The Good Soldiers (2 page)

“This is probably going to change me,” Kauzlarich had said at Fort Riley, and when he wasn’t around to overhear, a friend had predicted what the change was going to be: “You’re going to see a good man disintegrate before your eyes.”

Now he was being told that the soldiers at the Mortuary Affairs collection point were being alerted to get ready for remains, as were the soldiers at the collection point called Vehicle Sanitization.

“I mean, bottom line, if we lose this war, Ralph Kauzlarich will have lost a war,” Kauzlarich had said at Fort Riley.

Now, as more details came in, he tried to be analytical rather than emotional. Instead of thinking how Cajimat was one of the first soldiers he had been assigned when he was forming the battalion, he sifted through the sounds he had heard as he was going to sleep. At 12:35 there had been a boom in the distance. A soft boom. That must have been it. They were going to go to Afghanistan. That had been the first rumor. Then Iraq. Then nowhere at all. They were going to stay in Fort Riley and miss the war entirely. So many twists and turns had gotten the battalion that was going to win the war in the position to do it:

In 2003, when the war began, the battalion didn’t even exist, except on some chart somewhere that had to do with the army’s eternal reorganization of itself. In 2005, when it did come into existence, it didn’t even have a name. A unit of action—that’s how it was referred to. It was a brand-new battalion in a brand-new brigade that began with no equipment other than Kauzlarich’s and no soldiers other than him.

Worse, as far as Kauzlarich was concerned, was the place where the battalion was going to be based: Fort Riley, which unfairly or not suffered from a reputation as one of the armpits of the army. Kauzlarich, who was about to turn forty years old, had attended West Point. He had become an Army Ranger, perhaps the defining experience of his life as a soldier. He had fought in Operation Desert Storm in 1991. He had been in Afghanistan in the early days of Operation Enduring Freedom. He had been on a couple of missions in Iraq, had jumped out of airplanes eighty-one times onto mountains and into woods, and had lived in the wilderness for weeks at a stretch. But Fort Riley, to him, felt like the most remote place he had ever been. From the very first he felt like an outsider there, a feeling that only deepened in the days leading up to the surge, when reporters descended on Fort Riley looking for soldiers to talk to and were never directed to him. Even if they were looking for officers, his name wasn’t mentioned. Even if they were specifically looking for officers who were battalion commanders, his name wasn’t mentioned. Even if they were looking for
infantry
battalion commanders, of which there were only two.

There was just something about him that the army resisted even as it continued to promote him. He was not their smooth-edged, cookie-cutter officer. There was an underdog quality to him, which made him instantly likeable, and a high-beam intensity to him, which at times would emanate from him in waves. And if there were things the army resisted in him, there were things about the army that he resisted as well—insisting, for example, that he would never want a posting that would put him inside the Pentagon, because those postings often went to sycophants rather than to true soldiers, and he was a true soldier through and through. It was an insistence that struck some of his friends as noble and others as silly, both of which were part of his complicated soul. He was kind. He was egotistical. He was humane. He was self-absorbed. Growing up in Montana and the Pacific Northwest, he had been a skinny boy with jutting ears who had methodically re-created himself into a man who did the most push-ups, ran the fastest mile, and regarded life as a daily act of will. He took pride in his hard stomach and his pitch-perfect ability to recall names and dates and compliments and slights. He had precise and delicate handwriting, almost like calligraphy. He attended Mass every Sunday, prayed before eating, and crossed himself whenever he got on a helicopter. He liked to say, “Let me tell you something,” and then tell you something. He could be honest, which worked in his favor, and blunt, which sometimes didn’t. Once, when he was asked by a journalist about an investigation he had done into the death of Pat Tillman, the professional football player who became an Army Ranger in Kauzlarich’s regiment and was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan, he suggested that the reason Tillman’s family was having difficulty finding closure might have to do with religious beliefs. “When you die, I mean, there is supposedly a better life, right? Well, if you are an atheist and you don’t believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt,” he had said. So, blunt. And maybe insensitive, too. And crude on occasion. “It’s hot as balls” seemed to be his favorite weather report.

But beyond all of that was the fact that he was, at his core, a good leader. When people were around him, they wanted to know what he thought, and if he told them to do something, even if it was dangerous, they did it not out of intimidation but because they didn’t want to let him down. “Ask anybody,” his executive officer, Major Brent Cummings, said. “He has this dynamic personality about himself that people want to be led by him.” Or, as another of his soldiers put it, “He’s the kind of guy you follow to hell and back. He’s that kind of leader.” Even the big, bloated, political army could see this, and so, in 2005, Kauzlarich was made a battalion commander, and in 2006 he was notified that his unit was being given the dusted-off name of a dormant battalion called the 2-16, which was short for the Second Battalion, Sixteenth Infantry Regiment of the Fourth Infantry Brigade Combat Team, First Infantry Division.

“Holy shit. You know what the nickname is?” Brent Cummings said when Kauzlarich told him. “The Rangers.”

Kauzlarich laughed. He pretended to smoke a victory cigar. “It’s destiny,” he said.

He meant it, too. He believed in destiny, in God, in fate, in Jesus Christ, and in everything happening for a reason, although sometimes the meaning of something wasn’t immediately clear to him. That was the case at the end of 2006, when he was at last informed of his mission, that he and his battalion would be deploying to western Iraq to provide security for supply convoys. He was stunned by this. He was an infantry officer in charge of an infantry battalion, and the assignment he’d drawn in the decisive war of his lifetime was to guard trucks carrying fuel and food as they moved across the flat, boring lonesomeness of western Iraq for twelve boring months? What, Kauzlarich wondered, could be the meaning of this? Was it to humble him? Was it to make him feel like a loser? Because that was precisely how he was feeling on January 10, 2007, as he dutifully turned on the TV to watch George W. Bush, who was in the deepening sag of his presidency, announce his newest strategy for Iraq.

A loser watching a loser: On January 10, it was hard to see Bush any other way. At 33 percent, his approval rating was the lowest yet of his presidency, and as he began to speak that night, his voice, at least to the 67 percent who disapproved of him, might have sounded more desperate than resolute, because by just about any measure, his war was on the verge of failure. The strategy of winning an enduring peace had failed. The strategy of defeating terrorism had failed. The strategy of spreading democracy throughout the Middle East had failed. The strategy of at least bringing democracy to Iraq had failed. To most Americans, who polls showed were fed up and wanted the troops brought home, the moment at hand was of tragedy, beyond which would be only loss.

In that moment, what Bush then announced seemed an act of defiance, if not outright stupidity. Instead of reducing troop levels in Iraq, he was increasing them by what would eventually be thirty thousand. “The vast majority of them—five brigades—will be deployed to Baghdad,” he said, and continued: “Our troops will have a well-defined mission: to help Iraqis clear and secure neighborhoods, to help them protect the local population, and to help ensure that the Iraqi forces left behind are capable of providing the security that Baghdad needs.”

That was the heart of his new strategy. It was a counterinsurgency strategy that the White House initially called “the New Way Forward,” but that quickly became known as “the surge.”

The surge, then. As far as the majority of the American public was concerned, those additional troops would be surging straight into the tragic moment of the war, but as Bush finished speaking, and rumors about the identities of the five brigades began circulating, and their identities started becoming public, and the official announcement came that one would be a brigade that was about to deploy from Fort Riley, Kansas, Kauzlarich saw it differently.

A battalion commander in the thick of the war: that was who he was going to be. Because of strategic disasters, public revulsion, political consequences, and perfect timing, he and his soldiers weren’t going to be protecting supply convoys. They were going to Baghdad. Meaning restored, Kauzlarich closed his eyes and thanked God.

Three weeks later, his departure now a few days away, his hand a bit sore from being grabbed so many times by people shaking it and hanging on to it and looking in his eyes as if they were already trying to remember the last time they saw Ralph Kauzlarich, Kauzlarich sat down in his house to fill out a booklet called the Family Contingency Workbook.

I want to be buried / cremated.

“Buried,” he wrote.

Location of cemetery:

“West Point,” he wrote.

Personal effects I want buried with me:

“Wedding band,” he wrote.

In came his wife, Stephanie, who had been in another part of the house with their three young children. They had met twenty years before, when both were at West Point, and he had sensed immediately that this tall, athletic, chin-out woman suddenly in front of him was someone who would be able to hold her own against him. She was a catch, and he knew it. He considered himself one, too, and his very first words to her, spoken with utter confidence, were, “You can call me The Kauz.” The Kauz—to him, it sounded so much better than Ralph, and so much better than his full last name, which some people properly pronounced as KAUZ-la-rich, and some people mispronounced. Now, so many years later, years in which Stephanie had never, not even once, called him The Kauz, she looked at what he had written down and said, “That’s all you want to be buried with?”

“Yes,” he said, continuing.

Type of headstone:

“Military,” he wrote.

Scripture you want read:

“Psalm 23,” he wrote.

Music you want played:

“Something upbeat,” he wrote.

“Ralph, upbeat music?” Stephanie asked.

Meanwhile, in other parts of Fort Riley, the other soldiers were getting ready, too. Finishing wills. Designating powers of attorney. Working their way down final medical checklists. Hearing. Heart rate. Blood pressure. Blood type. They went to health briefings and were told: Wash your hands. Drink bottled water. Wear cotton underwear. Watch out for rats. They put on their body armor and stood outside in a zero-degree wind chill for inspection and were told that the straps weren’t tight enough, the ceramic plates intended to stop high-powered sniper bullets were an inch off, their compression bandages and tourniquets were stored in the wrong place, they were effectively dead men. They went to a briefing on stress management and suicide prevention and were told by a chaplain, “This is important. If you are not ready to die, you need to get there. If you are not ready to die, you need to be. If you are not ready to see your friends die, you need to be.”

And were they ready? Who knew? For most of them, this would be their first deployment, and for many it would be their first time away from the United States. The average age in the battalion was nineteen. Could a nineteen-year-old be ready? What about a nineteen-year-old soldier named Duncan Crookston, who was in his little apartment with his mother and father and new, nineteen-year-old wife, packing his things, when the phone rang? “Buried,” he said. “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” he said. Ten minutes later he hung up. “Just planned my funeral,” he nonchalantly told his curious parents and new wife, and was Duncan Crookston ready?

What about the youngest soldier in the battalion, who was only seventeen? “Roger that,” he said, whenever he was asked if he was ready, but when rumors about the deployment first began to circulate, he had taken aside his platoon sergeant, a staff sergeant named Frank Gietz, to ask how he’d be able to handle killing someone. “Put it in a dark place while you’re there,” Gietz had said.

So was a seventeen-year-old ready?

For that matter, was Gietz, who had been to Iraq twice, was one of the oldest soldiers in the battalion, and knew better than anyone the meaning of “a dark place”?

Was Jay Cajimat, who in ten weeks was going to be remembered by his mother in the local paper as a “soft-hearted boy”?

Didn’t matter. They were going.

They packed ammunition and photographs and first-aid kits and candy. They went into town for the last time and in a few cases drank too much, in a few other cases went AWOL to see girlfriends, and in at least one case got married. Five days before departure, Kauzlarich studied a list of soldiers who wouldn’t be able to go. Seven needed some sort of surgery. Two were about to become fathers. One had an infant in intensive care. Two were in jail. Nine were, for various reasons, as Kauzlarich put it, “mentally incapable of doing what we’re about to do.” But most were eager to do what they were about to do, were impatient, even, and said so with certainty. “It’s the decisive point of the fight,” one soldier explained, foot tapping, head nodding, practically vibrating. “This is the chance to win it.”

Four days until departure:

Kauzlarich gathered the battalion in a field behind headquarters to explain where in Baghdad they would be based. It had snowed, and it was cold, and the sun was going down as he said that they soon would be near Sadr City, Baghdad’s infamous slum and a center of the insurgency. The soldiers ringed him and pressed closer to hear, and as he raised his voice and said the words “a nice, little, mean, nasty area,” they echoed off the ice and the surrounding buildings, making this place feel even chillier than it was.