The Good Soldiers (6 page)

“This is one of my favorite movies,” he said to the Iraqi.

“I like the way they fight,” the Iraqi said.

“That’s how I fight,” Kauzlarich said.

“What’s the name of the actor?” the Iraqi said.

“That’s Mel Gibson,” Kauzlarich said.

“He acts like a leader,” the Iraqi said.

Now neither said anything, just watched until Gibson, the battle over, said inconsolably, “I’ll never forgive myself—that my men died, and I didn’t.”

“Tsk tsk,” the Iraqi said.

“He’s very sad,” Kauzlarich said.

“Tsk tsk,” the Iraqi said again.

“He was the first guy to tell me to trust my instincts,” Kauzlarich said. “Hal Moore.”

The Iraqi got up and returned with a vanilla ice-cream cone that Kauzlarich began licking as Gibson, home now, fell into the arms of his wife—at which point the electricity went out, the TV went dead, and the movie came to a sudden end.

“Whoops,” Kauzlarich said.

Both waited in vain for the electricity to come back.

“So, how are we going to fix this?” Kauzlarich said, meaning the war.

The Iraqi continued to look at the TV and shrugged.

“How are we going to get this to stop?” Kauzlarich tried again.

“We need God’s help,” the Iraqi said, and Kauzlarich nodded, finished his ice-cream cone, and after a while excused himself to return to the FOB.

Hours later, as the sun set, the sky took on its nightly ominous feel. The moon, not quite full, rose dented and misshapen, and the aerostat, a gray shadow now rather than the bright white balloon it had been in daylight, loomed over a landscape of empty streets and buildings surrounded by sandbags and tall concrete blast walls.

Inside some of those buildings were Kauzlarich’s soldiers, all of whom had been trained not in counterinsurgency, but, as Cummings had put it, to close with and destroy the enemy. A week after Cajimat’s death, they were passing time between missions like they usually did, by playing video games on their computers or videochatting over the Internet. Or lifting weights, or watching bootleg DVDs that they could buy at the hospital for a dollar. Or drinking Red Bulls or Mountain Dews or water mixed with high-protein powder. Or stuffing themselves with tubs of Corn Pops at the dining facility. Or flipping through magazines that came as close as possible to violating the army’s ban on pornography. Such was life on the FOB for the eight hundred of the finest, whose behavior could be explained simply by the fact that so many of them were nineteen, or by the more complicated fact suggested by the ubiquitous blast walls that they did all of these things behind.

Blast walls surrounded their barracks.

Blast walls surrounded their dining facility.

Blast walls surrounded their chapel.

Blast walls surrounded their latrines.

They ate behind blast walls, prayed behind blast walls, peed behind blast walls, and slept behind blast walls, and now, on April 14, as the sun rose and the dented moon disappeared, they emerged from those blast walls and got in their Humvees wondering if this would be the day that they were now dreaming of behind the blast walls, the one in which, like Cajimat, they would get blasted.

“And we’re off,” Kauzlarich said.

He was in his usual spot—left rear seat, third Humvee from the front. There were always at least four vehicles in a convoy; this one happened to have five. Nate Showman, a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant whose belief in the war and optimism about it matched Kauzlarich’s, was in the front right seat. There was no junior officer in the battalion with more promise than Showman, and Kauzlarich had selected him to be in charge of his personal security detail.

Out they went through the heavily guarded main gate of the FOB and were instantly on the front lines of the war. In other wars, the front line was exactly that, a line to advance toward and cross, but in this war, where the enemy was everywhere, it was anywhere out of the wire, in any direction: that building, that town, that province, the entire country, in 360 degrees.

In such a war, and in an area seeded with EFPs, what was the safest seat? The soldiers discussed it constantly. Kauzlarich didn’t discuss it, but he thought about it, too. The lead truck in a convoy was the one that got hit the most, but lately insurgents had been aiming at the second in line, or the third, which had been Cajimat’s, or sometimes the fourth or fifth. And while most EFPs had been coming from the right side, Cajimat’s had come from the left.

So there was no sure thing to rely on, only precautions to be taken. The Humvees were fitted with jamming devices to defeat EFPs armed with infrared triggers, but the devices weren’t always effective, which was why one Humvee also had a good-luck horseshoe wired to the front grille.

Every soldier had his own version of this. Showman carried a small cross knitted in army colors by someone in his parents’ church in Ohio. The gunner tried to stand in a particular way, with one foot in front of the other, so that if an EFP slug came roaring in, he might only lose one foot instead of two, and for similar reasons Kauzlarich sometimes tucked his hands inside of his body armor as he looked out the window and wondered how aware he would be if the explosion came. “Instantly,” he had told Cajimat’s mother, but was that really the way it happened? Would he know it? Would he hear it? Would he see it? Would he feel it? Would the pile of trash outside of his window that he was now regarding suspiciously be the last thing on earth he would see? Would his last words be what he was saying now into his headset, in response to a soldier’s trifling question back on the FOB? “Do you guys have shitters?” That’s what he was saying. Is that how it would end? In the midst of a sentence like that?

“Do you guys have shitters?”

“Do you guys have—”

The convoy approached another pile of trash. Maybe one was hidden in there.

The convoy approached a shadowy area in a viaduct. Maybe one was hidden in there.

Eyes sweeping, jammers jamming, the convoy moved along Route Pluto at a very deliberate ten miles per hour, which afforded the chance to see what the surge had accomplished so far. By now, other drivers knew what to do when a convoy of Humvees got near: pull over, wait patiently for it to pass, make no sudden moves, and show no frustration about the inevitable traffic jam that the convoy would leave in its wake. Now the convoy passed a driver with the temerity to bury his head in his hands, and did Kauzlarich and his soldiers happen to notice that?

Did they see the old man sitting in front of a shuttered store watching expressionlessly as he fidgeted with a string of worry beads?

Did they see the boy next to the old man regarding the convoy as if it were something slithering?

Did they see the white car decorated with flowers, and the van behind it filled with a bride and eight other women who were laughing and bouncing up and down in rhythm in their seats?

They moved past some children herding goats. They moved past a man pushing a block of concrete. They moved past a man smoking a cigarette and looking under the raised hood of a stalled car, and maybe the car really was stalled or maybe it was a car bomb that was about to explode. The soldiers slowed to a near stop. The man didn’t acknowledge them. No one did. No one smiled at them. No one threw flowers. No one waved.

Now someone did: a young boy dragging a piece of wire. He paused to wave at Kauzlarich, and Kauzlarich saw him and waved back, and what Kauzlarich saw was a waving boy who for all he knew was wired to explode, and what the boy saw was a thick window and a soldier behind it in body armor waving a hand that was encased in a glove.

Suspicion in 360 degrees—this is what four years of war had led to. Before leaving Fort Riley, the soldiers had been given an introduction to Iraq in the form of a laminated booklet called the Culture Smart Card, which told them, for instance, that “Right hand over heart is a sign of respect or thanks,” and “Don’t make the ‘OK’ or ‘thumbs up’ signs; they are considered obscene.” It also listed phonetic pronunciations for dozens of commonly used words and phrases, including
arjuke
(please),
shukran
(thank you),
marhaba
(hello), and
ma’a sala’ama
(goodbye).

They were good counterinsurgency terms, but Kauzlarich’s gunner had decided he needed only a few phrases to navigate this war, all of which he’d written in English and phonetic Arabic in black marker on his turret:

“Where are we?”

“Insurgent(s).”

“Where is bomb?”

“Show me.”

It was the language of IEDs and EFPs. All over eastern Baghdad, their numbers were increasing, and while Cajimat and the four other soldiers in his Humvee had so far been the 2-16’s only serious casualties, they hadn’t been the only targets. Just the night before, Kauzlarich and Cummings had been in the dining facility, or DFAC, eating dinner when a loud boom rattled the walls and sent dishes, trays, food, and dozens of soldiers crashing to the floor. At first the explosion seemed like a rocket attack on the FOB, the number of which had also been increasing, but it turned out to be an IED a mile or so away that had hit a 2-16 Humvee out on patrol. Somehow none of the soldiers in the Humvee had been injured more seriously than suffering ringing ears and slight concussions, but the Humvee had been destroyed.

That was where Kauzlarich directed the convoy now, to the spot where this had happened, so he could show the neighborhood how the United States of America was capable of responding. “Deny sanctuary to insurgents,” it said in the field manual, which was what Kauzlarich intended to do as the convoy eased from Pluto into one of the AO’s nicer neighborhoods and rolled to a stop by a fresh hole in the ground, caused by the IED. “Let’s go clear,” Kauzlarich said to his men, and soon twenty-three heavily armed soldiers were walking the streets and randomly searching houses.

They came to a house with laundry hanging in the courtyard and a neat row of shoes by the front door. Without asking permission, some of the soldiers went inside, through the first floor, up the stairs, through the second floor, into the closets, into the drawers.

They came to another house with a fruit tree out front, and a small metal tank for storing water that struck a soldier as peculiar. In silence, the family that lived in the house watched as the soldier unscrewed the cap of the tank and inhaled to make sure it was in fact water in there, and now watched another soldier reach up into the fruit tree and begin feeling around. He swept along one branch and then another. He stood on his tiptoes and felt among the leaves until he found what he was looking for, and as the family kept watching, he brought a ripe piece of fruit to his mouth and took a bite.

Each search took a few minutes at most and constituted the entire relationship between the Americans and the Iraqis. Unlike the riskier operations that occurred in the middle of the night, in which soldiers broke down doors as they went after specific targets, there was a businesslike feel to these searches: Into the house, search, ask a few questions, out. Next. In, search, out. Not that there wasn’t risk—they were here, after all, because someone had tried to kill some of them with an IED. And snipers were a risk as well, which was why soldiers walked with their weapons raised as they approached the next house, outside of which stood a man who invited Kauzlarich inside for some tea.

This had never happened before. In all the searches Kauzlarich had done, people always had passively stepped aside as he and his soldiers entered their houses, but this was the first time someone had invited him in.

So he went in, accompanied by an Iraqi national who worked as his interpreter. Four of his soldiers assigned to guard him also went in, while two other soldiers remained in the front courtyard as the first line of defense in case of an ambush.

The man led Kauzlarich past his surprised-looking family and motioned him toward a chair in a spotlessly clean living room. There was a table with a vase filled with artificial flowers, and a cabinet that was stacked with fragile dishes and teacups. “You have a beautiful house,” Kauzlarich said, sitting down, his helmet still on, his body armor still on, his handgun within easy reach, and the man smiled and said thank you even as circles of perspiration began to appear under his arms.

Off in the kitchen, water for tea was heating. Outside, other soldiers continued to clear houses of neighbors who had seen this man ask an American to come inside. Inside, the man explained to Kauzlarich why Iraqis were hesitant to cooperate. “I’m afraid to work with the Americans because the militia threatened me. I have no money. I wish I could,” he said in Arabic, pausing so his words could be translated by Kauzlarich’s interpreter, and now he switched to English to better describe what his life had become:

“Very difficult.”

The two of them continued to talk. The man said he was sixty-eight. Kauzlarich said the man didn’t look it. The man said he had been in the Iraqi air force. Kauzlarich nodded again. It wasn’t a hot day, but the man’s perspiration stains were growing. More than five minutes had gone by now. Surely the neighbors were keeping track.

“If people ask me later on, ‘Why Americans are in your house?’ I’ll just say, ‘Searching,’” the man said, more to himself than to Kauzlarich.

Tea was served.

“Hey, Nate,” Kauzlarich said to Showman, “walk around. Just have them escort you around the house.”

Ten minutes now. The man folded his fingers. He unfolded his fingers. He pulled up his socks. He said, “When I heard the IED go off last night, my heart—my chest . . .” He said he had been sitting in this very room when the IED exploded, eating dinner, and that the walls shook, but nothing had been broken.

Fifteen minutes. The man told Kauzlarich about one of his sons, who he said had been kidnapped two weeks before and repeatedly beaten until the man paid a $ 10,000 ransom. That’s why he had no money.

Twenty minutes. “I like America. When America came, I put flowers out front,” the man said. But at this point, “If I put them out, they will kill me.” His perspiration stains were huge now. Twenty minutes. House searches didn’t take twenty minutes. Everyone knew that. Kauzlarich stood.