Good Soldiers, Bad War - on David Finkel in Iraq
- Nick Terrell
The Good Soldiers by David Finkel
Scribe. 287 pages. $Au 35.00.
In the final sequence of HBO’s Iraq War mini-series, Generation Kill, the troops from Bravo 21 gather around a laptop. Their deployment has come to an end and the mood is celebratory. One of their number has just finished editing together a retrospective package from the footage he’d shot on his handi-cam during the battalion’s time in theatre. Not everyone in the squad is keen, but the majority assemble excitedly. To the accompaniment of Johnny Cash’s octogenarian end-time rumble, the grainy cut and paste of troops skylarking, bonding, waiting, shooting and smiling begins to play. At first the assembled troops embrace the mood of relieved and cheerful reminiscence but gradually, as fallen comrades grace the screen, then don’t, as the images revisit travesties and disasters, and as ubiquitous squalor and destruction, civilian terror, trauma and tragedy crowd out the small screen, the group-high falters and the digital revisitation loses its savour. One by one the troops move away.
Generation Kill was written and produced by David Simon (The Wire, Homicide: Life on the Street) and closing proceedings with this kind of musical montage is something of a signature move. Direct, astringent tunes are paired with poignant, summary footage to generate an emotive sign-off – the characters we’ve followed in such close detail are transferred into the mythic blur of their inevitable, symbolic futures. In Generation Kill, there’s an extra dimension – as we watch the closing music-video pastiche, so do the characters who feature in it. And as they watch, they respond. There’s a double manipulation here – first we imbibe the media package, the accepted unit of current affairs significance, and follow the emotional cues of adventure intermingled with atrocity. But as the discomfort of the soldiers begins to register, we are being prompted to consider another dimension. The soldiers respond to this YouTube realism with hurt, shame, guilt and something like a sense of professional decorum. While the clip puts the soldiers at the centre of horrific scenes, their reaction to the clip is a concise way to evoke the burden of living in the aftermath of active service. The excitement and mortal jeopardy of battle is also the gateway to a lifetime of doubt and revisitation. Simon’s is not the lightest of touches but this closing scene makes a fairly powerful challenge to the viewer. In contrast, David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers is simply words on a page - no apocalyptic soundtrack, no adrenalin metal, no video game devastation and no jackass bonding. Finkel offers mere reportage, mere journalism – but he also calls on his own rhetorical alchemies to produce an equivalent polemical effect.
But first, some details. David Finkel is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has covered the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo for The Washington Post. From January 2007, Finkel was embedded with Battalion 2-16 for the duration of their fifteen month deployment as a part of George W. Bush’s ‘Surge’. In The Good Soldiers, Finkel tracks the battalion’s experiences and morale as they work to blunt insurgency in occupied Iraq.
Finkel’s main source of information and context during his time with battalion 2-16 is Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Kauzlarich. Kauzlarich aspires to be a good Christian and pacifies himself again and again with his threadbare mantra “It’s all good.’ Finkel characterises Kauzlarich as a man who gets on by accepting the limitations of his intellect and surrendering to the dogma and protocols of army command. When the line from the President is ‘we’re winning the war’, Kauzlarich reflects on all the contradictory evidence in his day to day experience and seeks a way to see them as the material signs of imminent victory. Kauzlarich is an upbeat but emotionally ineloquent leader. He offers consolation to his troops, grieving at a service for a dead comrade, with this fairly brutal analogy: there is a bullet, he tells his men, that has been assigned to each one of us, and for each one of us that bullet has already been fired. The intention is plain enough, but there’s something sociopathic in the choice of time and place for such a fatalistic memento mori. Kauzlarich’s bovine fatalism (alternatively a staunch refusal to doubt) makes him the perfect foil to Finkel’s savvy and more sceptical soldiers.
Finkel’s project is partly explanatory and informative, but his primary aim is to convey the individual experience and social dynamics of the battalion. He wants his readers to learn about the role of the infantry, but more importantly he wants them to engage with the soldiers’ situation. This is where those rhetorical alchemies come in. Here is Finkel’s opening, an efficient piece of foreshadowing leading to an evocative metaphor for the psyche of the occupying forces.
[Kauzlarich’s] soldiers weren’t yet calling him the Lost Kauz behind his back, not when he began. The soldiers of his who would be injured were still perfectly healthy, and the soldiers of his who would die were still perfectly alive. A soldier who was a favourite of his, and who was often described as a younger version of him, hadn’t yet written of the war in a letter to a friend, “I’ve had enough of this bullshit.” Another soldier, one of his best, hadn’t yet written in the journal he kept hidden, “I’ve lost all hope. I feel the end is near for me, very, very near.” Another hadn’t yet gotten angry enough to shoot a thirsty dog that was lapping up a puddle of human blood. Another, who at the end of all this would become the battalions most decorated soldier, hadn’t yet started dreaming about the people he had killed and wondering if God was going to ask him about the two who had been climbing a ladder. Another hadn’t yet started seeing himself shooting a man in the head, and then seeing the little girl who had just watched him shoot the man in the head, every time he shut his eyes. For that matter, his own dreams hadn’t started yet, either, at least the ones he would remember – the one in which his wife and friends were in a cemetery, surrounding a hole into which he was suddenly falling; or the one in which everything around him was exploding and he was trying to fight back with no weapons and no ammunition other than a bucket of old bullets. …
Finkel’s straining a bit here (“perfectly alive”?) but in that bucket of old bullets he has struck upon a poignant symbol for the soldiers’ experiences in Iraq.
The good soldiers, to begin with, are models of efficiency and prudence:
They were finding stockpiles of weapons before the weapons could be used against them. They were getting shot at but not hit. Training and standards, Kauzlarich said – that was the difference. Other battalions were getting rocked by IEDs, but not them, and Kauzlarich kept saying, “It’s all good,” and that’s who they had become as March moved into April. They were the good soldiers.
On the FOB, they were the only ones who wore gloves as they walked around, always ready for the just-in-case, and whenever a convoy rolled out of the wire … the soldiers always drove slower than fifteen miles per hour, because slower improved the chances of finding an IED. Other soldiers in other battalions who had been around longer sped; but not them.
And then, over fifteen months, things change. It’s not only the good soldiers that are brought to their limit, it’s the great soldiers as well. Finkel writes of a soldier who had been “the one who never complained, who hoisted bleeding soldiers onto his back, who’d suddenly begun insisting on being in the right front seat of the lead Humvee on every mission, not because he wanted to die, but because that’s what selfless leaders would do.” For Finkel, this soldier’s path from dutiful efficiency to manic despair serves as a kind of gauge for the physical and psychological stresses brought to bear at the front line of the occupation.
He remembered the initial invasion … “I mean it was a front seat to the greatest movie I’ve ever seen in my life.” He remembered the firefights of his second deployment. “I loved it. Anytime I get shot at in a firefight, it’s the sexiest feeling there is.” He remembered how this deployment began to feel bad early on. “I’d get in the Humvee and be driving down the road and I would feel my heart pulsing up in my throat.” That was the start of it, he said, and then Emory happened, and then Crow happened, and then he was in a succession of explosions, and then a bullet was skimming across his thighs, and then Doster happened, and then he was waking up thinking, “Holy shit, I’m still here, it’s misery, it’s hell,” which became, “Are they going to kill me today?” which became, “I’ll take care of it myself,” which became, “Why do that? I’ll go out killing as many of them as I can, until they kill me.”
“The amazing thing,” Finkel continues, “was that no-one knew. Here was all this stuff going on, pounding heart, panicked breathing, sweating palms, electric eyes, and no one regarded him as anything but the great soldier he’d always been.”
A 24 year old Lieutenant Showman, the intermediary between the “it’s all good” Kauzlarich and an increasingly disaffected troop body confides “I think it’s difficult for them, and difficult for me, to hear about these strides we’re making, these improvements we’re making, when we know – when I know – for a fact, that this place hasn’t changed a damn bit since we set foot here in February.” And so, with a leadership in denial, and with an enemy continuing to inflict serious wounds, the disaffection intensifies.
Finkel’s reportage carries the narrative propulsion and verbal facility of a polished page-turning suspense writer. He judges well when to offer up fine detail and precision and when to draw back and let allusive profundity stimulate the reader’s emotional imagination. Finkel is a journalist, and The Good Soldiers is a record, a piece of reportage. But the record of what? This is not the political or military history of the Surge, this is an empathetic and involved response to the conditions and experiences of individual troops. Finkel does gesture to the various versions of the war, but the gestures are something of a formality.
There were just so many ways to describe this war, that was the thing.
Congress had needed two days of hearings.
Protesters had needed a die-in.
George W. Bush had needed just three words: “We’re kicking ass.”
Now Kauzlarich managed to do it in one. “Unfortunately,” he typed as he started the next sentence, and in the truth of that word, a bad day came to an end.
“Unfortunately” (Kauzlarich is breaking the news of another soldier’s death) is a vast understatement and an evasion. Nevertheless, of the many ways to describe this war, Finkel’s approval of this particular one reiterates his commitment to the close up account. In Finkel’s version of war, casualties are not just tactical expediencies but individual soldiers whose deaths will always leave an unfillable gap no matter how readily they are replaced.
Finkel is a serious, pedigreed journalist with a firm conviction in the morality of reportage. He is also clearly and consciously pursuing the right rhetorical tone. The idea: to let the reader pass gradually, unprompted, through the experiences he had shared with Battalion 2-16. Finkel’s style is anything but blank though – pregnant understatement, emotive character cameos, a deliberate and relentless engagement with the rank and file. Finkel positions his good soldiers in the midst of a vaguely defined politico-military machine. He emphasises their vulnerability to the remote agendas of their own command as much as their vulnerability to the unconventional warfare of an evasive adversary. The good soldiers are lost in some metaphysical landscape where the hostile posture of the invading force invites karmic retribution. Counter-insurgency easily takes on a broad symbolic resonance: the enemy is elusive, absent, they offer no target, no easy means of engagement, they give their opponent time to think and to worry - and to lose hope. Booby traps turn the countryside into an adversary. A conflicted, frightened populace remain at arm’s length and eventually the fight transforms into a sacrificial ritual of deference to some blood hungry abstraction of human aggression. Extrapolate out – Finkel’s good soldiers are the sacrificial offering, or the forfeit, made by an industrial military complex dreaming of supply and reconstruction contracts, and oil.
It’s all there – the epic sense of hopelessness and the dim outline of a self-defeating pugnacity. But The Good Soldiers is also firmly grounded in the detailed troop-level experience of the Surge. Finkel’s telegrammatic descriptions of action are intermingled with sensational, suspense filled constructions and context. His staccato procedural style mimics the manner of the soldiers’ sworn statements, his main source of combat detail.
… This time the explosion was thunderous. The Humvee shot straight up in the air – it must have been ten feet, soldiers would say later – and when it came down, it bounced and then exploded into flames.
Immediately, Jay March and other soldiers ran towards the Humvee and began dragging injured soldiers away.
Now they watched helplessly as the driver, nineteen-year-old James Harrelson, burned to death in front of their eyes.
Now they were in the tall, green grass on the side of the berm, tending to the snapped bones and haemorrhaging wounds of the four soldiers they had been able to get to.
Now, at the Rustamiyah aid station, medics ran toward the first arriving Humvee and the howls of a soldier in pain.
Now, inside the aid station, a soldier who had been unconscious was screaming and a second soldier was moaning, and a third soldier was swearing and apologizing as a doctor filled him with morphine.
There’s nothing like being there of course, but Finkel also does a lot of hard work to establish his authority. Finkel moves between the hard-boiled (terse, punchy and knowing), the sentimental and plaintive (humble pathos for the soldiers) and a kind of buttoned-down gonzo journalese (insistent and challenging). Through all these phases, he is reaching out to keep his reader where he wants them.
What about the youngest soldier in the battalion, who was only seventeen? “Roger that,” he said, whenever he was asked if he was ready, but when rumours about the deployment first began to circulate, he had taken aside his platoon sergeant, a staff sergeant named Frank Gietz, to ask how he’d be able to handle killing someone. “Put it in a dark place while you’re there.” Gietz had said.
So was a seventeen year old ready?
For that matter, was Gietz, who had been to Iraq twice, was one of the oldest soldiers in the battalion, and knew better than anyone the meaning of “a dark place”?
Was Jay Cajimat, who in ten weeks was going to be remembered by his mother in the local paper as a “soft-hearted boy”?
Didn’t matter. They were going.
Even the most dispassionate depiction of what war does to soldiers will tend to valorise their suffering and ordeals. These experiences are, plain and simple, extraordinary, and for us ordinary civilians, safe at home, they easily claim and hold our attention. As they should. But war is not just good soldiers being ground down by diabolical circumstances. There are many aspects of war that are obscured by the kind of close, human scale Finkel utilises throughout The Good Soldiers. To be fair, Finkel has not set out to dissect or analyse the industrial and political dynamics that can make war look like good business or sound politics. Nor does he set out to thoroughly explore the hierarchies that determine the character of military procedure. Essentially, he has set out to evaluate the surge strategy by way of the experiences of the troops enforcing it. It stands to reason, he implies, that the experiences and morale of these soldiers will offer one of the truest registers of whether the strategy is sound. This focus also guarantees Finkel’s reader a maximum in emotional yield. Finkel maintains the semblance of an impersonal, just-the-facts address, but there is something disingenuous about his journalistic objectivity.
Finkel doesn’t engage with the justifications for the original invasion of Iraq, his method is heavy on context, but analysis and evaluation fall outside the boundary of his explanatory portraiture. Finkel’s show don’t tell approach provides what most curious readers want – the chance to observe and listen in, before drawing their own conclusions about the efficacy of the surge. The Good Soldiers also contains an implicit invitation to assess the moral foundations of the US campaign in Iraq. Finkel lets the soldiers lead his reader in the critical questions – should we have ever come here? Should we be here now? Can we possibly do any good? Finkel allows the good soldiers to condemn and question the war, but he himself never does. He catalogues traumatic ordeals, life-ruining physical and psychological injuries, loss, betrayal and social dissolution, and provides the raw data for the reader to weigh gains against losses, but he himself never does this.
Without moving too far from the experiences of the rank and file, Finkel has gone to some lengths to ensure his portrayal of the surge encompasses much more than fighting. Relying on a brisk if sometimes overly emotive pen-portraiture, Finkel gives fair showing to the many and varied aspects of the soldiers’ lot and to the range of trauma inflicted by combat. There are page turning battle sequences, heroism and bravado, and there is death, crippling injury and despair. The anguished vigil by the wife of a critically injured soldier anticipates the countless minor aftershocks that all participating nations will continue to experience as veterans reintegrate themselves into the civilian population. Finkel segues from the theatre of war to an army hospital where multiple-amputees, burns victims and seriously damaged veterans struggle to rehabilitate themselves. He juxtaposes the insular, focused world of the deployed troops with a carnivalesque protest in Washington. The peace protesters have arranged a die-in, and with the scene seeming so much like a rehash of the anti-war movement of the seventies, Finkel does a short stint of new journalistic homage to Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night. Reading between Finkel’s lines, these people are having too much fun, and the retro aesthetic of their protest is too kooky to be valid.
The demonstration is mollifying public theatre for the wishy washy left – Finkel cuts directly to the mess hall where disinterested troops carry on with the routines and rituals of day to day survival. Finkel lets the demonstration appear trivial by comparison, but is it? Similarly, Finkel assembles a supporting cast of Iraqi allies who are either cynical, corrupt, incompetent or indolent. While the American command is characterised as callous and careerist, with only the most abstract interest in the protocols of warfare and no real concern to safeguard the good conscience of their subordinates. Finkel makes his most telling claim on his readers’ sympathies by representing his subjects as effectively powerless. By placing them at the mercy both of an abstract command and an abstract enemy, he inoculates them against the personal accountability that surely goes hand in hand with their voluntary commitment to fight in their nation’s interest. Finkel’s good soldiers are presented as moral bystanders – they make no decisions (they react, respond, follow orders) and their ideas, wishes, suggestions and attitudes have no bearing on the strategies and initiatives they are there to carry out. They are tools and victims.
Compelling as The Good Soldiers is, this is a sentimental and partial representation – there’s emotional feedback here, identification and admiration crowd out objectivity. Finkel can’t be objective about the soldiers. Would objectivity have made for a better evocation of the soldiers’ experiences? Would it have made for a better book? Probably not, but it’s important to bear Finkel’s partiality in mind. If we sympathise with the soldiers too much, if we engage in the sentimental idealisation of what a soldier is and does, we lose the ability to focus on other equally important aspects of warfare.
Finkel has no interest in the prickly issue of the soldiers’ professional contractual commitment to war. With all that is done to and by the good soldiers there is never any sense that their enlistment might be something to be regretted or that they still have the capacity to reject or protest against their circumstance. Good soldiers, it seems, will take anything on the chin. Finkel does record an abortive groundswell of disobedience, but the ease with which it is quashed seems to reinforce the intrinsic decency of this representative battalion.
In his back pages, Finkel registers his respect and gratitude for a military media policy sophisticated enough to let the bleaker moments in his work go to press undiluted. Finkel clearly takes the integrity of the US Armed Forces as a given and his account of the surge is intended as a serious contribution to the problem of the Iraq occupation. For all that, and in spite of Finkel’s even handedness (see the way he defended the US military against Wikileaks’ characterisation of the killing of two Reuters journalists as ‘collateral murder’*), a prospective recruit reading The Good Soldiers with a dry and attentive eye would hopefully go away with their military aspirations chronically discouraged. The thing is, though, that Finkel’s evocative, novelistic effects and his determination to engage the reader’s emotions as well as their intellect makes a dry-eyed reading quite unlikely. To identify with the soldiers, to come close to some imaginative understanding of their ordeals should take the reader one step nearer to a total abhorrence of war. I’m fairly confident this is what Finkel intended. However, because the soldiers are divorced from the kind of agency that might sour a reader’s sympathy, and because they seem (an a result) the victims of some arbitrary sentence, Finkel’s good soldiers transcend the political, economic and historical realities of their professional service. The sympathy they inspire is the sympathy for the martyr. The Good Soldiers presents a doomed cohort, broken down gradually by circumstances over which they have little to no control, but to which their ideal of duty demands a tragic, noble surrender. For the young and impatient, or for impressionable infatuates of dutiful self-sacrifice, the mythic glory of this kind of martyrdom holds a wicked allure.
14.07.10
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*In the chapter given over to July 12, Finkel gives an account of an incident that has become a flashpoint relating to perceived ethical shortfalls in the conduct of American forces and also to the freedom of information and the right of journalists to use and protect unnamed whistleblowers. Wikileaks posted the military’s own video record of a skirmish in which two Reuters journalists were killed by machine gun fire from an Apache helicopter. Finkel, who viewed the same tape with the leaders of Battalion 2-16 (who were the first ground troops on the scene after the gunship had calmed the hotspot) dismissed Wikileaks’ characterisation of the incident as ‘Collateral Murder‘, pointing out that the leaked clip gave no sense that the incident took place in the context of a lasting firefight in an area controlled by insurgents.