The Good Soldiers (4 page)

At the same time, Cajimat’s remains were being prepared for shipment behind the locked doors of a little stand-alone building in which there were sixteen storage compartments for bodies, a stack of vinyl body bags, a stack of new American flags, and two Mortuary Affairs soldiers whose job was to search the remains for anything personal that a soldier might have wanted with him while he was alive.

“Pictures,” one of the soldiers, Sergeant First Class Ernesto Gonzalez, would say later, describing what he has found in uniforms of the bodies he has prepared. “Graduation pictures. Baby pictures. Standing with their family. Pictures of them with their cars.”

“Folded flags,” said his assistant, Specialist Jason Sutton.

“A sonogram image,” Gonzalez said.

“A letter that a guy had in his flak vest,” Sutton said, thinking of the first body he worked on. “‘This is to my family. If you’re reading this, I’ve passed away.’”

“Hey, man. Don’t read no letters,” Gonzalez said.

“It was the only time,” Sutton said. “I don’t read the letters. I don’t look at the pictures. It keeps me sane. I don’t want to know anything. I don’t want to know who you are. I want the bare minimum. If I don’t have to look at it, I won’t. If I don’t have to touch it, I won’t.”

Meanwhile, the Explosive Ordnance Disposal team was finishing its report about the explosion:

“Blast seat measured 8’ x 9’ x 2.5’ and was consistent with 60—80 lb of unknown explosives.”

The platoon leader was writing a statement about what had happened:

“PFC Cajimat was killed on impact and was not able to be pulled from the vehicle.”

The platoon sergeant was writing a statement, too:

“PFC Diaz came running out of the smoke from the explosion. Myself and CPL Chance put him in the back of my truck where CPL Chance treated his wounds. I then saw to the left of the HUMV three soldiers, one being pulled on the ground. I ran to the soldiers and saw it was CPL Pellecchia being dragged, screaming he couldn’t get PFC Cajimat out of the vehicle.”

The battalion doctor was finishing his death report:

“All four limbs burned away, bony stumps visible. Superior portion of cranium burned away. Remaining portion of torso severely charred. No further exam possible due to degree of charring.”

The Pentagon was preparing a news release on what would be the 3,267th U.S. fatality of the war:

“The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

And Kauzlarich, back in his office now, was on the phone with Cajimat’s mother, who was in tears asking him a question:

“Instantly,” he said.

Several days later, Kauzlarich walked to a far corner of FOB and went into a building that was indistinguishable from all the other buildings except for a sign on a blast wall that read, chapel. One last thing to do.

Inside, soldiers were preparing for that night’s memorial service. A slide show of Cajimat was being shown on a screen to the left of the altar. In the center, a few soldiers were making a display out of his boots, his M-4, and his helmet. Sad, sentimental music was playing, something with bagpipes, and Kauzlarich listened in silence, his expression betraying nothing, until Cajimat’s platoon wandered in and took seats.

Diaz, the one who’d come running out of the smoke, his lower leg now filled with shrapnel, was among them, on crutches, and when he took a seat, Kauzlarich sat next to him and asked how he was.

“Yesterday I put on a tennis shoe for the first time,” he said.

“We’ll get you out in the fight again ricky tick,” Kauzlarich promised him, slapping him on the good leg, and when he got up and moved on, Diaz closed his eyes for a moment and sighed.

He next made his way to John Kirby, the staff sergeant who had been in the right front seat of the Humvee, just a foot or so from Cajimat, and whose eyes suggested he was still there.

“How are the burns?” Kauzlarich asked.

“All right,” Kirby said, shrugging as he gave the good soldier’s answer, and then, willing his eyes to be still, he looked directly at Kauzlarich and said, “I mean, it sucks.”

Up on the screen, the pictures of Cajimat continued to rotate.

There he was smiling.

There he was in his body armor.

There he was smiling again.

“I love that picture,” one of the soldiers said, and they were all watching now, chewing gum, picking at fingernails, saying nothing. It was late morning, and even though the chapel was surrounded by blast walls, a few rays of gray light managed to find their way in through the windows, which helped.

That night, though, when the memorial service began, it was different. The light was gone. The chapel was dark. The air didn’t move. Several hundred soldiers sat shoulder to shoulder, and some were crying as the eulogies began. “He was always happy. He had a heart bigger than the sun,” said one soldier, and if that wasn’t sad enough to hear from a nineteen-year-old who ten weeks before had been hollering in some Kansas snow, another said, “He was always there for me. I wish I could have been there for him. I’m sorry.”

Through it all, Kauzlarich sat quietly, waiting for his turn, and when it came, he walked to the lectern and looked in silence at his soldiers, all of whom were looking at him. In this moment, he wanted to say something that would describe Cajimat’s death for them as more than grievous. He had been thinking for several days about what to say, but while it was easy enough to sit in Kansas filled with ham and apple crisp and talk about change with a detached curiosity, now they had lost their first soldier. Their cherries had been popped. As had his.

So he decided to call it what he believed it to be, a rallying point as much as a loss, the point from which to measure everything to come, and said so to the soldiers. “Tonight,” he said, “we take the time to honor Task Force Ranger’s first loss, an unfortunate loss that in a special way made us as an organization whole.”

That’s how he characterized the subtraction of a soldier—as making the 2-16 whole—and the word seemed to hover in the air for a moment before settling onto the quiet men. Among them was Diaz, and as he sat there with shrapnel in his leg, did he believe that, too? Did Kirby, with his twitchy eyes? Did the other two soldiers who’d been in the Humvee, who were both on their way back to the United States with injuries so serious that they would be out of the fight for good?

Did all of them?

Didn’t matter. Of course they did.

That’s what their commander said, and that’s what their commander believed. For two months the soldiers had thought they were in the war, but now they really were in it, Cajimat was the proof, Cajimat was the validation, and as soon as the memorial ended, Kauzlarich hurried back to his office to see what would come next.

He turned on his computer. A fresh e-mail was waiting for him. It was from army headquarters, and it was informing him that in order to better accomplish the strategy of the surge, the 2-16’s deployment was being extended from twelve months to fifteen months.

“That’s okay,” he said.

He read it again.

“More time to win,” he said.

Again.

“It’s all good,” he said, and went into the next room to tell the news to Major Cummings, who was at his desk, lost in thought, a little homesick, and Michael McCoy, his command sergeant major, who was tracking a fly that was crawling across the battalion’s American flag. Red stripe. White stripe. Red stripe. White stripe. Now McCoy reached toward a stack of programs left over from Cajimat’s memorial and grabbed a dirty fly swatter that was resting on top of them. Kauzlarich paused. The fly fell. Then the surge resumed.

2

APRIL 14, 2007

Violence in Baghdad, sectarian violence in Baghdad, that violence
that was beginning
to
spiral out of control, is beginning to subside.
And as the violence decreases, people have more confidence, and
if people have more confidence, they’re then willing to
make difficult decisions of reconciliation necessary for Baghdad
to be secure and this country to survive and thrive as a democracy.
—
GEORGE W. BUSH
,
April 10, 2007

T
he building that Kauzlarich got for his headquarters was the one on the FOB that none of the other battalions had wanted, a two-story box that was being used for storage until the 2-16 took it over. It had deep cracks in several walls from earlier rocket attacks, and whenever a rocket landed nearby, dust clouds would come flying inside. Other battalion commanders on the FOB had offices big enough for sofas and conference tables; Kauzlarich’s office had just enough room for his desk and three metal folding chairs. It wasn’t even an office, really, but a section of an existing room that soldiers had walled off with spare plywood. He squeezed into the space on one side of the plywood, and on the other side were McCoy, Cummings, and four items whose importance would shift back and forth during the course of the deployment.

One was the fly swatter. One was a tape dispenser. One was a book called
Counterinsurgency FM 3-24.
And one was a large cardboard box filled with dozens of deflated soccer balls.