The Good Soldiers (27 page)

One day he said to Laura, “How much do you want to know?”

They were in the bedroom, just back from a memorial service at the Fort Riley chapel, where he had delivered a eulogy for Doster, who had died a few hours after Cummings had flown out of Rustamiyah to begin his leave. “Whatever you do, when you get up to speak, don’t look at the family,” the chaplain had said beforehand, advising Cummings on how not to lose his composure, and he hadn’t looked, but he had heard them, as had everyone in the chapel, including a few of the 2-16 soldiers who had been injured and sent back to Kansas. The soldier who had been shot in the chest at the gas station and dragged to safety by Rachel the interpreter was there. A soldier who had been shot in the throat and appeared to Cummings as if he were in the midst of a perpetual flashback was there. A soldier who had been in Cajimat’s Humvee way back when and now spent his days watching one of his arms wither away was there. There were five in all, and Cummings had made plans after the service to see them again, maybe for lunch, and then he and Laura had gone home to the one place in the world where he didn’t worry about whether his foot was halfway on the carpet and halfway on the floor. “How’d I sound?” he’d asked as he hung up his uniform. “You were good,” Laura had answered, sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at him, and suddenly he was crying and saying, “It’s so stupid, Laura, it’s so stupid, it’s so stupid,” and feeling as if the rainstorm he had watched the first night was now moving through him.

He felt better after that. He went for bike rides. He got his daughters ready for school. He drank the best beer he had ever tasted. He went to the gym with Laura. He sat on his porch with his dogs. He went to Ra-dina’s and saw the man with the big beard who always sat in the corner reading a novel, there as ever, as if there weren’t a concern in the world.

“Oh man, it was so good, just to be home,” he said, back in Baghdad now, about to take an Ambien, hoping he would be able to sleep. “It was the best time of my life.”

He had not seen the injured soldiers again, even though he’d intended to.

He’d also intended to go to the Fort Riley cemetery and visit the grave of the lone 2-16 soldier who had been buried there. Back in the war again, he wondered why he hadn’t.

But he hadn’t.

The grave was that of Joel Murray, one of the three soldiers who died on September 4 and whose home now was an old cemetery filled to its edges with dead soldiers from half a dozen wars. On December 11, his grave and that cemetery were covered in ice from a massive storm that was blowing through Kansas on its way from the Great Plains into the Midwest. Seventeen people so far were dead. Hundreds of thousands were without electricity. Trees were crashing down everywhere. Down came a huge limb in the cemetery, collapsing onto a line of headstones and just missing Murray’s. Down came more limbs all over Fort Riley, including in the front yard of a house near the cemetery, where a sign out front read,
LT COL KAUZLARICH
and where the morning newspaper with a story about the two most recent battle deaths in Iraq was buried under a layer of ice.

Stephanie Kauzlarich would get to the paper eventually, but at the moment she had too much to do.

“Next time I’ll buy the Jungle Pancakes,” she was saying to Allie, who was eight years old now and bored with her Eggos.

“You want more syrup?” she was saying to Jacob, who was six now.

“You gonna eat breakfast?” she was saying to Garrett, who was four now and racing around the house in a T-shirt and underpants while screaming,
“I can’t stop running!”

Last night’s pizza slices were still in the sink. Flash cards were on the counter. Lego pieces were everywhere. Stephanie opened the refrigerator and the orange juice came tumbling out, which somehow caused the Eggos to fall out of their box and go skidding across the floor. “It’s snowing waffles!” Jacob hollered as Stephanie, who had turned forty since the deployment began, ran after them.

Here was home in its truest form, when the soldier who lived there was not on the front porch watching a thunderstorm, or proposing, or passing out on the couch, or buying a truck, but was still in Iraq. It was what home was like not on the eighteen days that Kauzlarich would be there, but on the four hundred days he would not.

It was boxes of Christmas decorations that Stephanie had hauled down from the attic and needed to put up. It was thickening ice on the sidewalk and steps, and where in the world was the big bag of ice melter they bought last year? It was the lights flickering in the storm, and where were the AA batteries for the flashlight, in case the electricity went out? Here were the C batteries. Here were the AAAs. But where were the AAs? The framed photograph of Ralph on top of the refrigerator also needed batteries to power the motion sensor that triggered the memory chip on which he had recorded a message so the kids wouldn’t forget his voice. “Hey. Whatcha doin’ over there? I seeeee you,” he had recorded, trying to be funny, after Stephanie had said that his original message, about how much he missed them, might be too sad. And it worked. He got on a plane to go to Iraq, and the kids came home and walked into the kitchen and heard him saying, “I seeeee you.” They went out and came back in. “I seeeee you.” They woke up the next morning and came into the kitchen for breakfast. “I seeeee you.” Every morning, there he was, even before Stephanie had coffee. “I seeeee you.” She went upstairs to get dressed and came back. “I seeeee you.” She went to get the mail and came back. “I seeeee you.” She began ducking when she came into the kitchen. “I seeeee you.” What could she do, though? She couldn’t turn the photo upside down. She couldn’t take the batteries out, or cover the sensor, or do anything that would seem disrespectful of the circumstances that had led to the buying of the frame and the recording of the message. “I seeeee you.” “I seeeee you.” “I seeeee you.” “I seeeee you.” And then, one day, the batteries ran out, and she meant to replace them, but now it was months later, and anyway they were probably AAs, and if she could find any AAs she’d better put them in the flashlight, because the storm was getting worse. Down came a branch. “I wonder if I should move the car,” she said. But it was miserable out there. Down came more branches. “I should move the car,” she said.

His war, her war. They were vastly different and largely unshared with each other.

In April, when he wrote to tell her that Jay Cajimat died, he didn’t go into detail about learning what an EFP could do, and when she wrote back she didn’t go into detail about painting Easter eggs with the kids.

In July, when the 2-16 was being attacked several times a day, she didn’t dwell on her own drama: that she and the kids were driving home from out of state, and the car died and had to be jump-started, and they went to a Wendy’s, and the kids had to go to the bathroom, and she couldn’t turn off the car because she was afraid it would die again, and she couldn’t let them go in by themselves . . .

In September, she didn’t tell him much about the colonel’s wife who’d approached her and asked, “How are you doing?” “I’m doing okay.” “Are you sure?” “Yes.” “Are you
sure?”
“Yes, I’m doing okay.” “No, you’re not. You’re
not
doing okay.” It would have been an uncomfortable conversation anytime, but making it worse was the setting: the memorial service for the three dead soldiers. “And what am I supposed to say?” she said now, sitting in her kitchen. “I’m sick of being a single parent? I’m sick of not having sex? Is that what I say? That life sucks?”

Instead, she kept anything like that to herself. She wasn’t going to tell a colonel’s wife that, and she wasn’t going to tell Ralph, who she was sure needed her to be nothing other than upbeat.

“Happy birthday, cha-cha-cha,” the kids sang, and there was no way she was going to tell him how much work those videos were: that the boys preferred to be watching TV or playing with friends, that no one would say anything and she’d have to prompt them with whispered commands.

“Hi Love! Well, guess who loves you! Me & A, J, & G!!!!! I hope that you enjoyed the pictures I sent earlier . . . quite a remarkable storm!” was how she began her e-mail to him the night of the storm, after getting the kids into bed.

She didn’t tell him about the branch that just missed the car, or the way she attacked the ice on the sidewalk, with a hammer and knife, because she couldn’t find the melter, or that when she sent the pictures, she was sure he would notice that she hadn’t brought in the garden hose for the winter.

She didn’t tell him that before she could find a moment to write to him, the night had been a parade of footsteps and flushing toilets and coughs and a tired mother trying to soothe some anxious little boys by saying, “Good night, my handsome men.”

She came back downstairs. She looked at the silent photograph on top of the refrigerator. He was in a white shirt. They had all worn white shirts that day and gone to Sears to be photographed. It was right before he left. Almost eleven months later, of course she missed him, but it was more than that. “I think it’s hurt. Deep down personal hurt. Resentment. That it’s fifteen months. That I’m parenting alone. That I’m just doing life alone,” she said.

“I hate the war and what it has done to my life.”

She didn’t tell him that, either. Instead, giving no indication of her exhaustion, except for the time stamp on the e-mail that said it was sent at 12:44 a.m., she wrote, “Schools are closed again tomorrow. Some more precipitation fell, and well I think that perhaps we may be able to hit the slopes and go for some ice sledding! WOW! That would be fast & fun. Yes a perfect way to introduce the kids to Extreme Sports!!! I’ve been waiting for this opportunity to live on the edge!! ha-ha! Yea I know without you it won’t be quite as fun, but about living on the edge—I bet we can accommodate that feat in January!!!”

January was when he would be home. He was due to leave Baghdad in sixteen days.

“I’m worried about January,” she said. “Who will he be?”

“I’m proud of you!” she wrote to him. “Your wife, Stephanie.”

And now it was his turn.

Home.

He couldn’t wait.

He flew out at 1:00 a.m. on December 27. He would go to Fort Riley first, then to Orlando, then to Fort Riley again, and then back to Baghdad, with a stop at the end at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, so he could visit some of his most seriously injured soldiers. Next to seeing his family, he was looking forward to that most of all.

A few other soldiers from the battalion had already made such a visit to BAMC and had come back shaken from what they had seen. One was a specialist named Michael Anderson, who on September 4 was three Humvees behind the Humvee that was hit. A month later, on leave, he went to BAMC to visit Duncan Crookston, one of the two soldiers in the Humvee who had survived. “And it was heartbreaking,” Anderson would say, “because I remember Crookston being a grown man. I remember seeing what he looked like, and when I saw him, he honestly looked like a kid. You couldn’t tell that he used to be a grown man. He didn’t have his legs. He didn’t have his right arm. He didn’t have his hand. He was completely wrapped up. He had goggles on. His body was like in this mesh. It was, honestly, I don’t want to say creepy, but it was honestly creepy, seeing my buddy like that. It was just not right. It was September fourth all over again.”

Crookston was one of the soldiers Kauzlarich wanted to see. There were fourteen in all there, including six Nate Showman met with when he was on leave and spent an afternoon at BAMC. One of the soldiers had lost both of his legs below the knee. One had lost an eye. One had lost much of his left foot. One had lost much of his right foot. One had lost his lower right arm. One had lost his right hand. They met in the cafeteria for lunch, and at one point Kauzlarich’s name came up.

“I don’t ever want to see that motherfucker again,” one of the soldiers said.

10

JANUARY 25, 2008

Here’s what I tell people. I tell people here in America that an Iraqi
mother wants the same thing for her children that an American mother wants,
a chance for that child to grow up in peace and
to
realize dreams, a chance
for the child to go outside and play and not fear harm.
—
GEORGE W. BUSH
,
January 4, 2008

T
he guys are real excited to see you, sir,” the BAMC escort told Kauzlarich.

It was a windy, drizzly, bitingly cold day, especially for someone who had spent ten months in Iraq and ten days in Florida. During the leave, Stephanie kept her thoughts about the war mostly to herself, and so did Kauzlarich, until his last night home, when he confessed that there had been a few times in Orlando when he was driving and felt himself in a Humvee and here came the flash, the boom, the dirt. But only a few times, he said, and after a moment or two he was back in a rental car with his family. “How are you doing?” they asked each other, and the true answer was that they were doing fine. His being home had rejuvenated both of them, even during the worst of it, at Disney World, as he was steering the rental car into the Dopey parking lot and Garrett socked Allie in the nose. Allie screamed. Blood poured from her nose onto her clothing. Stephanie couldn’t find tissues. Kauzlarich began mopping up the blood with Garrett’s jacket, figuring it would teach him a lesson. In the chaos of the car, it seemed like a good idea, except instead of grabbing Garrett’s jacket, he accidentally grabbed Jacob’s, and now Jacob was upset, and Garrett was upset, and Allie was upset, and Stephanie was upset, and Kauzlarich was in the midst of saying, “You can’t hit girls, never hit girls,” when Allie began choking and spitting up blood, which went all over Garrett’s jacket.