The Good Soldiers (8 page)

Through an interpreter, Cummings started to explain why he was there, that U.S. soldiers would be moving into the spaghetti factory and that for security reasons they were going to have to build a very high wall that would unfortunately wall him in, but they would include a gate—

I will leave,
the man interrupted in Arabic before Cummings could finish.

“No,” Cummings said, asking the interpreter to tell the man that he wasn’t being told to leave, just that they would be building a wall—

I will leave,
the shaking man said again, and he sounded increasingly frantic as he said that he had come to this little bit of land only because his family had been uprooted from their own home by the militia, that he hadn’t meant to cause trouble, that he had nowhere else to go, that this borrowed place was all that he had left—and then, at last hearing the interpreter over his own voice, he said,
I don’t have to leave?
“No,” Cummings said. “I—”

I don’t have to leave?
the man said again, and it was at that point that the other people who lived in the little shack began pouring out. Out came child after child in raggedy clothes. Out came an old worried woman. Out came more children, who crowded around Cummings and the other soldiers, and finally came a pregnant woman who stood nervously in the doorway, listening to the man saying,
Thank you for saving us, thank you for enclosing us in a wall, thank you for allowing us to stay.

“You’re welcome,” Cummings said, taking the man’s hand, “and thank you for allowing us in,” and the man smiled, and the old woman smiled, and the woman in the doorway smiled, and an hour later, as Cummings headed back to the FOB, it was that disturbing moment of gratitude that he couldn’t shake from his mind. There’s such goodness in the country, he said, which was why, more than ever, he wanted Bob properly buried.

“I would hope someone would do the same for my body. And for any human being. Otherwise we’re not human,” he said.

How to be human in this instance, though? He still hadn’t figured it out by the following morning, when he received a call from Jager, who had just gotten a tip.

Cummings hung up the phone. He looked stunned. He went in search of Kauzlarich.

“Sir, the spaghetti factory has been destroyed,” he said.

The tip was that a dozen masked men, all carrying weapons and some carrying explosives, had gone into the factory after the soldiers left, and that the resulting explosion had been huge.

“Gone,” Cummings said of the factory.

Maybe it wasn’t. Initial reports were often wrong. Verification was needed.

Even in Iraq, though, some days are more difficult than others. No soldiers were in Kamaliyah this day, and because of high winds and dust, all forms of aerial surveillance had been grounded.

Then, late in the day, the pilot of a fighter jet passing high overhead reported that much of the factory appeared to have been destroyed.

How much was unclear. The pilot didn’t say. Cummings didn’t know.

What about the house?

“I don’t know.”

The grateful man?

He shook his head.

The old woman? The pregnant woman? The dozen children?

He shook his head.

What he did know, now that the problem of Bob had been solved:

“I hate this place,” he said.

Four days later, First Sergeant William Zappa was standing on a street in Kamaliyah in the middle of the morning when someone shot him in his side.

“At first I thought it was a little nick. I didn’t realize I had got shot. I heard a pop and I’m like, ‘What the hell was that?’ Then I looked down and I felt something, and then I started seeing the blood come out my side, and I’m like, ‘Hell, I just got shot,’” Zappa would say after this long day was over.

Most of the battalion had gone to Kamaliyah earlier that morning for the next step in bringing it under control, departing the FOB in a massive convoy early enough to pass the goat peddlers as they were still peeling the skin from the meat they hoped to sell before the sun got too hot. By nine o’clock, as a pair of attack helicopters circled overhead, hundreds of soldiers were fanning out across Kamaliyah and searching homes. By 9:50 a.m., Kauzlarich was looking out the window of his Humvee and saying, “It’s all good,” and by 10:21 a.m., Zappa had been hit by a single bullet that entered his side and exited through his back, which was starting to leak blood.

“Initially everybody was kind of spazzing, because all they knew was I got shot. ‘First Sergeant got shot!’” he would say later, describing it to whoever wanted to hear. “And everybody come running up and pulling out the scissors and getting ready to start cutting stuff, and I was, ‘Whoa, whoa, stop. I’m not dead. I can take my own IBA off. I can take it off.’ So I took off my own IBA, nobody assisted me.

“Then they sat me down in the backseat, and I was leaning forward so the doc could check the exit wound, and that’s when I started getting a little nauseous, and feeling a little light-headed. And I heard one of the soldiers say, ‘Hey, First Sergeant’s going down,’ and then I kind of snapped, ‘Give me some water.’ I drank some water, I snapped back to, doc put the bandage on, I put my clothes back on, of course I didn’t have a T-shirt; he did cut the T-shirt away. My IBA, I just draped it over my left shoulder, and then we took off.

“And I’m in the backseat, and I heard one of the sergeants say, ‘I hate all these motherfuckers,’ and I was, ‘Why? Ain’t all of them tried to kill me. It’s only a select group out there who’s trying to shoot at me. Don’t get mad at everybody ‘cause one knucklehead shot me.’”

And it was about that same time, on another street in Kamaliyah, that Sergeant Michael Emory was shot in the back of his head.

“Sniper!” Jeff Jager screamed as he saw Emory fall.

They were on the rooftop of a factory with a few other soldiers, over-watching Bravo Company’s clearance operation on surrounding streets. The roof was three flights up a narrow enclosed stairwell. It was a big roof spotted with broken glass and dirty puddles from a recent rain, and Emory was near the middle of it when there was a crack and he went down.

“Who’s down? Is that Sergeant Emory?” another soldier yelled out. Then, louder,
“Sergeant Emory!”

Emory was motionless, on his back, in a widening pool of blood.

“We got a sniper. We got a sniper,” a soldier said into the radio. “We got a man down.”

“Boland! Smoke! Smoke!” Jager yelled to a lieutenant who was on the far end of the roof by the stairwell and had two smoke grenades attached to his body armor.

Alex Boland tossed a grenade. There was a pop, and thick yellow smoke drifted over Emory as a soldier crawled toward him.

“Radio,” Jager said to the radio man, motioning for it.

“Sir, can I take my radio off and go help him?” the soldier asked.

“Yeah,” Jager said.

“I’m coming,” the radio man hollered, and off he went across the roof, running until he was inside the smoke. He knelt by Emory’s head and took one of his hands. The smoke dissipated, leaving them exposed.

“More smoke!” Jager yelled. “More smoke!”

Boland tossed his second grenade. Yellow smoke billowed and then thinned. “Drag him over here,” Boland hollered.

“More smoke,” Jager yelled to him.

“It’s all I got,” Boland yelled back.

Now a few more soldiers clattered up the stairwell, including a medic, who ran toward Emory, fell, got up, kept running, dropped down into Emory’s blood, and began pushing a pressure bandage into the back of his head.

“You guys stand up and pull him out. Over that way,” Jager yelled, pointing toward Boland. “Let’s go.”

They grabbed Emory under his arms and began pulling, but Emory was dead weight. Now another soldier ran toward Emory, took hold of his body armor, and lifted him. Another soldier grabbed a leg. Another grabbed the other leg.

“I got you covered,” Jager called. “Go!”

“Let’s go,” one of the soldiers said.

“Pull, pull,” another urged.

“Go go go go,” another said. “Keep going.”

They got Emory inside the enclosed stairwell, safe from any more sniper fire, but now they needed to get him down three flights of stairs. It was a big building. There must have been a hundred steps. Emory was placed on a backboard. He was limp. His eyes were opening and closing. Two soldiers hoisted the backboard, but there were no straps to secure him with, and when he began slipping off, another soldier draped him over his back in a fireman’s carry.

This was a staff sergeant named Adam Schumann. He was regarded as one of the best soldiers in the battalion. A few months after this moment, having turned into a soldier who was mentally broken, he would say of Emory, “I remember the blood was coming off his head and coming into my mouth. I couldn’t get the taste out. That iron taste. I couldn’t drink enough Kool-Aid that day.”

But on this day, in this moment, Schumann carried Emory down to the second-floor landing, and when Emory was again placed on the backboard, Schumann lifted one end of it onto his shoulders and led the way down to the bottom floor, and when Emory stirred at one point and asked, “Why does my head hurt?” Schumann was one of the soldiers who answered, “You’re gonna be all right.” He helped get Emory into a Hum-vee to be evacuated to an aid station, and then he and another soldier went back up to the roof to collect the things Emory had left behind. There were his sunglasses. There was his helmet, wet with blood, and for some reason Schumann and the other soldier decided that no one else needed to see that, so they searched the factory for something to cover it with. They found a sack of flour, ripped it open, emptied it and hid the helmet in there, and while they were doing that, Emory was on the backboard across the rear seat of a Humvee, continuing to talk in a slurred voice.

“Why does my head hurt?” he asked again.

“Because you fell down some steps,” said the sergeant who was in the back of the Humvee with him, lying next to him as they headed to the hospital, holding one of his hands.

“Oh,” Emory said.

Now Emory raised his other hand and looked at it.

“Why do I have blood on my hand?” he asked.

“You fell down some steps,” the sergeant said, holding Emory’s hand tighter.

Now Emory looked at the sergeant.

“First Sergeant, I’m fucked up, aren’t I?” he said.

And it was about that time, on another street in Kamaliyah, that a staff sergeant named Jared Stevens was shot in his lower lip.

He was moving backward when he was hit. That’s what the soldiers were taught: Don’t hold still for too long. Keep moving. Don’t be a target. So that’s what Stevens was doing, and it was his good luck to be moving backward rather than forward, so that when the bullet struck him, instead of going through his mouth, or his jaw, or his chin, it just ever so barely grazed his lip, butterflying it open from one side to the other.

Down he went, into a Humvee, to be evacuated.

“Okay,” Kauzlarich said, hearing the report of this third shooting over his radio, and then turned his attention back to his own crisis. He had spent much of the morning clearing houses, trying to track down a suspected insurgent who was considered the brigade’s highest-value target, and at least twice taking cover from gunfire, and now he was watching a crowd of several hundred Iraqis massed outside of a mosque. They were chanting and waving Iraqi and Jaish al Mahdi flags, and when the circling helicopters fired flares into the crowd to break it up, the chanting only got louder.

It was a bad situation that was worsening, and Kauzlarich knew it. This wasn’t what had been intended. Clearing houses? Yes, they had done that. Rounding up suspected insurgents? Yes, they had done that. But if the goal of the operation, as stated in planning documents, was for the sixty thousand residents of Kamaliyah to realize the Americans had come “to clear your neighborhoods and improve your quality of life,” that wasn’t happening.

It was time for the operation to end. Kauzlarich radioed his soldiers to begin wrapping things up, and then he directed his convoy around the protesters, first heading north for a few blocks, and then, when gunfire broke out, east, in between the sewage trenches, until he reached a building partly in shreds—the spaghetti factory.

Much of it was caved in. Most of it was still standing, but the walls were lined with deep cracks. It was ruined.

Across the street, however, was another factory, and when Kauzlarich went inside to look it over, he liked what he saw—until he reached the bottom floor and discovered a family of eleven squatters, ranging from young children to an arthritic old man on a mattress over which someone had taped a poster of Muqtada al-Sadr.

“If we pay them, will they leave?” Kauzlarich asked his interpreter. “Tell them I’ll give them three hundred dollars.”

“It’s not enough,” the interpreter said, conveying the reply from a man who seemed to be the head of the family.

“Not enough?” Kauzlarich said. “It isn’t enough?” He was confused. “They don’t even
own
this.”

The interpreter shrugged.

“If I pay him a thousand dollars?” Kauzlarich said.

“Give me a little bit more,” came the reply. “One thousand five hundred.”

Kauzlarich looked around. He needed a COP, and the truth was that this was better than the spaghetti factory even before the spaghetti factory had been bombed.

“Tell them by Tuesday they’ll need to be gone,” he said, and just like that Bravo Company had a COP, and eleven people with no home had $1,500 to find one.

He headed south now, a very long day nearly done. In the distance, on the far side of the spaghetti factory, was the little house. It was still intact, but there was no one outside, no hanging laundry, no signs of life at all. He kept going, away from Kamaliyah, back to the FOB, back to his office, back to his e-mails, where the initial reports about Emory weren’t good. There was a report that he was in surgery and that his condition was extremely critical. There was a report that he went blind at the hospital and began panicking and was now in an induced coma. Now Cummings was telling Kauzlarich that at one point they were erroneously informed that he had died.