The Good Soldiers (20 page)

Kauzlarich’s beautifully simple solution was to put a platoon of soldiers in each of the stations. That was Operation Banzeen. The platoons remained there all day, and the results were immediate. The insurgents disappeared. Two-day waits became waits of a few minutes. Fuel was available. Prices stabilized. Early on, the insurgents had fought back—three soldiers had been wounded by sniper fire at the Mashtal station—but the platoons draped the perimeter of the station in camouflage netting and continued to show up every day, and there hadn’t been an attack in a month.

“A great success for us,” the soldier concluded, and Petraeus, who’d heard of the operation, turned to Kauzlarich and said, “Actually, all of Baghdad has learned from that.”

And you could just about hear Kauzlarich’s bad-news vessel becoming a good-news vessel.

At the end of the briefing, Kauzlarich showed one last slide. “Sir, our fight as I define it,” he said. It was a circle-and-spoke diagram. The circles had labels such as “JAM” and “COP” and “ISF,” and lines from those circles led to more circles, and those circles led to even more circles, which led to even more: “Militia,” “Sheiks,” “Trash Removal,” “Small Kill Teams,” “Chow.” There were 109 circles in all, and all of them were connected either directly or indirectly to the circle in the middle that was Kauzlarich and the 2-16. “Our Fight,” the diagram was called, and as brilliant as it might be, at first glance it appeared to be the most complicated diagram ever designed. Kauzlarich had put it together late one night when he was unable to sleep, and when he showed it to his command staff, they looked at it in stunned silence. Even the chaplain, who always had something to say, didn’t know what to say. “Fuck,” one company commander mouthed as they continued to stare, and now Petraeus was staring at it in silence, too.

“It’s very simple,” Petraeus finally said, and everyone in the room, except for Kauzlarich, began to laugh.

“Just the fact that you can construct this shows how far our army has progressed,” Petraeus continued, and the laughter got louder.

“No, I mean it,” Petraeus said, and when it became clear that he did mean it and the laughter died out, only then, for the first time since the briefing began, did Kauzlarich smile.

“Well, you guys keep up the terrific work,” Petraeus said, and a few minutes later, when everyone stood outside posing for photographs and one of the world’s most famous people put his left arm around Kauz-larich’s shoulder, Kauzlarich looked the happiest he’d looked in a long time.

Away went Petraeus, to his helicopter, and Kauzlarich went back inside to welcome eight soldiers who had just arrived on the FOB as mid-tour replacements. All were brand-new soldiers who had joined the army after the 2-16 had deployed, which was one way to think of how long the 2-16 had been here. Four of them were medics and were sent to the aid station for training, and the other four stood at attention as Command Sergeant Major McCoy introduced himself.

“Well,” McCoy said, “you’re in the shit now.”

He continued to look them over. There was no need to explain to them why the battalion needed new soldiers. One was two days shy of turning nineteen. McCoy assigned him to Charlie Company, which had been the company of Murray, Lane, and Shelton. “What’d you do before you came here?” he asked the next one. “Not a whole lot, Sergeant Major.” He was sent to Delta Company, which had been the company of Gajdos and Payne. So was the third one, who said nothing at all. The fourth one was named Patrick Miller. He was twenty-two and from Florida. He said he’d been in college, premed, had good grades, was close to graduating, but had run out of money, and so here he was, and McCoy decided a smart guy like him would be useful in the operations center. Miller smiled. He had a great smile. It lit up the room. Kauzlarich noticed it, too, as he shook hands with each of the new soldiers. The army may have been getting more waiver cases than ever, but it was also getting its Patrick Millers.

“Welcome to the team,” Kauzlarich said, and he went outside to exult a little bit more in this day.

All of Baghdad has learned from that.

That was what Petraeus had said.

Keep up the terrific work.

He had said that, too. And on the way out, one of Petraeus’s aides had said that of all the battalion briefings Petraeus had gotten, this had been one of the best.

The good day. “It’s all good,” Kauzlarich said, just so happy. It was late afternoon now, and he was starting to say something else when he was interrupted by the sound of an explosion.

He swiveled his head, unsure of what it was.

It had been close by, near the main gate. He listened for a moment. It had sounded like an EFP. He looked at the sky. It was still gorgeous and blue. He kept looking. Here it came now, a coil of rising black smoke, and he immediately knew that it was spiraling up from near the Rustamiyah fuel station, where the platoon that had spent the day there as part of Operation Banzeen had just radioed in that they were heading back to the FOB.

Now the radio crackled again.

“Two casualties,” a soldier was yelling. “One not breathing. Life-threatening.”

Kauzlarich took off for the aid station.

He got there just after the arrival of two Humvees, one of which had six holes in it, a ruined engine, and a shredded tire, and had been chain-dragged from the fuel station to the FOB by the other. He passed two of his soldiers, who were crying. He passed another soldier, who was kicking a Humvee as hard as he could, over and over.

“Fucking war,” Kauzlarich said, nearing the doors.

There was a trail of bright red blood drops leading from the damaged Humvee to the aid station, and he followed it inside.

Inside:

A soldier was howling. He’d been the driver. Part of the EFP had gone under the Humvee and sent shrapnel up through the floorboards, breaking the bones in one of his feet and slicing off the heel of the other. As Kauzlarich made his way through the aid station, Brent Cummings, who’d also come, went to the soldier, took hold of his hand, and told him he would be all right. “How’s Reeves?” the soldier said, and when Cummings didn’t answer, he asked again. “Tell me how he’s doing.”

“Just worry about yourself right now,” Cummings said.

Joshua Reeves, a twenty-six-year-old specialist, was the one at the end of the blood trail, and he was who Kauzlarich went to. He’d been in the right front seat when the EFP exploded, much of which had gone through his door. He had arrived at the aid station unconscious and without a pulse, and doctors were just beginning to work on him. He wasn’t breathing, his eyes weren’t moving, his left foot was gone, his back side was ripped open, his face had turned gray, his stomach was filling with blood, and he was naked, with the exception of one bloodied sock—and as if all that weren’t enough with which to consider Joshua Reeves in these failing moments of his life, now came word from some of the soldiers gathered in the lobby that he’d begun this day with a message from his wife that she had just given birth to their first child.

“Jesus,” Kauzlarich said upon hearing this, his eyes filling with tears as he watched another soldier dying in front of him.

“Let me know when it’s three minutes,” the doctor overseeing everything that was going on called out loudly, so her voice could be heard over the rumble of some machinery. The room smelled dizzily of blood and ammonia. There must have been ten people around Reeves. Someone was holding an oxygen mask over his face. Someone was stabbing him with a dose of Adrenalin called epinephrine. Someone, maybe a medic, was pushing up and down on his chest so violently it seemed every one of his ribs must be breaking. “You need to go harder and faster,” the doctor in charge told him. The medic began pushing so hard that pieces of Reeves’s shredded leg began dropping to the floor, and Kauzlarich continued to watch in silence, as did Cummings and Michael McCoy and the chaplain, all of them in a row.

“It’s been two minutes,” someone called out.

“Okay, check for a pulse, please.”

The CPR stopped.

“No pulse.”

The CPR resumed.

More of Reeves dropped to the floor.

In went a second dose of epinephrine.

“Someone feel for a pulse in his neck.”

“Three minutes.”

“Continue CPR, please.”

In went a third dose of epinephrine as someone who was trying to clean up what had been falling accidentally kicked something small and hard, which skidded across the floor until it came to a stop next to McCoy.

“That’s a toe,” he said quietly.

He was fighting back tears now. So was Cummings. So was Kauzla-rich. Behind them, open-mouthed, not moving, were the four medics they had just welcomed to the FOB, and out in the lobby, waiting for news, were some of the soldiers and the interpreter who had done their best to save Reeves in the first moments after the explosion.

“We said we couldn’t trust these fuckers . . .” one of them was saying.

Another was saying nothing, just walking in circles, hearing in his head what Reeves had said right after the explosion: “Oh my God.” And then: “I can’t feel anything.” And then had passed out.

Another, the interpreter, a twenty-five-year-old Iraqi national whose name was Rachel and who was covered in blood, was also saying nothing. In the days ahead, she would explain that she had been in the second Humvee when the EFP went off, had run to the first Humvee, had crawled inside until she was wedged next to Reeves, and had seen him pass out and go white. “I started slapping him in the face. Hard. He was bleeding a lot. His blood was in my boots,” she would say, but for now she stood in those boots, the blood thickening in her socks and drying against her skin, waiting like the rest of the platoon.

It was 5:25 p.m. now, thirty minutes since the explosion, sixteen minutes since doctors had begun their work, and 9:25 a.m. in an American hospital where a new mother was expecting a phone call.

“Has anybody packed that wound on his left buttock?” one of the doctors was saying.

“Left
and
right,” another doctor corrected.

“Check for a pulse, please,” the doctor in charge said.

“No pulse,” another doctor called out.

“Continue CPR.”

“Okay, your fifth dose of EPI just went in now.”

“We’re at twenty minutes.”

There was so much commotion, so many people doing so many things, that a discreet nod from one of the physician assistants who was standing near Reeves might not have been noticed. But the chaplain, who was waiting for it, did notice, and he now made his way to Reeves, placed a hand on his forehead just above his open, unmoving eyes, and began to pray.

The doctor in charge gave it a few more minutes to be sure.

“Feel for a pulse, please,” she said for a final time, and the room became still. The oxygen machine that had been breathing for Reeves was switched off. The violent chest compressions that had been pushing blood through him came to an end. Everything stopped so a doctor could touch his fingers to Reeves’s neck in perfect silence and make the death of another soldier official.

“Wait,” he said after a moment. “Wait wait wait wait.” He adjusted his fingers slightly. “I have a pulse,” he said. “I have a pulse!”

Another doctor placed his fingers on Reeves to be sure. “Yes!” he said, and as Kauzlarich and everyone else looked on in astonishment, a room that had been so quiet switched back into motion as Reeves’s heart fought to beat on its own.

There was a medevac helicopter on its way that would be landing in a few minutes, and the doctors and nurses worked frantically to prepare Reeves to be placed on it with the other soldier. They finished packing the wounds across his lower back and shattered pelvis. They wiped some of the blood away and wrapped him tightly in twenty rolls of gauze, so much that they emptied an entire supply cabinet.

“How much time do we have?” the lead doctor called out.

“Four minutes,” came the answer.

“Can I get a blanket, please?” the lead doctor said.

She swaddled him in a blanket.

Time to move.

They lifted him onto a stretcher and carried him out of the treatment room and past the soldiers in the lobby, who had no idea of what had just occurred. What they saw was that he was alive. Outside now, the helicopter was in sight on the horizon. It swooped in fast, kicking up dust and creating a terrible racket, and even with that and the jostling as Reeves was loaded on board, his eyes remained unmoving. But his heart continued to beat.

“A great save,” Kauzlarich shouted to one of the doctors who had worked on Reeves.

“I’m hoping. I’m hoping,” the doctor replied.

Up the helicopter went, into the sky, away from all of this, and Kauzlarich watched until it disappeared. It was still a blue sky, and a gorgeous sky, and he walked beneath it back to the office where a few hours before he had stood with David Petraeus, and where he would now wait for an update. Eight months before, he had wondered what it would be like to see a soldier die. Now he had seen a soldier brought back to life.

The phone rang sooner than he had expected.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Okay. Okay.”

He hung up. Reeves was at the hospital and was headed into surgery. There’d be another update once he was out.

Then the phone rang again, too soon.

He had died.

Outside, Brent Cummings was examining Reeves’s Humvee, trying to figure out the path that the EFP had taken and feeling a little sickened by the faint smell of burnt hair, when he got the news from one of the medics. “Any word?” he asked. “We lost him, sir,” the medic said. “Okay, thanks,” Cummings said and then walked in sudden tears over to a nearby building and began hitting it and kicking it for a while.

And inside, Kauzlarich stayed in his office, by himself, reading an e-mail that had just arrived and wondering what to write back. “Ranger 6,” it began. “I appreciate you hosting me today and laying out what is going on in New Baghdad. Your many initiatives, such as securing the gas stations, creating your own fusion cell, and optimizing the DAC all seem to be developing significant traction. You guys are making big progress, and I am very proud of the 2-16 IN Team.”