The Good Soldiers (13 page)

“I’m okay,” he said weakly.

“You look sick,” Abdul Haitham said.

“Believe me, I’m good,” the man insisted.

“Are you scared?” Haitham said. He started laughing.

Then everyone, except for the man, started laughing and drifted away until only the American medic was left.
“Shukran,”
the man said gratefully after drinking the cool water, and with whatever dignity a too-old, too-heavy soldier could muster, he rose to his feet, wobbled his way from the bleachers to a parked pickup truck, climbed in, shut the door, closed his eyes, and slumped forward onto the dashboard.

He appeared to be passed out.

“Oh shit,” the medic said, spying this, and while the others went off with Haitham and his shiny ring that may have meant something or may have meant nothing, the American ran over to further help and enhance.

Kauzlarich’s strategy for helping, in addition to befriending Qasim, was to go to meeting after meeting with Iraqi officials and to treat each one as if the outcome of the entire war hung in the balance. If the Iraqis served a platter of sheep’s brain, he reached toward the skull and ate a handful of sheep’s brain. If they wanted to talk about trash, he would talk about trash until even they were exhausted by his enthusiasm.

“In America, we do not put trash out in the street,” he said at one meeting with a man named Esam Al-Timimi, who was the civil manager of Kauzlarich’s part of Baghdad. “We have garbage
cans,
and the garbage
man
drives up to the garbage cans, and throws the garbage in the garbage
truck,
and takes it away.” He paused for translation. Timimi sat behind an ornate desk decorated with fake red flowers and vines. On the wall was a broken cuckoo clock. “Do we want to do that here?” Kauzlarich asked.

Timimi leaned forward. “We cannot compare to America,” he said.

Kauzlarich started to reply, but Timimi cut him off. “Let me give you an example,” he said and launched into a story about a time years before, during the time of Saddam Hussein, when Spain decided to clean up the garbage of Sadr City. Contractors were hired with the promise that they could sell anything valuable that they found in the trash and keep the money. And it might have worked, Timimi said, except that the scavenging children of Sadr City got to the garbage first. “I saw children with black arms. I thought they were wearing clothing. Actually it was dirt. They recycled everything, even the plastic inside medical bags,” he said. “This is an example. Our life is very hard.”

“So, Mr. Timimi,” Kauzlarich said, pressing on. “Do we want to buy big trash cans for people to put garbage in?”

And so Timimi told another story about a time when there
were
big trash cans for people to put garbage in, but the problem, he said, was that in their culture, children take out the trash, and the children were often too short to reach the big trash cans. “So they dumped it in the street next to the containers.”

“Let’s do this,” Kauzlarich tried. “Let’s buy the right-size plastic containers.”

And so Timimi told another story about a time when plastic containers for water were distributed, and people used them sometimes to store water, and other times to store petrol, and ended up getting sick. “Educated people—they understand. But it’s very difficult to teach the citizens of Nine Nissan,” he said.

And so Kauzlarich suggested putting the big trash cans not in homes but in schools. “So we can teach kids to put garbage in the garbage cans,” he said.

And Timimi thought about this, and ignoring the fact that so many schools had been ransacked and were closed, he said: “Good!”

That was an outstanding meeting.

But more often, the meetings were like the one Kauzlarich had with a sheik who began by saying, “I wanted to have a meeting with you to thank you. I want to be the leader who brings peace to our area.”

And then he said that to do this he would need money and a car.

Also, “I need a new pistol.”

And bullets, too.

“Everybody wants something in this country,” Kauzlarich had said before the meeting, predicting what would happen. “Where is my telephone? Where is this? Where is that? When is America going to bring in paint? Walls? Electricity? Where’s the TV? Where, where, where?

“It’s a gimme gimme gimme society,” he continued, and then backed down a bit. He wasn’t blind to how bad things had become because of the war’s ruinous beginnings, and unlike many soldiers, he had read enough about Iraq, and about Islam, to have at least a fundamental awareness of the people he was among. “The whole religion of Islam is supposed to be a peaceful religion, in which the jihad is supposed to be that internal fight to be the best person you can be,” he said. “I mean the Iraqi people, they’re not terrorists. They’re good people.”

Where things got blurry for Kauzlarich, though, was in the meaning of
good,
especially in the subset of Iraqis whom Kauzlarich found himself dealing with. The sheik, for instance: at one point Kauzlarich threatened him with jail for possibly being involved in an IED cell, but then let him go after he promised to provide information about what was going on inside Kamaliyah and to help keep things under control. So was the sheik good or bad?Was he an insurgent, or was he an informant? All Kauzlarich knew for sure was that he was making uncertain bargains with someone who wore a heavy gold watch and a pinky ring with a turquoise stone, smoked Miami-brand cigarettes, lit those cigarettes with a lighter that had flashing red-and-blue lights, blew smoke from those cigarettes into Kauzlarich’s face while asking for money, for guns, for bullets, for a new cell phone, for a car, and referred to Kauzlarich as “my dear Colonel K.”

He also called Kauzlarich “Muqaddam K” at times, and in this he had plenty of company.
Muqaddam
was the Arabic equivalent of lieutenant colonel. It was what people began calling Kauzlarich soon after his arrival in February, which so pleased him that in response, to show his respect, he had been trying to use Arabic, too.

He learned to say
habibi,
which was “dear friend.”

He learned to say
shaku maku
(“what’s up?”),
shukran la su’alek
(“thank you for asking”), and
saffya daffya
(“sunny and warm”).

He learned to say
anee wahid kelba
(“I am one sexy bitch”), which made people laugh every time he said it.

The months went by. The meetings grew repetitive. The same complaints. The same selfish requests. The same nothing done.

He learned to say
marfood
(“disapproved”) and
qadenee lel jenoon
(“it drives me crazy”).

June came.

He learned to say
cooloh khara
(“it’s all bullshit”) and
shadi ghabee
(“stupid monkey”).

July now.

Allah ye sheelack,
he found himself saying. I hope you die. “May God take your soul.”

On July 12, Kauzlarich ate a Pop-Tart at 4:55 a.m., guzzled a can of Rip It Energy Fuel, belched loudly, and announced to his soldiers, “All right, boys. It’s time to get some.” On a day when in Washington, D.C., President Bush would be talking about “helping the Iraqis take back their neighborhoods from the extremists,” Kauzlarich was about to do exactly that.

The neighborhood was Al-Amin, where a group of insurgents had been setting off a lot of IEDs, most recently targeting Alpha Company soldiers as they tried to get from their COP to Rustamiyah for Crow’s memorial service a few days before. Two IEDs exploded on the soldiers that day, leaving several of them on their hands and knees, alive but stunned with concussions, and now Kauzlarich was about to swarm into that area with 240 soldiers, 65 Humvees, several Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and, on loan to them for a few hours from another battalion, two AH-64 Apache helicopter gunships.

All together, it made for a massive and intimidating convoy that at 5:00 a.m. was lining up to leave Rustamiyah when the radar system picked up something flying through the still-dark sky. “Incoming! Incoming!” came the recorded warning as the alert horn sounded. It was a sound that, by now, after so many such warnings, seemed less scary than melancholy, and the soldiers reacted to it with shrugs. Some standing in the open reflexively hit the dirt. The gunners who were standing up in their turrets dropped down into their slings. But most did nothing, because the bullet had been fired, it was only a matter of time, and if they knew anything by now, it was that whatever happened in the next few seconds was the province of God, or luck, or whatever they believed in, rather than of them.

Really, how else to explain Stevens’s split lip? Or what happened to a captain named Al Walsh when a mortar hit outside of his door early one morning as he slept? In came a piece of shrapnel, moving so swiftly that before he could wake up and take cover, it had sliced through his wooden door, sliced through the metal frame of his bed, sliced through a 280-page book called
Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife,
sliced through a 272-page book called
Buddhism Is Not What You Think,
sliced through a 128-page book called
On Guerrilla Warfare,
sliced through a 360-page book called
Tactics of the Crescent Moon,
sliced through a 176-page
Calvin and Hobbes
collection, sliced through the rear of a metal cabinet holding those books, and finally was stopped by a concrete wall. And the only reason that Walsh wasn’t sliced was that he happened in that moment to be sleeping on his side rather than on his stomach or back, as he usually did, which meant that the shrapnel passed cleanly through the spot where his head usually rested, missing him by an inch. Dazed, ears ringing, unsure of what had just happened, and spotted with a little blood from being nicked by the exploding metal fragments of the ruined bed frame, he stumbled out to the smoking courtyard and said to another soldier, “Is anything sticking out of my head?” And the answer, thank whatever, was no.

Another example: How else to explain what had happened just the day before, in another mortar attack, when one of the mortars dropped down out of the sky and directly into the open turret of a parked Hum-vee? After the attack was over, soldiers gathered around the ruined Hum-vee to marvel—not at the destruction a mortar could cause, but at the odds. How much sky was up there? And how many landing spots were down here? So many possible paths for a mortar to follow, and never mind the fact that every one of them comes down in a particular place— the fact that this one followed the one path that brought it straight down through a turret without even touching the edges, a perfect swish, the impossible shot, made the soldiers realize how foolish they were to think that a mortar couldn’t come straight down on them.

Resigned to the next few seconds, then, here they were, lined up at the gate, listening to the horn and the incessant, “Incoming! Incoming!” and waiting for whatever was up there to drop.

One second.

Two seconds.

A boom over there.

One second.

Two seconds.

Another boom, also over there.

And nothing here, not even close, no swish this time, so the gunners stood back up, the soldiers in the dirt dusted themselves off, and the massive convoy headed toward Al-Amin to begin a day that would turn out to feature four distinct versions of war.

Arriving just after sunrise, Charlie Company broke off from the convoy and headed to the west side of Al-Amin. It was a
saffya daffya
day, and the soldiers found no resistance as they began clearing streets and houses. Birds chirped. A few people smiled. One family was so welcoming that Tyler Andersen, the commander of Charlie Company, ended up standing under a shade tree with a man and his elderly father having a leisurely discussion about the war. The Iraqis asked why the Americans’ original invasion force had been only one hundred thousand soldiers. They talked about the difficulties of life with only a few hours of electricity a day, and how much they mistrusted the Iraqi government because of the rampant corruption. The conversation, which lasted half an hour and ended in handshakes, was the longest, most civil one Andersen would have with an Iraqi in the entire war, and it filled him with an unexpected sense of optimism about what he and his company of soldiers were doing. That was the first version of war.

The second occurred in the center of Al-Amin, where Kauzlarich went with Alpha Company.

Here, sporadic gunfire could be heard, and the soldiers clung to walls as they moved toward a small neighborhood mosque. They had been tipped that it might be a hideout for weapons, and they wanted to get inside. The doors were chained shut, however, and even if they hadn’t been, American soldiers weren’t allowed in mosques without special permission. National Police could go in, but the three dozen NPs who were supposed to be part of this operation had yet to show up. Kauzlarich radioed Qasim. Qasim said they were coming. Nothing to do but wait and wonder about snipers. Some soldiers took refuge in a courtyard where a family’s wash was hanging out to dry. Others stayed bobbing and weaving on the street, which was eerily empty except for a woman in black pulling along a small girl, who saw the soldiers and their weapons and burst into tears as she passed by.

Here, finally, came the NPs.

“There are weapons inside,” Kauzlarich told the officer in charge, a brigadier general.

“No!” the general exclaimed in shock, and then laughed and led his men toward a house next door to the mosque. Without knocking, they pushed through the front door, went past a wide-eyed man holding a baby sucking his thumb, climbed the steps to the roof, took cover for a few minutes when they heard gunfire, jumped from that roof down onto the slightly lower roof of the mosque, went inside, and emerged a few minutes later with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, an AK-47, ammunition, and, placed carefully into a bag, a partially assembled IED.

“Wow,” Kauzlarich said after all this had been brought down to the street, and for a few moments, defying his own order to always keep moving, he stared at the haul, disgusted.