The Good Soldiers

by David Finkel

  Now Kauzlarich managed to do it in one. “Unfortunately,” he typed as he started the next sentence, and in the truth of that word, a bad day came to an end.

  8

  OCTOBER 28, 2007

  In Iraq, our campaign to provide security for the Iraqi people has been difficult

  and dangerous, but it is achieving results . . . In Baghdad, the number of Iraqi civilians

  murdered by terrorists and death squads is down sharply. Throughout Iraq, the number

  of American service members killed in September was the lowest since July 2006.

  —GEORGE W. BUSH, October 22, 2007

  The number of American KIAs for September was forty-three. The number of deaths for the month was sixty-six, or slightly more than two a day, but once the White House subtracted what the Pentagon in press releases called the “non-combat related vehicle rollover” deaths, the “non-combat related accident” deaths, the “non-combat related injury” deaths, the “non-combat related illness” deaths, and the “non-combat related incident” deaths, the number left over was indeed the lowest since July 2006.

  Forty-three in all of Iraq—and five of those forty-three were soldiers of the 2-16.

  Reeves had been the fourth, and then, a week later, almost to the minute, an EFP blew into a Humvee in which sat thirty-seven-year-old Sergeant First Class James Doster. “He ain’t gonna make it. He’s as fucked-up as Reeves,” Kauzlarich said after seeing him in the aid station, barely alive. Like Reeves, Doster had been in the right front seat; like Reeves, his lower left leg was gone and his pelvis was ruined; like Reeves, he was airlifted to the hospital, where he bled out and died. “Fucking the same. Everything the same,” Kauzlarich said as he waited for confirmation, and when it came, he simply said, “Fuck.”

  Izzy

  Eleven dead now. Another forty-four injured. Gunshots. Burns. Shrapnel. Missing hands, arms, legs, an eye. Ruptured eardrums, a mangled groin, gouged-out muscles, severed nerves. One guy took it in the stomach as he waited to use a pay phone on the FOB and a rocket landed nearby. Rockets, mortars, RPGs, sniper fire, EFPs. “The thing is, they can’t kill all of us,” Kauzlarich said as he prepared to telephone the war’s newest widow, who lived with two young daughters in a house in Kansas on a street called Liberty Circle, and when he was done with the call, he hung his head and said, “That’s probably the saddest woman I’ve talked to yet.”

  Sometimes Kauzlarich and Cummings would wonder what exactly the Iraqis hated about them. What were they doing, other than trying to secure some Iraqi neighborhoods? What made people want to kill them for handing out candy and soccer balls, and delivering tankers of drinking water to them, and building a sewer system for them, and fixing their gas stations, and never being aggressive except for rounding up the killers among them?

  “I’m offering peace and a shit-free life, and you want to fight me? Fine. Live in shit,” Cummings said one day in the midst of an exasperated conversation with Kauzlarich as they tried to figure it out.

  “The bottom line is these guys are the most ungrateful fucks I’ve ever met in my life,” Kauzlarich said, and then, as he had been doing for eight months now, five or six times a week, he got in his Humvee and headed to another meeting with their local political leaders.

  He was just turning off Route Pluto when he was once again nearly hit by an EFP. This time it exploded as the first Humvee in the convoy passed by. Two soldiers were lacerated by flying shrapnel. But the main charge missed, and though Kauzlarich didn’t make it to that day’s meeting, at the next one his patience was just about gone.

  There they were, waiting for him—the same cast of characters he had been dealing with for nearly eight months, who promised anything, and delivered nothing, and wanted everything, and always had another complaint.

  Around the room it went, one more time.

  The schools aren’t fixed.

  The generators you promised haven’t arrived.

  The fence you’re building on Route Pluto is ugly.

  The fence is a security fence, and the reason we’re building it is because Route Pluto is where you keep trying to kill us, Kauzlarich thought but didn’t say.

  The electricity is still out most of the time.

  The sewer project is not done and winter is coming and Kamaliyah is a mess.

  We need you to paint the mosque.

  Why can’t you paint the mosque? Kauzlarich thought.

  We get nothing from the Americans.

  Fuck off, he thought to himself, and this time he did say it out loud.

  “Fuck ’em,” he said, but only to Colonel Qasim, who nodded enthusiastically, as if he understood.

  Did Qasim understand? Maybe. In this place, maybe fuck was one of English’s universally understood words. Or maybe he had sensed the declining mood of the man who had become his favorite American of all. He called Kauzlarich “Muqaddam K.” The two had spent hours and hours together, and even though their conversations required an interpreter, Kauzlarich talked to him not only about the war, but sometimes about personal things: His wife. His kids. Things such as holidays and birthdays and family pizza night. After the meeting, lingering a bit, they found themselves talking again, and when Kauzlarich mentioned that he would be turning forty-two in a few weeks, Qasim said he would have a party for him.

  “A party?” Kauzlarich said.

  A party, Qasim said. A party for Muqaddam K’s birthday. A party with a cake.

  Kauzlarich was touched. Another promise to be broken, he thought, but at least this was a nice one.

  If Kauzlarich were to pick a favorite among the Iraqis he had met, Qasim would be up there, and so would Mr. Timimi, the civil manager, who day after day did whatever he did in his office with the big desk and the broken cuckoo clock.

  But Izzy, his interpreter, was the one Kauzlarich had grown closest to and who had come to represent all the reasons Kauzlarich continued to find faith in the goodness of Iraqis, even after eleven deaths. Six years older than Kauzlarich, Izzy was a thin man with a melancholy face, the face of someone who understood life as something to be resigned to. At one point, he had lived for a few years in New York City, as part of Iraq’s delegation to the United Nations, which was when he became fluent in English. Now his job was to interpret everything said in Arabic to Kauzlarich, as well as what Kauzlarich wanted to say to Iraqis, no matter what it was. When rumors of a cholera outbreak were sweeping through Baghdad and Kauzlarich announced on PEACE 106 FM, “If you have explosive diarrhea, go to your nearest clinic or hospital,” Izzy interpreted that. If he had been close enough to hear when Kauzlarich had muttered, “Fuck ’em,” to Qasim, he would have interpreted that.

  There were times when Iraqis would look at Izzy in obvious disgust, as if he were nothing more than a tool of the Americans. But he did his job enthusiastically, partly because of his affection for the United States— his older daughter, now seventeen, was born in New York City—and partly because of something that had happened over the summer when he had gone home to spend a few days with his family in central Baghdad.

  Late one afternoon, a bomb had exploded just outside of his apartment building. Even by Baghdad standards it was a monstrous explosion. Twenty-five people died and more than one hundred others were injured, but seven miles away, no one on the FOB knew anything about it until Brent Cummings’s cell phone rang and Izzy was on the other end, in a panic.

  There had been an explosion, he said. His apartment was in ruins, his building was on fire, and one of his daughters had been badly injured by something that had pierced her head. He had taken her to a hospital, but there were so many other injured people that doctors had said there was nothing they could do, that she needed more help than they could give, and so he was standing on a street with his bleeding daughter at his side, afraid that she was going to die.

  “The only hope you have is to get her to an American hospital?” Cummings asked, repeating what Izzy had just said. Izzy started to answer. The cell phone
went dead. “Izzy?” Cummings said. “Izzy?”

  How did moments of decency occur in this war?

  “Izzy,” Cummings said, calling him back. “Bring your daughter here.”

  That was how.

  “Oh thank you, sir. Thank you, sir,” Izzy said.

  And that’s when things got complicated. Even this war had its rules, and one of them covered who could be treated at an American aid facility. Americans could, of course, but Iraqis could not, unless they were injured by the American military, and only if the injury was life-threatening. Since the car bomb had been an Iraqi bomb, none of the injured was entitled to American care, including, it seemed, Izzy’s daughter.

  But Cummings had in mind Izzy’s previous life, before he was an interpreter. If the daughter who was injured had been born in New York City, did that make her eligible? Could an American-born Iraqi who was injured by a non-American bomb receive medical care in an American military medical facility?

  Cummings didn’t know the answer. He phoned some doctors at the aid station, but they didn’t know, either. He tried the FOB legal representative, but couldn’t get through. He wasn’t even sure which of the daughters had been injured—the one born in New York, or the eight-year-old who was born in Baghdad. He called Izzy back. The connection was terrible. He dialed again and again.

  “Izzy . . . okay . . . where is your daughter that is from the United States?”

  Again the phone went dead.

  He called again. The connection kept breaking up. “Is your daughter from the United States with you right now? . . . Is she hurt? . . . Which daughter is hurt? . . . Is she on the street with you? . . . You can’t what? . . .What?”

  Again the phone went dead, and at that point Cummings made a decision not to ask any more questions, just to assume what the answer would be. He was making a guess. He understood that. But with Kauzlarich away for a few hours on another FOB to attend a memorial ceremony, there was no one else to ask what to do.

  He telephoned an officer in another battalion who controlled access to the FOB and whose approval would be needed for someone not in the military to get through the gate without being turned away, detained, or shot. “Yes,”he said. “I’m sure we can produce a birth certificate.” He wondered whether such a certificate, if it even existed, had burned up in the fire. He checked the time. The sun was going down. A curfew would be in effect soon, at which point Izzy and his daughter wouldn’t be allowed outside until sunrise. The officer kept asking questions. “We’ll figure that piece out,” Cummings said impatiently. “Right now, I just want to help the guy.”

  Next he called the battalion’s physician and told him to be ready to treat one female, age unknown, in a matter of minutes. “A U.S. citizen,” he added, and then to that added, “maybe.”

  Next he tried Izzy again, to see how close he was to the FOB, and Izzy, his voice more panicked than before, said he wasn’t close at all, that he was still on the street, still next to his daughter, trying to find a taxi. “Thank you, sir,” he kept saying. “Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  There was nothing to do but wait. It wasn’t as if a convoy could go pick up Izzy. He would have to get here on his own. The sun was almost down now. A call came from an officer in another battalion who said he’d heard that the 2-16 had lost some soldiers somewhere. “No,” Cummings said. Then another officer called saying he’d heard some soldiers had been injured in an apartment bombing. Then another: the rumor was that some 2-16 soldiers had died in an EFP attack.

  “No, there are no injured Coalition Forces,” Cummings kept saying. “It is an Iraqi—an Iraqi American—who was hurt. It is the interpreter’s daughter.”

  He phoned Izzy again.

  Still trying to find a taxi.

  Another call, from the doctor: “I don’t know the extent of the injuries . . . I don’t know if he’s even in a cab yet . . . I don’t know if they’re going to make it here before curfew.”

  Another call. It was Izzy. They were in a taxi. They were on the bridge, two minutes from the base.

  Cummings hurried to the gate. It was dark now. The FOB’s ambulance pulled up to receive the girl. Five minutes had gone by. Where was the taxi? Now the guards said they had stopped it in the distance and that there was no way it would be allowed any closer than it had gotten, which was somewhere out of sight. “Get a litter,” Cummings yelled to the ambulance crew. Sprinting, he went out the gate, passing coils of razor wire and blast walls, and then stopping when he saw Izzy walking toward him, illuminated by the headlights of the ambulance.

  Izzy’s clothing was filthy.

  Next to him was his wife, who was crying.

  On his other side was one of his daughters, the one born in New York, who appeared to be uninjured.

  And in front of them all, wobbly but walking, was a young girl with shiny purple sandals, blood all over her blue jeans, and a bandage covering the left side of her face.

  It was the eight-year-old, the daughter born in Baghdad, the one who according to the rules had no standing whatsoever to be treated on the FOB. “Izzy,” Cummings called out, knowing right then that he had guessed wrong. He ran toward the family as other soldiers reached the girl. They lifted her up. She began crying. They carried her through the gate without stopping. They ran with her into the aid station, and as the doors swung shut she cried out in Arabic for her father, who’d been told to remain in the lobby.

  Izzy took a seat in a corner. Cummings stood nearby. “Was it a car bomb?” he asked after a while.

  “No, sir,” Izzy said. “It was two car bombs.”

  And then he said nothing more, not until one of the doctors came into the lobby to tell him that his daughter was going to be all right.

  “Thank you, sir,” he managed to say, and when he was unable to say anything else, he bowed his head, and then wiped his eyes, and then followed the doctor into the treatment area, where he saw his Iraqi daughter surrounded by American doctors and medics.

  What do the rules say?

  At that moment, anyway, no one seemed concerned one way or another: not the doctors, not the family, and not Cummings, who stood at the very same spot he’d stood at as he watched Crow die, watching once again.

  The injuries to the girl were serious. There was a deep cut across her cheek, and worse, something had gone into the left side of her forehead, near her temple, and was deeply embedded in bone. Izzy held her hand as the doctors wrapped her in a sheet, making sure to secure her arms tightly. Her mother closed her eyes. The doctors leaned in. It took a while, and at the worst of it the little girl couldn’t remain quiet, but then the doctors were showing her what they had pulled out—a thick piece of glass nearly two inches long.

  The glass had been part of an apartment that no longer existed, in a section of Baghdad where the sounds that night were of mourning.

  But here on the FOB, the sounds were of a mother whose home was ruined kissing her daughter’s face, and a father whose home was ruined kissing his daughter’s hand, and a little girl whose home was ruined saying something in Arabic that caused her family to smile, and Cummings saying quietly in English, “Man, I haven’t felt this good since I got to this hellhole.”

  Because of the curfew, they stayed on the FOB that night in a vacant trailer that Cummings found for them. He offered to take them to the DFAC, but Izzy insisted that they weren’t hungry, even though they hadn’t eaten for hours. “We’ll get you some ice cream. We’ll get you some food,” Cummings said, but Izzy politely declined. He did accept sheets, which they used with embarrassment in the middle of the night to clean up the trailer when their daughter got sick and vomited, but that was all they accepted before closing their door, and when Cummings knocked just after sunrise they were already gone.

  They wanted to get home to see what they had lost, which turned out to be almost everything. Their clothing. Their furniture. Their prayer rugs. Their generator. Their plastic tanks that held the drinking water they got from a pump on the
roof. What was left was the shell of an apartment with blown-out windows and soot-covered walls, but they had nowhere else to go, and so they continued to live in a building that was abandoned and ghostly now, where six of the twenty-five dead had been their neighbors. One of them was a boy who’d been the age of Izzy’s injured daughter and liked to hang out with Izzy, talking about soccer. “Marvin,” Izzy said one day after he had returned to the FOB, thinking back. “His mother was a Christian. He was a lovely child.” He had been on the roof of the four-story building when the bombs had exploded, probably to get water, or perhaps in search of a breeze on a hot summer day, and the shaking had thrown him over the edge. He landed in front of the doorway, and when people saw his body, no one wanted to go past, even though much of the building was on fire. “‘Please, someone move Marvin,’” Izzy recalled his wife crying out, “but no one would, because everyone liked Marvin very much.” Finally an uncle rushed forward to cover the body with a blanket, at which point people eased past and hurried out to the street.

  An Iraqi’s life: the soldiers simply had no idea. Every so often, on a clearing operation, they would see something such as a cross on a wall or a pair of high heels shoved under a teenage girl’s dresser and feel a brief sense of commonality, but for the most part, Iraq continued to be men with prayer beads and women in black drapes and calves in living rooms and goats on roofs. This place wasn’t just strange after eight months, it was ever stranger. Like the guy being tracked one night in October on a night-vision surveillance camera as he walked alone through a field, holding something suspicious-looking in his hand. “What’s that?” a soldier monitoring the feed said with concern, and as calls went out with the man’s coordinates and snipers trained on him to take him out, a man who thought he was obscured by darkness looked around, bent over, dug a shallow hole, lifted his robe, squatted, went to the bathroom, and used whatever was in his hand to scoop some dirt and cover up what he’d done. Was the man all right? Was he without a home? What conditions of a life would lead him into a field as curfew approached? Had his building been destroyed, like Izzy’s? Every act in Iraq came freighted with so many questions—but to the soldiers, once they stopped laughing, and groaning, and covering their eyes, and peeking through their fingers, the question was simply: Why the fuck would some dude shit in the middle of a field?