hal Moore had said.

“I’ll never forgive myself—that my men died, and I didn’t,” Mel Gibson had said.

“Tsk tsk,” the Iraqi had said.

“Watch,” the Sierra Leonean had said, swinging the knife.

“Bottom line,” Kauzlarich said, and then came his heroic decision:

The 2-16 had given enough.

It would be jackassery to go up Route Predators, “absolute jackassery,” and as relief spread through the soldiers in his convoy, who just wanted to go home, he guided them safely back to Rustamiyah and closed himself in his office to write his memorial speech.

In another part of the FOB, Nate Showman was writing, too.

“Rae baby,” he wrote to his new wife.

He had come in at 7:55 a.m. with blood on his boots and a sadness so thorough that he’d been unable to speak, even when a few soldiers asked him how he was doing. His answer was to shake his head and stare at the ground. He had spent the rest of the day in isolation, and only now had he found some words he wanted to say, writing to his wife, “I’m gonna need some help when I get home.”

He slept only a little that night, even though he was exhausted, and the next day, at Kauzlarich’s request, he went reluctantly to the operations center for a debriefing. The two of them had always been able to talk more easily than most commanders and junior officers, maybe because Showman’s self-confidence and methodical thinking in some ways reminded Kauzlarich of himself. “I’m just trying to figure out what the hell happened,” Kauzlarich said now to Showman, getting right to it, and when Showman looked at him in silence, Kauzlarich said quietly, “If you would, just talk me through.”

So Showman began by telling Kauzlarich about what Patrick Miller was doing just before he died, that he was standing outside of his Humvee eating a date that he’d been given by an Iraqi National policeman.

“The last thing I saw of Little Miller,” is how he put it, and he didn’t bother to explain that Miller was called Little Miller to differentiate him from Big Miller, a soldier with a back so hairy that there would be bets among soldiers over who would be brave enough to lick it. Or about the night his soldiers woke him up and there was Little Miller dancing in front of him, naked except for sunglasses, an M-4, a bandana, and a thong, and laughing hysterically as he chanted, “I’m ready to fight terrorists .” All of the soldiers were laughing. He laughed, too. He had been crazy about Miller.