Into the Fray

A new perspective on the Iraq war
The Good Soldiers, by David Finkel, Sarah Crichton Books, 2009.  $26, 287 pp.
David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers has incredible stories at its core, and refines them even further, resulting in an account engrossing through its honesty and simplicity. The Good Soldiers is at once thrilling and horrifying, breathtaking and stomach-wrenching, harrowing and hopeful. It is perhaps the single finest account of modern warfare in recent memory.
Finkel presents a visceral first-hand perspective on the Iraq war, as experienced by the soldiers of the Second Battalion, Sixteenth Infantry Regiment, First Infantry Division, or “the 2-16.” Led by the indefatigably optimistic Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, the battalion’s 800 soldiers find themselves sent to Iraq as a part of President Bush’s all-or-nothing “surge” of American forces in Iraq. Their task is to quell the sectarian violence that has Iraq teetering on civil war, and Kauzlarich is determined to make his battalion a model for counterinsurgency in Iraq.
Finkel’s Iraq war is not the big-picture war of pundits and headlines. It is not the Iraq War of Jane Meyer’s The Dark Side, Tom Ricks’ Fiasco, Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City, or George Packer’s The Assassin’s Gate – other noteworthy products of the conflict. It is not a sweeping account of high -level mistakes; it is not an argument for a new strategy. There is not even a hint of judgment in the entire account, except in that it confirms a truism too easy to recite and too difficult to fully grasp: war is hell, always. Rather than critique, The Good Soldiers shares, with journalistic detail and novelistic suspense, the stories of particular soldiers in a particular situation, and from those stories emerges an indelible image of the consequences, good, bad, and somewhere in between, of the Iraq war.


Each Man’s War
There is the story, for example, of Duncan Crookston, age 19, who loses his legs, his arm, his ears, his nose, and his eyelids; who undergoes months of surgery; whose mother and 19-year-old wife stand heroically at his bedside; who eventually succumbs to infection and dies. There’s Phillip Cantu, who witnessed the capture of Saddam Hussein first-hand, but later takes his own life. There’s Patrick Hanley, whose truck is attacked leaving him unconscious for five weeks and with “long-term memory loss, and dizziness so severe that for the next eight months he would throw up whenever he moved his head, and weight loss that would take him from 203 pounds down to 128.” There’s the 17-year-old soldier who takes aside his platoon sergeant “to ask how he’d be able to handle killing someone.” “Put it in a dark place while you’re there,” the sergeant tells him.
Looming above all these characters is Kauzlarich, who emerges as the most complex and riveting of the soldiers. “He was kind. He was egotistical. He was humane. He was self-absorbed… 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 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.” Kauzlarich’s mantra is “It’s all good,” and he repeats it in the face of death, defeat, and relentless challenge. He repeats it with such perseverance that his soldiers begin to call him “The Lost Kauz” because “of his ability to see what they couldn’t, and to not see what they could.”
Finkel renders the experiences of the 2-16 in powerful, sparse prose. He uses a distinct narrative style, often stating what is about to happen in a single all-encompassing sentence, and then embarking on a lengthy blow-by-blow account. It is a technique that is both slightly melodramatic and highly effective. The fourth chapter opens with typical understatement: “On 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.” But Finkel then elaborates on the events, which culminate in a strikingly pregnant image of “two soldiers wiping raw Iraqi sewage out of their eyes and ears and spitting it out of their mouths.”
Out of Grasp
Indeed, the omnipresence of human waste in The Good Soldiers functions as a sort of metaphor for the situation in which the 2-16 finds itself immersed. Bad situations consistently become worse, and progress consistently proves short-lived. One particularly horrific scene recounts the death of a Reuters photographer and his assistant, whom the 2-16 confuses for insurgents. In the frenzy to kill the photographer, whose camera resembles a weapon, eleven Iraqis are killed, and a small child is wounded. But despite the disastrous consequences, the 2-16 “acted appropriately,” adhering to the rules of engagement laid down by their superiors. And those superiors do make brief appearances: General Petraeus visits the 2-16 and is briefed by an eager-to-impress Kauzlarich. Though he comes off as brilliant and determined, it’s hard to believe that Petraeus can really understand the day-to-day ambiguity and complexity of the 2-16’s operation. After all, it is the foot soldiers, not the generals, who ultimately need to decide if the man in the gun sight is an insurgent or an innocent bystander.
To the extent there is an underlying message in The Good Soldiers, it must be that good men sometimes find themselves in lose-lose situations, and the soldiers of the 2-16 are remarkable both in their courage and integrity. They are patriots, and are willing to lay down their lives for their country. But they are not blind, and many become disillusioned as the casualties mount. Finkel opens each chapter with a quote from George W. Bush “We’re kicking ass,” the president exclaims, a few days before the 2-16 loses two more soldiers to a roadside bomb. The quotes only further emphasize the gaping chasm separating the “War Room” in Washington and the garbage-strewn war zone in Iraq.
Finkel is no pundit. He is a reporter, and an exceedingly talented one. He never once draws attention to himself, to the incredible dangers he himself faced. He does not judge his protagonists. He does not create irony where there is none; plenty presents itself without his help. And yet it is hard to avoid wondering, after an account this precise and unfiltered, how exactly American soldiers ended up in such an egregious war – and how often it will be repeated.