The Good Soldiers (34 page)

The school where the 2-16 had tried to develop adult literacy classes was now reportedly being stocked with weapons for an assault on the COP in Kamaliyah.

The swimming pool that was being built in New Baghdad was now filling not with water but with twenty armed men who had arrived in cars reportedly packed with bombs.

Now, near one of the COPs, a surveillance camera that had once tracked a suspicious man into a field where he proceeded to go to the bathroom now tracked another suspicious man, who squatted against a wall with a weapon and began firing. “So, he’s shooting?” a soldier said. “Not shitting?”

And the answer was that everyone seemed to be shooting.

“Glad we’re giving these people sewers,” Cummings said at one point, when an exploding EFP missed a convoy but severed a water main, creating a giant water geyser that would soon flood parts of Kamaliyah, lead to water shortages, and soften the ground so much that some of the new sewer pipes would collapse. A year before, when Cummings had first seen Kamaliyah and peered into a hole in the ground at the cadaver named Bob, he had talked of the goodness here and the need to act morally. “Otherwise we’re not human,” he had said. Eight months before, when he had bent some rules to get Izzy’s injured daughter into the aid station and had watched her smile as Izzy kissed her, he had said, “Man, I haven’t felt this good since I got to this hellhole.” Now, watching the water geyser, he simply said, “Stupid people. I hate ’em. Stupid fucking scumbags.”

“This is the evolution of democracy, what’s going on right now,” Kauzlarich said at another point, late that night, searching for an explanation, and the following morning, as he and most of his soldiers prepared to go out to get things back under control, he was even more certain that his explanation was right. “This has to happen. This whole uprising has to happen. It’s got to happen,” he said as he got dressed. A year before, when he had tried to envision the moment he was now in, he had made a prediction. “Before we leave, I’m going to do a battalion run. A task force run. In running shorts and T-shirts,” he had said, tracing a route on the map in his office that went from Route Pluto to Route Predators and back to the FOB. As it turned out, that route would be the route that he and his soldiers would follow today as they tried to restore some order, and as he covered himself with body armor and double-checked the ammunition in his gun, he said, “This is the last stand of the Shi’a populace. That’s what this is. This is Jaish al Mahdi’s last stand, and that’s why we gotta get ’em. Now is the time. Everybody has their last stand. The Japanese had their last stand. The Germans had their last stand. Everybody has their last stand. And now they’re gonna die.”

He walked out from his trailer and headed down the dirt road toward the operations center, where some soldiers who were part of his personal security detail were watching video images of roaming gangs and new tire fires along Route Predators. “This is where we’re going?” one of them said. “This isn’t fucking funny. This is what we’re driving through?”

“Game on,” Kauzlarich said as he approached them, and then he saw Izzy, who would be going, too, standing on the fringes, smoking a cigarette down to the filter.

“Izzy, how are you today?
As-Salamu Alaykum? Shaku maku?”

“I don’t know what the fuck is going on,” Izzy said.

“What the fuck! What’s wrong with your people? They’re out of control,” Kauzlarich said, and when he saw Izzy looking at him with a confused smile, he tried to reassure him. “Today will be a good day,” he said. “You got earplugs?”

Izzy shook his head.

“You want some?” Kauzlarich said. “Save your hearing. Might need to.”

He laughed and handed Izzy an extra pair he had, while one of his soldiers, Sergeant Barry Kitchen, watched from a distance.

“He thinks he’s gonna change the country. He thinks he’s gonna change all this. But he’s not,” Kitchen said. “I mean, it’s good to believe, to a point, but when it comes to this? The whole country falling apart pretty much? One guy’s not gonna fix it.”

And off they went.

Up Route Pluto.

“I anticipate small-arms fire and possibly EFPs,” Kauzlarich radioed in.

Onto Route Predators and toward the burning tires.

“I’ve got to piss. I’ll put one out personally,” he said now.

Around the burning tires and into a storm of gunfire.

“We’re going to go ahead and turn around. We’ve taken a considerable amount of small-arms fire.”

Onto another road and into an exploding EFP that passed between two vehicles.

“No worries. We’re continuing movement.”

Onto another road and into a second EFP explosion that went through the back of the Humvee directly in front of him, ruining it and just missing the soldiers in the rear seat.

“No casualties. The vehicle’s jacked up. We are going to drag it out of here.”

And on it went, not just for Kauzlarich, but for every convoy and at every COP. Gunfire. Mortars. RPGs. EFPs. “Our worst nightmare is coming true. We have two platoons in heavy contact,” Cummings said at one point as he monitored radio transmissions that were at times inaudible because of all the gunfire. He tried to get some Apache gunships in to help. No luck. The 2-16 soldiers were on their own. They drove up streets and down streets. They got shot at, and they shot back. “Stay slow, stay low, and if you see someone with a weapon, fucking drop him. Don’t even ask questions,” had been Kauzlarich’s instructions, and that was what they did: off of rooftops, in streets, behind buildings. But the Iraqis kept coming and coming. They shot at convoys and launched rockets at Rustamiyah, and when an Iraqi Army Humvee was hit and burst into flames, they swarmed it, reached into the fire, and ran off with whatever they could, even the portable stretcher.

“Wow,” Kauzlarich said to Cummings when he finally made it back at sunset and walked into the operations center. He shook his head, unable to say anything more. He was furious. He and his soldiers had been in two firelights and had been hit with two EFPs. The soldiers who had been in the Humvee that was crippled in the second explosion, including Sergeant Kitchen, were at the aid station, being examined for signs of hearing damage and concussions. Izzy was there, too, with a terrible headache, looking sad and old, and so Kauzlarich found another interpreter to telephone a sheik who was one of the most powerful in Kamaliyah. “Tell him I’m going to blow up all the pump stations, and the sewage project will be no more,” he said.

“Are you joking?” the interpreter asked.

“No. I am serious. Tell him I am going to destroy the Kamaliyah sewage project unless the people calm down. I will blow up your project and you will live in shit for the rest of your life.”

He started to say more but was interrupted by the warning siren going off.

Three rockets. Three explosions.

“We need to take a fucking knee,” he said.

So, on March 27, they took a fucking knee, staying on the FOB or in COPs “to transition from Counterinsurgency Operations to High Intensity Combat Operations.” That would be the wording in an official synopsis submitted afterward of all that had happened so far and would happen next. It was a lengthy document devoid of any emotion—making no mention, for instance, of the soldier who spent the day double-sandbagging the entrance to his room while saying over and over, “God, I hate this place,” as if reciting a prayer—a document that boiled down to this: even though they were one day closer to being done, they weren’t done yet. There was going to be more.

On the twenty-seventh, with the Americans mostly tucked away, the targets became the Iraqis who had worked most closely with them and now existed with the indelible taint of that contact. A call came in about Mr. Timimi, the civil manager. “JAM wants to burn down his house, and he wants help,” the interpreter who took the call told Kauzlarich.

“We’re not gonna protect his house. We don’t do houses,” Kauzlarich said.

Another call came, this one relaying a message from Colonel Qasim, who said most of his 550-member National Police battalion, known as the 1-4-1, were throwing down weapons, changing out of their uniforms, and defecting. He needed help, too.

“If One-four-one is going to surrender, no sense going in and saving their ass,” Kauzlarich said.

Another call: Timimi again. “Mr. Timimi wants to say thank you,” the interpreter told Kauzlarich.

“For what?”

“For letting JAM burn his house down.”

Another call from Qasim: a mob was advancing on the District Area Council building, where his office was, and he was afraid. “He says they’re almost at the fence and they will kill him.”

“No. They won’t kill him. Tell him he has to defend himself,” Kauzla-rich said. He then radioed Ricky Taylor, the commander of Alpha Company, to go to the DAC and rescue his friend forever who had given him a birthday party, and as a platoon of Taylor’s soldiers shot their way toward Qasim, Kauzlarich made a new prediction: “The whole fucking city is going to erupt tomorrow.”

But it was only the Shiite parts of Baghdad that continued to erupt. The morning of March 28 came with fresh fires and explosions, and after more than four hundred days here, there was a growing sense of bewilderment within the soldiers. What were they supposed to think of what was happening? How were they to make sense of it? How could they shape it into something understandable? Should it be by pure numbers? If so, the numbers added up to the most attacks on them ever, by far. Every convoy was being attacked now. It was June again, except doubled. Should it be by examples? Because if it was examples, here was one: a report just coming in that the Iraqi spokesman for the surge, a pleasant man who was often at press conferences with U.S. officials saying how well things were progressing, had been kidnapped by insurgents who had killed his bodyguards, burned down his house, and may have hidden him somewhere within the garbage piles and water buffalo herds of Fedaliyah.

Fedaliyah: once a shithole, always a shithole, and now a platoon was headed toward it to search for a spokesman of the surge. Kamaliyah: that was the shithole where the soldiers had tried the hardest and the violence was now the worst. Mashtal, Al-Amin, Mualameen: shithole, shithole, and shithole, all of them a warscape now, with streets so empty and life so hidden that, for a moment anyway, the most overwhelming thing about all of this was the silence it had brought. It was the silence of bending glass. It was the hush on a Kamaliyah rooftop just before Sergeant Emory received a bullet to his head. It was the quiet of a Kansas snowfall just before some soldiers began to cheer. It was silence just waiting to be broken, like the silence just before Joshua Reeves said, “Oh my God,” like just before Duncan Crookston said, “I love my wife,” and so it was broken now with explosion after explosion, all directed at Kauzlarich and his soldiers as they maneuvered under a sky speckled with high white clouds and spreading black ones beneath.

Almost everyone was out now, taking fire, dodging RPGs, finding IEDs and EFPs, and somehow, so far, not getting hurt. Kauzlarich was in a convoy headed toward Qasim, whose 550 police were now down to half that and dropping. Meanwhile, another National Police battalion that overlapped some of Kauzlarich’s area was reportedly down to almost zero, and its defectors included the commander himself, whose last words, said in a departing rush, were something about JAM surrounding his house, his family was inside, he had to go, family first, apologies. Qasim, though, was hanging in, his fear gone, his defiance back, and ever so slowly, Kauzlarich and his convoy moved toward him. They found one EFP and detonated it. They received a report that another was hidden in a speed bump somewhere, and here came a speed bump. Here, now, around a corner, coming from the direction of Kamaliyah, careened a van with a coffin strapped to the top. Here, farther along, were a woman and three children, outside, unprotected, walking, crying their eyes out. Here came another speed bump. Here was another family—father, mother, two children—with filthy faces, in filthy clothing, huddled against a filthy wall on a filthy street, and was this the family Kauzlarich had in mind when he was still at Fort Riley talking about success? “The end state, in my opinion, the end state in Iraq would be that Iraqi children can go out on a soccer field and play safely. Parents can let their kids go out and play, and they don’t have a concern in the world. Just like us,” he had said, and then asked: “Is that possible?”

It was hope as a question, forgivably sweet, and yet even now, with the answer huddled in front of him against a wall, and now, at sunset, with more of the answer exploding around him in the form of a mortar attack that bloodied a few of his soldiers from flying shrapnel, and now, in the dark, as the attacks continued and he prepared to spend the night on Qasim’s couch, he got on the radio and said to his company commanders, “Overall today, a very successful day out on the battlefield.” They were listening to him in COPs that were being mortared and fired upon, at checkpoints abandoned by Iraqis, where they were bracing for imminent attacks, and at the FOB, where the incoming sirens had been sounding all day. “Keep doing what you’re doing,” he continued. “Maintain vigilance. Remember the three Ps: patience, perseverance, and paranoia. There’s a lot of bad guys out here that are trying to get some licks in on us. By the grace of God, today they weren’t successful. We, on the other hand, were very successful, but our luck can run out. So just keep doing what you’re doing and I have negative further. Over.”

Over, and then out, and then one of the soldiers who had been listening said, “Well, this answers the question. They weren’t attacking because one guy told them not to attack.”

“If it wasn’t for the cease-fire, it would have been like this the whole time,” another soldier said.

“If the cease-fire hadn’t been going on, all the surge would have meant is more soldiers to die,” another said.

“The only thing the past few days have proved to me is that after a year they can still do whatever they please, whenever they please,” another said.

But Kauzlarich remained adamant. The surge
was
working, and this, now, was the proof. “They wouldn’t be fighting if we weren’t winning,” he had said in the worst of June. “They wouldn’t have a reason to. It’s a measure of effectiveness.” He believed this even more stubbornly now, on March 29, as the fighting grew worse and he rose from Qasim’s couch and ever so carefully picked his way through the depressing landscape of eastern Baghdad back to the FOB.