The Good Soldiers (16 page)

Another second-chancer: a soldier they called Private Teflon because he was always in the vicinity of bad things, from fights to a rumored drive-by shooting, but was never implicated. So he got to go to Iraq, too, and when his friend Cameron Payne was killed, he delivered a eulogy so overflowing with hurt it was like listening to the exact moment of someone being transformed by heartbreak. Which of course is what wars did, in every way imaginable, bad and good. Kauzlarich knew this from having been around soldiers for twenty years, and now that he was in charge, he wanted to make sure that his soldiers, even the few stupid ones, especially those stupid ones, maintained control. He could imagine what some of them were saying: “We’re in battle everyday, and they’re doing a health-and-welfare? It’s bullshit.” And he agreed. “But we gotta do it right,” he said. So when word came one day that some soldiers had ransacked a house during a clearance operation, he did two things. He launched a formal investigation, because as he told his command staff, livid, “There’s no reason to ratfuck anybody’s house in a search. We’ve got to show respect to the Iraqi people.” And he called a meeting with his company commanders and first sergeants to remind them of the God-given moment they and their soldiers were lucky enough to be in.

“You guys are living the dream right now. You truly are living the dream,” he said in the slow, precise diction he used when he was all about persuasion. “Talk to your people about that. Make sure they understand why we do what we do.”

It was classic Kauzlarich, full of belief, the Fort Riley speech all over again. But more and more of them weren’t understanding.

“Sometimes I wonder what type of world the chain of command is living in. To think we’re winning?” Gietz said one day.

“None of the kids believe in this anymore,” he went on. “The kids are hurting. The kids are scared. They don’t need the bravado. They need understanding. They need someone to tell them, ‘I’m scared, too.’”

The Lost Kauz. That was what soldiers in one platoon had begun to call Kauzlarich, in need most of all of a target for their growing anger.

President Bush. That was what soldiers in another platoon, this one in Bravo Company, were calling him because of his ability to see what they couldn’t, and to not see what they could.

The platoon had been Andre Craig’s platoon. Now, on September 17, it was headed south along the baking dirt of Outer Berm Road, moving from Kamaliyah to the FOB, when the second Humvee in the convoy passed over three buried 130-millimeter projectiles that were wired to a handheld trigger. This time the explosion was thunderous. The Humvee shot straight up in the air—it must have been ten feet, soldiers would say later—and when it came down, it bounced and then exploded into flames.

Immediately, Jay March and other soldiers ran toward the Humvee and began dragging injured soldiers away.

Now they watched helplessly as the driver, nineteen-year-old James Harrelson, burned to death in front of their eyes.

Now they were in the tall, green grass on the side of the berm, tending to the snapped bones and hemorrhaging wounds of the four soldiers they had been able to get to.

Now, at the Rustamiyah aid station, medics ran toward the first arriving Humvee and the howls of a soldier in pain.

Now, inside the aid station, a soldier who had been unconscious was screaming, and a second soldier was moaning, and a third soldier was swearing and apologizing as a doctor filled him with morphine.

Now the fourth soldier was asking, “What happened to Harrelson?” and waiting with begging eyes for the answer.

And now the remnants of the platoon were gulping down sleeping pills with their Boom Booms. Nearly a week after James Harrelson’s death, they were not yet under control.

At Joe’s, soldiers drank Boom Booms and Mountain Dews, rented hookahs, smoked cigarettes, dipped tobacco, and played cards. There was another, nicer place to go to on the FOB that was run by Army Morale, Welfare, and Recreation, but it could feel a little too clean, like a supervised rec room, and for a soldier who was feeling poorly, nothing was more suitable than Joe’s. On the night before Jay March’s birthday, most of Harrelson’s platoon was here.

This was their fifth day straight as they waited for Harrelson’s memorial service. They never came during daylight, only after dark, dinner done, the long night just beginning. As bleak as it was, with its bare-bulb lighting and dirty Christmas wreath hanging cockeyed on a wall, Joe’s did have the benefit of a big-screen TV whose volume was always cranked up. There had been so many rocket attacks lately that some soldiers were getting jumpy as they moved around the FOB, always listening for the high-pitched, cartoonish whistle of a rocket on its descent. Inside Joe’s, though, you couldn’t hear whistles, warning horns, or even impacts unless they were close enough to shake the walls, so you were spared that particular anxiety. All you could hear were soldiers talking loudly over whatever was on TV, which at the moment, as the soldiers arrived and settled in, was a country music video for a song called “What Hurts the Most.” “Do you ever think about the future?” a young woman in the video, beautiful and wholesome and about the right age to be a soldier’s girlfriend, was asking a young man. “What do you see?” she asked, and meanwhile Jay March, who could see James Harrelson on fire, shuffled a deck of cards and dealt a hand of spades.

Harrelson had been in the second Humvee and March had been right behind him in the third. All of the other soldiers had been in the convoy, too, except for Phillip Mays, Jr., a thirty-year-old platoon sergeant, who had stayed back that day because of a broken hand and was here at Joe’s at a separate table, trying to read a book. The soldiers loved Mays, who was all jaw and muscles and newly formed circles under his eyes. They were absolutely loyal to him, and in return, he was so devoted to them that for weeks he’d fought alongside them without mentioning that he’d hurt his hand during a middle-of-the-night raid when he’d chased two suspicious Iraqis into a stable. Describing it now, he said he should have known something was going to go wrong when he went through the doors and straight into the rear ends of two camels, but the fact was that such things were always happening here. It was like what Kauzlarich had said after another platoon had chased someone into a house at 4:00 a.m. and found an entire family not only awake but sitting in a circle around a little cow: “Expect the unexpected.” Or after another platoon had chased someone into the courtyard of a house and discovered a mentally retarded child tethered to a pole. “The normal abnormal,” Brent Cummings called it. So Mays pushed the unexpected camels out of the way by their unexpected rear ends and grabbed one of the Iraqis by his shirt, and when he went after Mays’s M-4 and got hold of it, Mays started hitting him with his left hand. “I knew it was hard, because I had blood on me,” he said. “He still wouldn’t let go of the weapon. That’s when I transitioned to my right hand and knocked him out, breaking my hand in the process.” He didn’t expect that, either, and when he realized what the crunching sound was, he told no one, because it would have meant a cast and he’d be out of the fight and there was no way he was going to let that happen, not after waiting so long to get here. “I wanted this my whole life, since I was a little boy,” he explained. “Not to be a warmonger, necessarily, but to be in the army, serving my country.” So he took aspirin and stayed in the fight, and that’s how tough and devoted Mays was—and how uncharacteristic it was that he had spent much of this day in his room, behind a closed door with a sign on it saying that he didn’t want to be disturbed.

What he wanted was to sleep. Since Harrelson, however, he’d hardly slept at all. “Too much in my head,” he had said earlier, sitting on his bed, behind that closed door, before coming to Joe’s. He’d been given a sleep aid called Ambien, with instructions to try one and take it from there, and when one didn’t work he’d tried two, and when two didn’t work he’d tried four. But four wasn’t enough, either, and meanwhile, on the other side of the room, his roommate was rearranging his furniture yet again, which he had been doing somewhat obsessively for several days.

This was the officer in charge of the platoon, Lieutenant Ryan Hamel, twenty-four, for whom all of the decisions yet to come in his life would be shaded by the decision he made to travel down Outer Berm Road. “I made the call” is how he put it in his sworn statement. He was in the Humvee directly behind Harrelson’s. He saw it rise, saw it fall, saw the flames, saw Harrelson inside of them, might have heard a scream, might not have, and now was wondering if he’d be able to sleep better if his bed were over here rather than over there, and his shelves were over there rather than over here.

“Truck went up. Smoke and fire,” he said, shaking his head, neatly summing up a day.

“Nineteen years old,” Mays said, summing up a life, and meanwhile, in another room just down the hall, the platoon’s medic, twenty-three-year-old Michael Bailey, who couldn’t save Harrelson, and couldn’t save Craig, was saying that instead of sleeping, he now spent his nights looping aimlessly through the dark parts of the FOB. He said of Craig, “I basically held on to him as he died.” He said of Harrelson’s reaction to Craig, “He saw it, and he was scared. It scared the shit out of him.” He said of the platoon’s reaction, “It scared the shit out of everyone. And this”— meaning Harrelson’s death—“has scared everyone, too. Me, every time I go out on patrol, I feel sick. It’s like, I’m gonna get hit, I’m gonna get hit, I’m gonna get hit . . .”

And meanwhile, in another room, Jay March was listening to another soldier, Staff Sergeant Jack Wheeler, describe what the two of them had done after they had seen Harrelson die and Wheeler had noticed a thin wire coming off the top of the berm.

The wire was red, and of all the colors to remember from that day, Wheeler would easily remember that, because of the obscene way it suddenly stood out against the brown of the dirt and the tree trunks, and the green of the grass and the leaves. In what had been a two-color world at that point, before it was joined by the orange of the fire, how could he not have spotted a red wire? How could no one have seen something that now, as Wheeler followed it with his eyes, seemed so conspicuous? It emerged from under the dirt on top of the berm and led toward a grove of palm trees, passing in the air like a tightrope above where the bleeding soldiers lay. “I got the wire!” he shouted, taking off with some soldiers to track it, and when March saw them, he took off, too. They followed it to a tree that stood slightly apart from the others, probably the aiming point, around whose trunk it had been wrapped. From there, it stretched tautly to another tree, and then ran for a while along the ground to a house amid a cluster of houses beyond the palm grove, far enough from the Humvee that the exploding ammunition sounded like nothing more than distant firecrackers.

Now, out of the house that the wire led to, came three men who saw the approaching soldiers and broke into a run, going in different directions. Wheeler, March, and two other soldiers ran after two of the men, who had cut across a street toward a row of four houses. Wheeler kicked open the door of the first house and found himself face-to-face with an elderly, terrified man who motioned down a hallway. Weapons shouldered, the soldiers moved toward the first room, where, in a corner, they found six women and children huddled together and crying. The normal abnormal. They moved down the hallway to a second room, in which they found a man who was on his knees, as if praying. Expect the unexpected. He was perhaps five feet away. He swiveled toward them with an AK-47 in his hands. “I shot him three times,” Wheeler said, as March listened in silence, looking away for a moment. The man toppled forward, dead, with two holes in his stomach and one in his head, Wheeler continued, and from there they moved to the house next door, and then to the next house, and then to the next house, where Wheeler found and killed the second man, and now, almost a week later, after shooting two people within spattering distance and seeing a friend die, he wasn’t sleeping well, either.

“I start thinking about what happened, and then I start thinking about why I’m here,” he said. “It’s pointless. They say on TV that the soldiers want to be here? I can’t speak for every soldier, but I think if people went around and made a list of names of who fucking thinks we should actually be here and who wants to be here, ain’t nobody that wants to be here. There ain’t probably one soldier in this fucking country, unless you are higher up and you’re trying to get your star or you’re trying to make some rank or a name for yourself—but there ain’t nobody that wants to be here, because there’s no point. What are we getting out of fucking being here? Nothing.” He paused for a moment, and then said, “Man, if I could just do it all over again. If I had taken a different route. What if we had left earlier? What if we had left later?”

And Jay March continued to listen.

Now, at Joe’s, Sergeant Mays put down his book and watched some of his soldiers play spades. “Solid guy,” he said of one of them. “Lazy,” he said of another. “Tough,” he said of another. He looked at March, a favorite of his. “March is from a fragile background,” he said, without elaborating. “They’re angry. Very angry,” he said of the platoon, which of course included himself. “How can anybody kill and function normally afterward? Or see someone get killed and function normally afterward? It’s not the human response.”

Eleven o’clock now. Bailey, the medic, was talking about holding Craig. “Every time he exhaled, there’d be blood all over the back of the driver’s seat,” he was saying.

Midnight. March got his vicious pink belly. It was the first one the platoon had given since a month before, when James Harrelson had turned nineteen.

One a.m. and beyond. The horn went off. A rocket whistled overhead. Wheeler dealt. March looked at his cards. Everyone was wide awake. The video came back on the TV. “What do you see?” the girl said to the boy. “What do
you
see?” the boy said back to the girl.

The following morning, after going to sleep at sunrise and waking up two hours later, March was sitting outside bleary-eyed when the crack of gunfire came from the direction of the chapel.
Bang . . .
pause . . .
bang . . .
pause . . .
bang.
By now, everyone on the FOB knew the sobering rhythm of a rifle squad practicing for a memorial service, and when the echoes of the first volley slapped off the buildings and blast walls surrounding him, March barely reacted. Maybe it was because of exhaustion, or maybe he was too lost in thought. He had been the first to reach Harrelson and realize there was nothing to be done, and six days later his eyes were as red as the raw parts of his stomach. He lit a cigarette. “In Alabama, you gotta be nineteen to buy cigarettes,” he said, repeating what Harrelson, who was from rural Alabama, had once told him.