The Good Soldiers

From the perspective of a single U.S. Army Infantry battalion, American journalist David Finkel’s non-fiction book The Good Soldiers (2009) chronicles the 2007 troop surge during the Iraq War. Finkel received the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the ALA Alex Award for it.

For eight months, interspersed between January 2007 and June 2008, Finkel embedded himself with the 2nd Battalion of the 16th Infantry Regiment, informally known as the "2-16 Rangers." Under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Kauzlarich, the 800-soldier battalion was one of many tasked with stabilizing a portion of Baghdad in the wake of the 2007 troop surge in Iraq. As part of the surge, George W. Bush deployed 20,000 additional troops "to help Iraqis clear and secure neighborhoods, to help them protect the local population, and to help ensure that the Iraqi forces left behind are capable of providing the security." By the time of the troop surge, 3,000 U.S. soldiers had already been killed and another 25,000 wounded.

While many the surge's troops were deployed to the so-called Green Zone, where the presence of Iraq's transitional government allowed for a modicum of stability, Kauzlarich and his men were stationed in Rustamiya, a neighborhood on the Eastern outskirts of the city where 350,000 insurgents continued to resist American occupation. This deadly area, according to Finkel, is one where few politicians or diplomats dared to enter.



Kauzlarich is tasked with going door-to-door to inquire about who had placed an improvised-explosive-device or IED on the road. At worst, home searches could turn into a deadly firefight. At best, Kauzlarich encountered residents who wanted to help the Americans but could not out of fear of retaliation from insurgents. In one interview, a resident told Kauzlarich, "I like America. When America came, I put flowers out front. [But now] if I put them out, [insurgents] will kill me." Kauzlarich sensed that the longer the interview went on, the more anxious the man had become. Even hosting an American soldier in your home for more than 20 minutes was enough to invite reprisals.

The threat of IEDs is arguably the greatest peril these soldiers faced. Their fear took on a mystical quality, as the soldiers placed as much importance on their electronic jamming devices as they did on a horseshoe talisman hanging from their Humvee's front grille, intended to ward off danger.

Within the first seven months of the battalion's deployment, they faced 42 incidents of IED attacks, small arms fire, and rocket fire. As more and more of the soldiers were sent to the hospital with missing limbs or to the morgue in body bags, troop morale plummeted. Only the battalion chaplain offered the soldiers any semblance of psychological relief, giving them an outlet through which to express their fear and despair. In one interview with Finkel, a soldier said, "They say on TV that the soldiers want to be here? I can’t speak for every soldier, but I think if people went around and made a list of who wants to be here, ain’t nobody that wants to be here." This is an example of the cognitive dissonance soldiers felt when watching American television reports, presidential addresses, and protest rallies concerning the war in which they found themselves.



Many of the soldiers also suffered from severe post-traumatic stress disorder owing to their experiences in the war. Sgt. Adam Schumann bore the burden of 1,000 days spent in Iraq, plagued by images like that of the dying man who sank into the mud after Schumann shot him. "You could see it in his shaking hands. You could see it in the three prescription bottles in his room: one to steady his galloping heart rate, one to reduce his anxiety, one to minimize his nightmares." Another soldier "took off his armor and lay down against it and woke up a few hours later with the sinking feeling a person gets when he realizes that nothing changed while he was asleep, that all of it is still true."

Although Finkel embarked on this journalistic endeavor with few biases about the war, it is difficult for him to escape the conclusion that "the strategy of winning an enduring peace had failed. The strategy of defeating terrorism had failed. The strategy of spreading democracy throughout the Middle East had failed." This is made all the more tragic when considering the casualties suffered by the 2-16 battalion alone: 14 dead, 75 wounded, and untold more suffering the debilitating effects of PTSD.

According to The New York Times, The Good Soldiers "brilliantly captures the terrors of ordinary men enduring extraordinary circumstances."