The Good Soldiers (9 page)

“Fucking knuckleheads,” Cummings said.

In walked Stevens, Xylocained, stitched up, swollen, and on Percocet, to tell Kauzlarich that he had been taking cover behind walls, moving around, trying to do everything right. “I turned around and pow,” he said, all mumbly.

“You
did
do everything right,” Kauzlarich said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

In walked Zappa, the two holes in him plugged and stitched, to say that, thanks to God, and Jesus, and a wife who tithes and sings hymns and reads the Bible for two hours a day, sometimes three, he was fine.

“Fucking heroes,” Command Sergeant Major McCoy said to the two of them.

Now Stevens excused himself to go outside and call his wife.

“I got shot in the fucking mouth,” he said when she answered, his eyes suddenly wet.

Back inside, meanwhile, Kauzlarich reviewed the day as he prepared to write a report about it that would go to brigade first, and then up the line from there.

“Overall, it was a good day,” he said.

“We cleared what we wanted to clear.

“We better understand Kamaliyah, a city we have to control.

“We identified our enemy, including the brigade’s high-value target number one.

“We found Bravo Company a new COP.

“We had three close calls, and the battalion reacted very well to them.

“The staff fought well from here, and they fought very well out there, which only makes them stronger.

“So today was a very good day.”

A week later, the news on Emory wasn’t at all encouraging. He had been airlifted to a hospital in Germany and was now in a coma, on life support. There had also been an increase in roadside bombs since the operation, due largely to the high-value target they’d gone after who afterward had been overheard saying angrily over his phone that he was going to put IEDs everywhere.

And perhaps he had, because soon after that conversation a soldier from another battalion who was driving into Kamaliyah with a load of blast walls for the COP lost both of his legs when his truck was hit by an EFP. There were mortar attacks on the COP, too, one of which slightly injured three soldiers from an engineering battalion and one from the 2-16.

Nonetheless, the COP was finished—one more COP by which to gauge the success of the surge—and on May 7, Kauzlarich returned to Kamaliyah to see it.

As usual, before leaving, Nate Showman gathered other soldiers in the convoy to brief them on the latest intelligence reports. He had been awake since before dawn, when an IED had blown up outside the FOB on Route Pluto as soldiers from another battalion rolled by in a tank. Badness circling, closer and closer—that’s how 2-16 soldiers were starting to feel. Now they watched Showman trace a road on a map he was holding. “First Street is closed off because of an IED. First Street is black. We’re not going that way,” he said. Next he pointed to a spot on the edge of the FOB. “Two days ago, on the fifth, this guard tower on the very northernmost section of the FOB was engaged. One round went right through the ballistic glass, impacted on the right side of one of the guards’ heads. All it did was hit his Kevlar,” his helmet. “He received minor scratches from it, will be all right.” Next he pointed to a spot on Route Pluto. “Hey, that thing that woke us up this morning was One-eight hitting an IED just north of Checkpoint Five-fifteen.”

“On Pluto?” a soldier said.

“No shit?” another said.

“It hit a tank. The thing blew up, and they just burned right on through. That tank didn’t even stop rolling,” Showman said. “The bigger thing for us is the fact that in the last three days there have been about six EFPs on Route Predators, right up by Kamaliyah.”

“Right where we’re heading,” another soldier said.

“Yeah,” Showman said.

They decided to bypass Predators and take Berm Road, the only other route into Kamaliyah, which was the elevated dirt road that Cummings had been on the day he first went to see Bob. No road felt worse to travel than Berm Road. There were only so many points to climb onto it and drop off of it, and once up there, the feeling was of being utterly exposed and vulnerable, that the places to hide a bomb were limitless, including in the soft dirt underneath. The surrounding landscape didn’t help, either: pools of fetid water, dead animals, vast piles of trash being picked through by families and dogs, grotesque pieces of twisted metal that in the dust clouds kicked up by the convoy reminded some soldiers of pictures they’d seen of the wreckage of the World Trade Center after 9/11. On Berm Road, Iraq could seem not only lost, but irredeemable.

But on this day it was the better way. As the convoy inched along, reports were coming in of yet another IED explosion on Predators; on Berm, meanwhile, the worst of it was some kids who paused in their trash-picking to throw rocks at the convoy as it passed by them and coated them in dust.

Kauzlarich, looking out the window, was uncharacteristically quiet. He had slept badly and woken uneasily. Something about the day didn’t feel right, he’d said before getting in the Humvee. Once he saw the COP, though, his mood brightened. In a week’s time, it had gone from an abandoned building with nothing inside of it other than a family of squatters to a fully functioning outpost for a company of 120 soldiers. Cots stretched from one end to the other. Generators chugged away so there was electricity. There was a working kitchen, a row of new portable toilets, and gun nests on the roof behind camouflage netting. The whole thing was enclosed in a solid perimeter of high blast walls, and even when Jeff Jager mentioned the isolating effect this was having regarding their relationship with the adjacent neighborhood, it was clear that Kauzla-rich’s confidence about what he was accomplishing in Kamaliyah had returned.

“I’d say about forty percent of the people who live around here are gone “Jager said.

“Forty percent?” Kauzlarich said.

Jager nodded.

“They’ll be back,” Kauzlarich said.

“Maybe,” Jager said.

“Six weeks, they’ll be back,” Kauzlarich said, and soon after that he was again in his Humvee, now passing the spaghetti factory, now passing the little house that still showed no signs of life, now climbing back up onto Berm Road to leave Kamaliyah—and that’s when the EFP exploded.

And was he in the midst of saying something when it happened? Was he looking at something specific? Was he thinking of something in particular? His wife? His children?The COP?The shitters? Was he singing to himself, as he had done earlier, when the convoy was leaving Rustamiyah and he sang, to no recognizable tune, just sang the words he had been thinking, “Oh, we’re gonna go to Kamaliyah, to see what kind of trouble we can get in today”?

boom.

It wasn’t that loud.

It was the sound of something being ripped, as if the air were made of silk.

It was so sudden that at first it was a series of questions, none of which made any sense: What was that flash? Why is it white out? What is that shudder moving through me? What is that sound? Why is there an echo inside of me? Why is it gray out? Why is it brown out?

And then the answer:

“Fuck,” said Kauzlarich.

“Fuck,” said the gunner.

“Fuck,” said the driver.

“Fuck,” said Showman.

The smoke cleared. The dirt finished falling. Thoughts slowed. Breathing returned. Shaking began. Eyes focused on arms: there. Hands: there. Legs: there. Feet: there.

All there.

“We’re okay,” Kauzlarich said.

“We’re good,” Showman said.

It had come from the left.

“Stay put,” Kauzlarich said.

It had come from the left, where someone had stood watching while holding a trigger.

“Look for secondary,” Kauzlarich said.

It had come from the left, where someone had stood watching while holding a trigger and had pressed it a tenth of a second too early or a tenth of a second too late, because the main charge of the EFP passed through the small gap in between Kauzlarich’s Humvee and the one in front of it. And though there were flat tires and cracked windows and a few holes here and there from secondary effects of the explosion, all of the soldiers were okay, except for the shaking, and blinking, and headaches, and anger that began to rise in their throats.

“Fucking dirty cocksucker,” one soldier said as the convoy moved off of Berm Road and into a place safe enough for the medic to check eyes for signs of concussions and ears for hearing loss.

“When it blew up, everything turned black,” another soldier said.

“I just saw a bunch of dust.”

“Everything was like fucking crazy.”

“I was shaking like a fucking . . .”

“We’re alive, guys. That’s the name of the fucking game.”

“. . . like a fucking . . .”

“Trust me. The situation could be a lot fucking worse.”

“It’s luck. It’s fucking luck. That’s all it is.”

“I can tell you I’ll be glad when these days are done for me. Fuck this shit.”

“All right. We’re going to stay focused. We’re in a war,” Kauzlarich said, but he was shaken, too, and now, as the convoy limped away from Kamaliyah through a maze of dirt trails and more trash mounds, everything was anger, everything was fucking, everything was fuck.

The fucking dirt.

The fucking wind.

The fucking stink.

They passed a fucking water buffalo.

They passed a fucking goat.

They passed a fucking man on a fucking bicycle and didn’t give a fuck when he began coughing from the fucking dust.

This fucking country.

They neared a child who stood by herself waving. She had filthy hair and a filthy face and was wearing a filthy red dress, the only bit of color visible at the moment in this entire place, and as she kept waving at the convoy, and now at Kauzlarich himself, he had a decision to make.

He stared out his window.

He raised his hand slowly.

He waved at the fucking child.

4

JUNE 30, 2007

So America has sent reinforcements to help the Iraqis secure their population,
go after the terrorists, insurgents, and militias that are inciting sectarian violence,
and get the capital under control. The last of these reinforcements arrived in
Iraq earlier this month, and the full surge has begun . . . We’re still at the
beginning of this offensive, but we’re seeing some hopeful signs.
—
GEORGE W. BUSH
,
June 30, 2007

O
n June 5, at 10:55 at night, a $150,000 Humvee with five soldiers inside rolled into a sewage trench, turned upside down, and sank.

It happened in Kamaliyah, where uncovered, unlined trenches ran along every street and passed in front of every house. At some point after the war began, the United States had decided to show its good intentions by fixing this, appropriating $30 million to bring sewers to Kamaliyah. It was an ambitious project involving Turkish subcontractors and Iraqi sub-subcontractors that by the time Kauzlarich arrived had come to a dead halt because of corruption and incompetence. Kauzlarich was given the task of resuscitating the project, which, in keeping with his character, he had taken on enthusiastically. The great leaders of previous wars may not have had to do sewers, but Kauzlarich did in his version, and in mid-May, at a meeting with a few of Kamaliyah’s leaders, he’d made clear his desire to succeed. “I know about half the workers working on the sewage project are militants, and they’ve got a choice. They can either work with me or against me. If they work against me, I will arrest them. If they sabotage the sewage project, I will hunt them down and kill them,” he’d said.

Michael and Maria Emory

Point made, the project resumed. Still, on June 5, Kamaliyah was a long way from having sewers, which meant that the trenches were filled to their rims as a convoy pulled out of the COP on a lights-out mission to rendezvous with an informant.

“Go right! Go right!” one of the soldiers in the last Humvee yelled to the driver, who was fiddling with his night-vision goggles, or NODs, as they rounded a corner, but it was too late.

The Humvee began to slide into the trench. Then it flipped. Then it sank. Then it began filling up.

Four of the soldiers scrambled out a door and got out of the trench relatively dry, but the gunner was trapped inside. “He was yelling,” Staff Sergeant Arthur Enriquez would remember afterward, and if there was any hesitation about what to do next, it was only because, “I didn’t want to jump in the poo water.”

And then?

“I jumped into the damn poo water.”

Down he went, into the crew compartment, where the gunner was stuck in his harness straps, his head partly in the sewage water, which continued to seep in. Enriquez got one arm around the gunner and lifted his head higher, and with his other hand began cutting away the straps. Now he and the gunner were nearly submerged as he pushed the straps away and began pulling at the gunner’s body armor. Now they were completely submerged as he pulled the gunner’s armor away. He squeezed his eyes shut. He wondered how long he could hold his breath. He felt for the gunner’s waist and began pulling. Everything was slippery. He tried again. He got the gunner to the door. He kept pulling, and slipping, and pulling, and now they were out the door, out of the Humvee, out of the sewage, and up on the bank, and that’s how this month of hopeful signs began for the 2-16, with two soldiers wiping raw Iraqi sewage out of their eyes and ears and spitting it out of their mouths.