Free The Good Soldiers by David Finkel Page A

a COP, and the truth was that this was better than the spaghetti factory even before the spaghetti factory had been bombed.
    “Tell them by Tuesday they’ll need to be gone,” he said, and just like that Bravo Company had a COP, and eleven people with no home had $1,500 to find one.
    He headed south now, a very long day nearly done. In the distance, on the far side of the spaghetti factory, was the little house. It was still intact, but there was no one outside, no hanging laundry, no signs of life at all. He kept going, away from Kamaliyah, back to the FOB, back to his office, back to his e-mails, where the initial reports about Emory weren’t good. There was a report that he was in surgery and that his condition was extremely critical. There was a report that he went blind at the hospital and began panicking and was now in an induced coma. Now Cummings was telling Kauzlarich that at one point they were erroneously informed that he had died.
    “Fucking knuckleheads,” Cummings said.
    In walked Stevens, Xylocained, stitched up, swollen, and on Percocet, to tell Kauzlarich that he had been taking cover behind walls, moving around, trying to do everything right. “I turned around and pow,” he said, all mumbly.
    “You did do everything right,” Kauzlarich said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
    In walked Zappa, the two holes in him plugged and stitched, to say that, thanks to God, and Jesus, and a wife who tithes and sings hymns and reads the Bible for two hours a day, sometimes three, he was fine.
    “Fucking heroes,” Command Sergeant Major McCoy said to the two of them.
    Now Stevens excused himself to go outside and call his wife.
    “I got shot in the fucking mouth,” he said when she answered, his eyes suddenly wet.
    Back inside, meanwhile, Kauzlarich reviewed the day as he prepared to write a report about it that would go to brigade first, and then up the line from there.
    “Overall, it was a good day,” he said.
    “We cleared what we wanted to clear.
    “We better understand Kamaliyah, a city we have to control.
    “We identified our enemy, including the brigade’s high-value target number one.
    “We found Bravo Company a new COP.
    “We had three close calls, and the battalion reacted very well to them.
    “The staff fought well from here, and they fought very well out there, which only makes them stronger.
    “So today was a very good day.”
    A week later, the news on Emory wasn’t at all encouraging. He had been airlifted to a hospital in Germany and was now in a coma, on life support. There had also been an increase in roadside bombs since the operation, due largely to the high-value target they’d gone after who afterward had been overheard saying angrily over his phone that he was going to put IEDs everywhere.
    And perhaps he had, because soon after that conversation a soldier from another battalion who was driving into Kamaliyah with a load of blast walls for the COP lost both of his legs when his truck was hit by an EFP. There were mortar attacks on the COP, too, one of which slightly injured three soldiers from an engineering battalion and one from the 2-16.
    Nonetheless, the COP was finished—one more COP by which to gauge the success of the surge—and on May 7, Kauzlarich returned to Kamaliyah to see it.
    As usual, before leaving, Nate Showman gathered other soldiers in the convoy to brief them on the latest intelligence reports. He had been awake since before dawn, when an IED had blown up outside the FOB on Route Pluto as soldiers from another battalion rolled by in a tank. Badness circling, closer and closer—that’s how 2-16 soldiers were starting to feel. Now they watched Showman trace a road on a map he was holding. “First Street is closed off because of an IED. First Street is black. We’re not going that way,” he said. Next he pointed to a spot on the edge of the FOB. “Two days ago, on the fifth, this guard tower on the very northernmost section of the FOB was