The Good Soldiers by David Finkel Read Free Book Online

daylight, loomed over a landscape of empty streets and buildings surrounded by sandbags and tall concrete blast walls.
    Inside some of those buildings were Kauzlarich’s soldiers, all of whom had been trained not in counterinsurgency, but, as Cummings had put it, to close with and destroy the enemy. A week after Cajimat’s death, they were passing time between missions like they usually did, by playing video games on their computers or videochatting over the Internet. Or lifting weights, or watching bootleg DVDs that they could buy at the hospital for a dollar. Or drinking Red Bulls or Mountain Dews or water mixed with high-protein powder. Or stuffing themselves with tubs of Corn Pops at the dining facility. Or flipping through magazines that came as close as possible to violating the army’s ban on pornography. Such was life on the FOB for the eight hundred of the finest, whose behavior could be explained simply by the fact that so many of them were nineteen, or by the more complicated fact suggested by the ubiquitous blast walls that they did all of these things behind.
    Blast walls surrounded their barracks.
    Blast walls surrounded their dining facility.
    Blast walls surrounded their chapel.
    Blast walls surrounded their latrines.
    They ate behind blast walls, prayed behind blast walls, peed behind blast walls, and slept behind blast walls, and now, on April 14, as the sun rose and the dented moon disappeared, they emerged from those blast walls and got in their Humvees wondering if this would be the day that they were now dreaming of behind the blast walls, the one in which, like Cajimat, they would get blasted.
    “And we’re off,” Kauzlarich said.
    He was in his usual spot—left rear seat, third Humvee from the front. There were always at least four vehicles in a convoy; this one happened to have five. Nate Showman, a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant whose belief in the war and optimism about it matched Kauzlarich’s, was in the front right seat. There was no junior officer in the battalion with more promise than Showman, and Kauzlarich had selected him to be in charge of his personal security detail.
    Out they went through the heavily guarded main gate of the FOB and were instantly on the front lines of the war. In other wars, the front line was exactly that, a line to advance toward and cross, but in this war, where the enemy was everywhere, it was anywhere out of the wire, in any direction: that building, that town, that province, the entire country, in 360 degrees.
    In such a war, and in an area seeded with EFPs, what was the safest seat? The soldiers discussed it constantly. Kauzlarich didn’t discuss it, but he thought about it, too. The lead truck in a convoy was the one that got hit the most, but lately insurgents had been aiming at the second in line, or the third, which had been Cajimat’s, or sometimes the fourth or fifth. And while most EFPs had been coming from the right side, Cajimat’s had come from the left.
    So there was no sure thing to rely on, only precautions to be taken. The Humvees were fitted with jamming devices to defeat EFPs armed with infrared triggers, but the devices weren’t always effective, which was why one Humvee also had a good-luck horseshoe wired to the front grille.
    Every soldier had his own version of this. Showman carried a small cross knitted in army colors by someone in his parents’ church in Ohio. The gunner tried to stand in a particular way, with one foot in front of the other, so that if an EFP slug came roaring in, he might only lose one foot instead of two, and for similar reasons Kauzlarich sometimes tucked his hands inside of his body armor as he looked out the window and wondered how aware he would be if the explosion came. “Instantly,” he had told Cajimat’s mother, but was that really the way it happened? Would he know it? Would he hear it? Would he see it? Would he feel it? Would the pile of trash outside of his window that he was now regarding