The Good Soldiers (5 page)

Views from the right rear window of a Humvee, Baghdad, Iraq

For now, Kauzlarich thought that giving soccer balls to Iraqi children who would run up to his Humvee screaming, “Mister, mister,” was having an effect. A child would take home a soccer ball; his parents would ask where it came from; he would say, “the Americans”; the parents would be delighted; their confidence would increase; they would be more willing to make the difficult decisions of reconciliation; Baghdad would become secure; democracy in Iraq would thrive; the war would be won. Eventually, Kauzlarich would give up on soccer balls.

For now, no one touched the tape dispenser. Eventually, Cummings would begin swatting flies just hard enough to stun them, stick them to a piece of tape, and drop them alive into his trash can, which would be something that
did
have an effect. “I
hate
flies,” he would say each time he did this.

Eventually, the book would become covered with dust. But in these days after Cajimat, it was still something that was referred to, enough so that Cummings had bookmarked page 1-29 with a piece of paper on which he had written: “Are We Winning Table.”

The book, released just before the 2-16 deployed, was the military’s first update to its counterinsurgency strategy in twenty years. When he announced the surge, Bush had made it clear that counterinsurgency was now what the war was about, and to the extent that a war could have an instruction book, that’s what the field manual was. It was 282 pages of lessons, all urging soldiers to “focus on the population, its needs, and its security” as the best way to defeat the enemy, rather than by killing their way to victory. Control the population, win the war. Win the people, win the war. To the soldiers of the 2-16, this was an interesting turn of events. “Remember, we are an infantry battalion,” Cummings said one day. “Our task and purpose is to close with and destroy the enemy. We are the only force designed for this. Armor stands off and they kill from a distance. Aviation kills from a distance. The infantryman goes in and kills with his hands, if necessary.” The manual got even more interesting under the section called “Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency,” which sounded suspiciously Zen-like. “Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is.” “Some of the best weapons for counterinsurgents do not shoot.” “Sometimes, the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be.”

Privately, Cummings wondered whether this was the type of war Kauzlarich would want to fight. “He’s a soldier. All he is
is
a soldier. He’s an instrument of war, and he’s looking for that fight, and that’s why I think he is somewhat frustrated in the fact that he’s not in the clean war, where he can be the leader up front—‘Follow me, men’—because this war doesn’t dictate it. This war dictates drinking
chai,
handshaking, being political. And I think that’s where he’s a little uncomfortable. Because he’s the guy at the front of the formation who can run the battalion into the ground, if necessary. Literally: ‘Follow me.’”

But Kauzlarich, at least at this point, insisted that he loved being part of the strategy. “You know what’s funny? This is what I always wanted to do. I always wanted to be a soldier and statesman together,” he said one day. He was in his office, looking at a wall map that showed the 2-16’s AO. Some people called the area New Baghdad. Some called it Nine Nissan, for the ninth of April, the day Baghdad fell. Kauzlarich had his own name for it. “This place is a shithole,” he said, “but it has so much potential. I’ve often thought, let’s take Fedaliyah”—he pointed to one of the worst neighborhoods in the AO—“and let’s bulldoze the whole town. In six months, I could have an entire city rebuilt. It would have electricity. It would have running fresh water. It would have sewerage. It would have new schools. It would have houses that were built to some sort of safety code. And then we move to Kamaliyah and do the same thing there. Rebuild the whole darn place.”

The map he was looking at, composed of satellite imagery, was extraordinary in its detail. It showed Fedaliyah, Kamaliyah, Mualameen, Al-Amin, Mashtal, and every other neighborhood in the AO, building by building and street by street, each of which had been given an American name. That wide street with the waterway running down the middle of it, which Iraqis called Canal Road, was, to the Americans, Route Pluto; the busy road it intersected with, which was constantly being seeded with hidden bombs, was Route Predators; the one where Cajimat died was Route Denham; and the skinny one that soldiers tried to avoid because of its ambush possibilities was Dead Girl Road.

Where did the names come from? Who had the dead girl been? How had the dead girl died? This far into the war, no one seemed to care. Sometimes anything more than an assumption is a waste of time in Iraq; and anyway, the names were fixed now, not just in 2-16’s AO but throughout all of Baghdad, which the map showed as well. Neighborhood by neighborhood, there was Baghdad in its entirety for Kauzlarich to consider—the east side, which was largely Shi’a after several years of violent ethnic and religious cleansing that had been brought on by the war; and the west side, which was largely Sunni. The west side contained elements of al Qaeda, and the east side contained the insurgent armies of the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, called the Jaish al Mahdi, or, in American-speak, JAM. The west side had suicide bombers killing American troops, and the east side had a particularly lethal type of IED called an explosively formed penetrator, or EFP, which was the type of bomb that had so easily penetrated Cajimat’s Humvee. The east side was the 2-16’s side, and every day that Kauzlarich looked at the map it got uglier and uglier, especially the way the Tigris River, which runs north—south and divides the city in half, curves to the west at one point and then curves back to the east, creating an elongated peninsula that is politely referred to as “teardrop shaped.” Kauzlarich wasn’t always polite, though. “It’s the perfect metaphor for this place,” he said, staring at the way the peninsula seemed to be inserting itself into the west side of the city. “Iraq fucking itself.”

His war, then, would be to take all of this on—the JAM, the EFPs, the mounds of garbage, the running sewage, the whatever else—and fix it. So far, no one had been able to do this, but he seemed so confident that he made a prediction. “Before we leave, I’m going to do a battalion run. A task force run. In running shorts and T-shirt.” He traced the route he had in mind on the map. Up Pluto, along First Street, up toward Den-ham, over toward Predators, and back.

“That’s my goal—without taking any casualties,” he said, and to that end, he was willing to try anything that might fall under counter-insurgency strategy, including one highlighted on page 1-29 of the field manual, which read, “Conduct effective, pervasive, and continuous information operations.” Hidden away on the FOB was a U.S.-funded radio station, and that’s where Kauzlarich headed late one afternoon, to speak to the residents of his nice, little, mean, nasty area via PEACE 106 FM.

The air was dusty as usual, and the wind, from the west, carried the scent of burning plastic as he walked past a latrine trailer, under which lived a feral cat with grossly swollen testicles. The fact that the cat was alive at all surely said something about resiliency in a country where life was down to the survival level. There were plenty of mice and rats on the FOB to kill, but there were things that wanted to kill the cat, too, such as a fox that could be seen from time to time trotting by with something writhing in its mouth and at other times standing with its teeth showing as it watched soldiers entering and exiting the latrines.

Next he walked past the mooring site for a bright white blimp called an aerostat, which floated high above the FOB with a remote-controlled camera that could be focused on whatever might be happening a thousand feet below. Day or night, the aerostat was up there, looking down and around, as were pole-mounted cameras, pilotless drones, high-flying jets, and satellites, making the sky feel at times as if it were stitched all the way up to the heavens with eyes. There were helicopters, too, armed with thirty-millimeter cannons and high-resolution cameras that could focus tightly on whatever was about to be shot, which one day was a dead water buffalo that had been spotted on its side with wires sticking out of its rear end. Concerned that an IED had been hidden inside the water buffalo’s rectum, the helicopter moved in for a closer look as its camera recorded what came next. There was the water buffalo. There were the wires. There was a dog trotting up to the water buffalo’s rear. “Be advised, there’s a dog licking the IED,” the pilot said, and then he opened fire.

Next Kauzlarich walked past the PX, which would soon have to close temporarily after a rocket crashed through the roof and exploded next to a display rack of
Maxim
magazines, and then he entered a ruined, four-story building that once had been a hospital.

The studio was on the top floor, up where the workers lived, those who had come to Rustamiyah from Nepal and Sri Lanka to clean the latrines, sweep up the endless dust, sleep six to a room, and listen to mournful songs on tinny speakers purchased from the sad little shops on the hospital’s first floor. The doors to these rooms were splintered and scuffed, and behind one of them was the radio staff. One of them was a local Iraqi whom the military was paying $88,000 a year to run the radio station. He introduced himself as Mohammed and then confided that Mohammed was a fake name he used to shield his identity. The other man was Mark, an interpreter, also from Baghdad, who confided that his name wasn’t really Mark.

“Dear listeners. Welcome to a new show,” Mohammed, or whoever he was, said to whoever might have been out there listening to PEACE 106 FM, and that’s how the first of what would be dozens of radio shows began. It was a complicated process. In Arabic, Mohammed said to his listeners, “Our first question to Colonel Kauzlarich is about the situation nowadays in New Baghdad,” which Mark then translated into English, to which Kauzlarich said in Arabic,
“Shukran jazilan,
Mohammed”— “Thank you very much, Mohammed”—and in English went on from there:

“Approximately eight weeks ago there was a great deal of crime,” he said. “There was sectarian violence. There were numerous murders. There were many bombs going off, roadside bombs, IEDs, EFPs, and also car bombs that were killing many innocent civilians. Today that does not exist. Crime is down by over eighty percent. The people of Nine Nissan are beginning to feel safe.”

He waited for Mark, or whoever Mark was, to translate what he’d said, and then continued: “My organization is known as Task Force Ranger, which is approximately eight hundred of the finest American soldiers. Everything that they do is in a controlled and disciplined manner. And one of the things I stress that they do as their commander is to go out and talk to the Iraqi people and determine what their feelings are, what their greatest fears are, and how we can best assist them and the Iraqi Security Forces in developing a very secure environment for them to live in.”

Again he waited for Mark to translate, and continued: “Bottom line is, the current situation is good—but it’s not as good as it’s going to be . . .” and on he went for thirty-six minutes until he said, seeking to win over the people,
“Shukran jazilan,”
and Mohammed said,
“Shukranjaz ilan,”
and Kauzlarich said,
“Ma’a sala’ama, sadiqi,”
and Mohammed said,
“Ma’a sala’ama.”

This was war fighting as counterinsurgency, just as it was when, in an attempt to “expand and diversify the host-nation police force,” Kauzlarich met with an Iraqi army officer who was living in an elementary school that the Iraqis had taken over not far from the FOB. The walls were pink. They were decorated with Tweety Bird cutouts. There was a single cot and a small TV hooked up to a satellite dish, and the Iraqi had just brought Kauzlarich an orange soda when from the TV there came some kind of roar.

“Tomorrow, you’re going to begin doing clearance operations?” Kauzlarich asked, ignoring the sound.

“Yes,” said the Iraqi, shifting his eyes from Kauzlarich to the TV, where a movie was playing that showed American soldiers being shot.

“What is your personal assessment of the attitude of the Iraqi people in Baghdad al-Jadida?” Kauzlarich continued.

“Most of the people are from Sadr City,” the Iraqi said, as blood spurted in slow motion, guns blazed in slow motion, and the actor Mel Gibson moved in slow motion. “Every time the Americans put pressure on Sadr City, they run here.”

“What area do you think we should clear next?” Kauzlarich asked, shifting his attention to the TV, too, and then falling silent as he realized the movie was about a famous battle in the Vietnam War that had taken place just a few weeks after he had been born. In so many ways, that was the war that had made him want to be a soldier in this war. It had been the background scenery of his childhood from the day he was born, on October 28, 1965, when the number of dead American troops was at 1,387, to the end of the war in April 1975, when 58,000 were dead and he was nine and a half years old and thinking he would like to be in the army. It wasn’t the deaths or politics that had affected him, but rather a boy’s romanticized visions of courage and duty, especially the scenes he had watched on TV of released POWs in the embrace of weeping families. But even more than those scenes was the Battle of Ia Drang, which began when an outnumbered army battalion was airdropped into the midst of two thousand North Vietnamese soldiers and ended up in a face-to-face fight to the death. Years later, in the army now and studying the mistakes of Vietnam, Kauzlarich had also studied the heroics of Ia Drang, and when the battle was memorialized in a book called
We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young,
he had a copy of it in hand when he one day met the commander of the battalion, Hal Moore, and asked him for advice. “Trust your instincts,” Moore had scribbled in the book. Ever since, Kauzlarich had tried to do just that, and now, how strange, here he was: a battalion commander just as Moore had been, in Iraq watching the movie version of the book about the battle that had helped turn him into what he had become.