Free The Good Soldiers by David Finkel

the things Emory had left behind. There were his sunglasses. There was his helmet, wet with blood, and for some reason Schumann and the other soldier decided that no one else needed to see that, so they searched the factory for something to cover it with. They found a sack of flour, ripped it open, emptied it and hid the helmet in there, and while they were doing that, Emory was on the backboard across the rear seat of a Humvee, continuing to talk in a slurred voice.
    “Why does my head hurt?” he asked again.
    “Because you fell down some steps,” said the sergeant who was in the back of the Humvee with him, lying next to him as they headed to the hospital, holding one of his hands.
    “Oh,” Emory said.
    Now Emory raised his other hand and looked at it.
    “Why do I have blood on my hand?” he asked.
    “You fell down some steps,” the sergeant said, holding Emory’s hand tighter.
    Now Emory looked at the sergeant.
    “First Sergeant, I’m fucked up, aren’t I?” he said.
    And it was about that time, on another street in Kamaliyah, that a staff sergeant named Jared Stevens was shot in his lower lip.
    He was moving backward when he was hit. That’s what the soldiers were taught: Don’t hold still for too long. Keep moving. Don’t be a target. So that’s what Stevens was doing, and it was his good luck to be moving backward rather than forward, so that when the bullet struck him, instead of going through his mouth, or his jaw, or his chin, it just ever so barely grazed his lip, butterflying it open from one side to the other.
    Down he went, into a Humvee, to be evacuated.
    “Okay,” Kauzlarich said, hearing the report of this third shooting over his radio, and then turned his attention back to his own crisis. He had spent much of the morning clearing houses, trying to track down a suspected insurgent who was considered the brigade’s highest-value target, and at least twice taking cover from gunfire, and now he was watching a crowd of several hundred Iraqis massed outside of a mosque. They were chanting and waving Iraqi and Jaish al Mahdi flags, and when the circling helicopters fired flares into the crowd to break it up, the chanting only got louder.
    It was a bad situation that was worsening, and Kauzlarich knew it. This wasn’t what had been intended. Clearing houses? Yes, they had done that. Rounding up suspected insurgents? Yes, they had done that. But if the goal of the operation, as stated in planning documents, was for the sixty thousand residents of Kamaliyah to realize the Americans had come “to clear your neighborhoods and improve your quality of life,” that wasn’t happening.
    It was time for the operation to end. Kauzlarich radioed his soldiers to begin wrapping things up, and then he directed his convoy around the protesters, first heading north for a few blocks, and then, when gunfire broke out, east, in between the sewage trenches, until he reached a building partly in shreds—the spaghetti factory.
    Much of it was caved in. Most of it was still standing, but the walls were lined with deep cracks. It was ruined.
    Across the street, however, was another factory, and when Kauzlarich went inside to look it over, he liked what he saw—until he reached the bottom floor and discovered a family of eleven squatters, ranging from young children to an arthritic old man on a mattress over which someone had taped a poster of Muqtada al-Sadr.
    “If we pay them, will they leave?” Kauzlarich asked his interpreter. “Tell them I’ll give them three hundred dollars.”
    “It’s not enough,” the interpreter said, conveying the reply from a man who seemed to be the head of the family.
    “Not enough?” Kauzlarich said. “It isn’t enough?” He was confused. “They don’t even own this.”
    The interpreter shrugged.
    “If I pay him a thousand dollars?” Kauzlarich said.
    “Give me a little bit more,” came the reply. “One thousand five hundred.”
    Kauzlarich looked around. He needed