Free The Good Soldiers by David Finkel Page B

engaged. One round went right through the ballistic glass, impacted on the right side of one of the guards’ heads. All it did was hit his Kevlar,” his helmet. “He received minor scratches from it, will be all right.” Next he pointed to a spot on Route Pluto. “Hey, that thing that woke us up this morning was One-eight hitting an IED just north of Checkpoint Five-fifteen.”
    “On Pluto?” a soldier said.
    “No shit?” another said.
    “It hit a tank. The thing blew up, and they just burned right on through. That tank didn’t even stop rolling,” Showman said. “The bigger thing for us is the fact that in the last three days there have been about six EFPs on Route Predators, right up by Kamaliyah.”
    “Right where we’re heading,” another soldier said.
    “Yeah,” Showman said.
    They decided to bypass Predators and take Berm Road, the only other route into Kamaliyah, which was the elevated dirt road that Cummings had been on the day he first went to see Bob. No road felt worse to travel than Berm Road. There were only so many points to climb onto it and drop off of it, and once up there, the feeling was of being utterly exposed and vulnerable, that the places to hide a bomb were limitless, including in the soft dirt underneath. The surrounding landscape didn’t help, either: pools of fetid water, dead animals, vast piles of trash being picked through by families and dogs, grotesque pieces of twisted metal that in the dust clouds kicked up by the convoy reminded some soldiers of pictures they’d seen of the wreckage of the World Trade Center after 9/11. On Berm Road, Iraq could seem not only lost, but irredeemable.
    But on this day it was the better way. As the convoy inched along, reports were coming in of yet another IED explosion on Predators; on Berm, meanwhile, the worst of it was some kids who paused in their trash-picking to throw rocks at the convoy as it passed by them and coated them in dust.
    Kauzlarich, looking out the window, was uncharacteristically quiet. He had slept badly and woken uneasily. Something about the day didn’t feel right, he’d said before getting in the Humvee. Once he saw the COP, though, his mood brightened. In a week’s time, it had gone from an abandoned building with nothing inside of it other than a family of squatters to a fully functioning outpost for a company of 120 soldiers. Cots stretched from one end to the other. Generators chugged away so there was electricity. There was a working kitchen, a row of new portable toilets, and gun nests on the roof behind camouflage netting. The whole thing was enclosed in a solid perimeter of high blast walls, and even when Jeff Jager mentioned the isolating effect this was having regarding their relationship with the adjacent neighborhood, it was clear that Kauzla-rich’s confidence about what he was accomplishing in Kamaliyah had returned.
    “I’d say about forty percent of the people who live around here are gone “Jager said.
    “Forty percent?” Kauzlarich said.
    Jager nodded.
    “They’ll be back,” Kauzlarich said.
    “Maybe,” Jager said.
    “Six weeks, they’ll be back,” Kauzlarich said, and soon after that he was again in his Humvee, now passing the spaghetti factory, now passing the little house that still showed no signs of life, now climbing back up onto Berm Road to leave Kamaliyah—and that’s when the EFP exploded.
    And was he in the midst of saying something when it happened? Was he looking at something specific? Was he thinking of something in particular? His wife? His children?The COP?The shitters? Was he singing to himself, as he had done earlier, when the convoy was leaving Rustamiyah and he sang, to no recognizable tune, just sang the words he had been thinking, “Oh, we’re gonna go to Kamaliyah, to see what kind of trouble we can get in today”?
    boom.
    It wasn’t that loud.
    It was the sound of something being ripped, as if the air were made of silk.
    It was so sudden that at first it