The Good Soldiers
By David Finkel
Hardcover, 304 pages, $26.00
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York
September 15, 2009
Not since Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried has there been such a searing, unembellished and unforgettable look at war as David Finkel's The Good Soldiers, a journal-like account of 15 months spent with the 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment of the 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, aka the 2-16, aka the "Rangers," in a little slice of vicious hell in Baghdad that everyone, even generals, avoids visiting if they can.
Finkel, a Pulitizer-Prize winning staff writer for the Washington Post, documents the ups and downs--mostly downs--of the Rangers as they become the front line in George W. Bush's infamous "surge," following the soldiers from their home base at Ft. Riley, Kansas, to the IED-mined roads of Baghdad. He follows them and he follows them and he follows them ... to their breakdowns, to their hospital bedsides and even, unfortunately, to their graves, in what has to be one of the most astounding, heartbreaking and beautifully written chronicles of men at war ever written.
The book opens in Kansas in April 2007, with the introduction of the Rangers' leader, Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, famous before Finkel ever hooked up with him for his investigation into the death of Pat Tillman, whom he commanded, and for the remark heard around the world: that Tillman's family was having trouble "letting go" of his death, and were continuing to look for answers about it, because they were not Christians.
But that is, relatively speaking, long behind Kauzlarich when The Good Soldiers opens. At long last, he is readying to do what, as a West Point graduate and career officer, he feels he's been trained to do: Lead men into battle. He's upbeat, always upbeat, repetitiously upbeat, in fact, with one of his favorite sayings, "It's all good," echoing in his home, in the Kansas barracks, on the plane over.
"It's all good."
It's all good, even when the 2-16 arrives and it's not the kind of action any of them envisioned, largely defensive, hidden behind concrete bunkers or rolling slowly down the streets as very armored warnings/protectors to the local populace. There's a confusion of mission for many, and feelings of frustration set in. Trained to fight, they're instead given elaborate policing rules and elemental instruction in diplomatic courtesies, unable to tell friend from foe. Kauzlarich gives weekly upbeat interviews on a local radio talk show, doing the public relations gig, talking up safety metrics and school protection. He meets with local leaders in near-ceremonious tea breaks in offices, all of them scheming and demanding and bartering and playing games with the rich (and powerful) Americans.
None of this is what Kauzlarich and his men feel they came here to do, of course. But no one's hurt, no one's dead. Yeah, they have a few scares here and there and a lot of impatience, but for a while, it really is all good. Until, suddenly, it's not. The first soldier dies, and others begin to follow.
Finkel brilliantly captures the irritation the men feel at constraint, and then the terror as they realize what continual targets they are, and then the growing hatred they bear toward the Iraqis they're assigned to "liberate" and "protect." The Humvees that don't keep them safe, the cumbersome armor they wear that doesn't keep them alive, the garbage heaps/dead animals/abandoned vehicles beside the roads, any of which could explode at any moment ... the author catches the dust, the fear, the grit, the loathing, the paranoia, the blood, all of it, and mixes it with the genuine desire these soldiers have to make a difference. The mixture is excruciating--all the hopes and lives on both sides that are ground down, in this day-by-day chronicle, all the dreams that are sacrificed or blown to smithereens. Even those who come out of the deployment undead and unwounded are twisted by the experience in ways only partially glimpsed so soon after their tour.
The chasm between the war as it plays out in the media and the war these soldiers experience in Iraq couldn't be wider. Even when General David Petraeus visits, that gap isn't closed. He's there, he listens, he's whisked away ... and the men he leaves behind see more of him on television at congressional hearings than they do when he's at their base in the flesh. It's a different war, here and there. Completely different.
The soldiers would laugh about this, but after more than half a year here, one thing they had lost sight of was how different the Iraq war was in Iraq as opposed to in the United States. To them, it was about specific acts of bravery and tragedy. The firefight in Fedaliyah--that was the war. Three dead inside a fireball on Predators--what else could a war be?
But in the United States, where three dead on Predators might be mentioned briefly somewhere inside the daily paper under a heading such as "Fallen Heroes" or "In Other News," and the firefight in Fedaliyah wouldn't be mentioned at all, it was about things more strategic, more political, more policy-driven, more useful in broad ways. Three dead? Yes, damn, how sad, and God bless the troops, and God bless the families, too, and this is exactly why we need to get out of Iraq, to honor the sacrifice, and this is precisely why we need to stay in Iraq, to honor the sacrifice, but you know what? Have you seen the numbers? Have you seen the metrics? Have you seen the trend lines?
Yes, there are people inside those numbers, those metrics, those trend lines. This books honors them.
Each soldier that Finkel writes about fairly leaps off the page, vivid and real. There's 19-year-old Duncan Crookston, making his own funeral arrangements before deployment; Adam Schumann, the soldier's soldier, who saves his buddies but in the end succumbs to nightmares; Nate Showman, who'd begun his deployment as an earnest, gung-ho 24-year-old lieutenant and manages to wind up by the time of his first leave rolling his eyes whenever Kauzlarich strides by with his trademark, "It's all good."
What Finkel displays on every page, with every character, is a commitment to describe each person with the dignity of complication, with great care and compassion. It would be easy and cheap to make a joke of Kauzlarich, for example, with his determined optimism and strange blend of brusque West Point profanity and simple Christianity. But he's a dark guy, too, and the author draws that out, the side of him that's a family man profoundly itchy when with his family to be back in the camaraderie of the military theater, almost more comfortable missing the family than being with them. And Stephanie, his wife, who while loving him and emailing him and missing him, also makes decisions because he won't offer input from half a world away, and she kind of likes it and kind of resents it, and both their worlds are wonderful when he's on leave at home but also ... not functioning quite right.
The human condition, in war, both for the fighters and the the ones they leave behind, has never been written about better than this. And thus far, this is the masterwork book of Iraq, particularly poignant and pregnant with meaning because it focuses on the last ditch effort of the surge, the last gasp of a war no one wants to own anymore. Yet courage and hope are reflected in the men fighting it, even if, in the end, disillusion wins the day.
I'm going to cheat a little here at the conclusion. My words can't do this work justice, so I'm going to let the author and the book speak instead. Here, then, is the opening to The Good Soldiers--rounded, painful and beautiful all at once:
His soldiers weren't yet calling him the Lost Kauz behind his back, not when this began. The soldiers of his who would be injured were still perfectly healthy, and the soldiers of his who would die were still perfectly alive. A soldier who was a favorite of his, and who was often described as a younger version of him, hadn't yet written of the war in a letter to a friend, "I've had enough of this bullshit." Another soldier, one of his best, hadn't yet written in the journal he kept hidden, "I've lost all hope. I feel the end is near for me, very, very near." Another hadn't yet gotten angry enough to shoot a thirsty dog that was lapping up a puddle of human blood....
Yep, it's all good. The whole damn book is this damn good, and it makes you feel as never before the waste and grief that marks the human addiction to war. If Finkel doesn't snag his second Pulitizer--this one for a book instead of newspaper articles--then there is no justice in this world.