The Good Soldiers
by David Finkel
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Book Summary Information
Author: David FinkelEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-09-15
ISBN: 0374165734
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Book Reviews of The Good Soldiers
Book Review: A must-read account of what our soldiers have gone through
Summary: 5 Stars
David Finkel's The Good Soldiers is a book I feel everyone should read, regardless of whether you're for, against or ambivalent about the war in Iraq. Finkel's account of the experiences of one particular battalion, the 2-16, stationed in one of the more dangerous parts of Baghdad during the Surge, lets the reader see in vivid detail what our soldiers experienced in that time and place during the war.
One of the best things about Finkel's account is that he himself is invisible as he relates the things the soldiers of the 2-16 see, say and do, from the time they learn they are to be deployed from their home base of Fort Riley, Kansas, to the winding down of their last days in Baghdad when their fifteen-month tour finally comes to an end. Finkel becomes something of a kaleidescopic camera, with each turn bringing something new into view - a patrol going through their first IED attack, a soldier dealing with a family of Iraqi refugees living in a shed inside a gutted building the unit wants to make into an outpost, another soldier dealing with red tape as he tries to get the body of a dead Iraqi removed from a septic tank, soldiers prepping for the Soldier of the Month award by learning rote answers to questions irrelevant to the reality they live with, another soldier racing against time to get help for the daughter of an Iraqi interpreter injured by a bombing, soldiers back in the states in army hospitals learning to live without the legs, arms and eyes they've lost, the superstitious rituals individual soldiers perform before going out on patrol, a soldier home on leave who cannot look at his eight-year-old daughter without remembering an Iraqi girl of the same age who saw him shoot an armed insurgent in the head in her home - and many, many others. But all the while, Finkel never inserts himself into the scene. The soldiers, their families, and the Iraqis they deal with speak for themselves while Finkel remains silent, never commenting, never explaining, only acting as a silent witness to events as they unfold.
It really is hard to convey just how much there is to experience in this book, how much it takes you into the lives and experiences of the soldiers you get to know, their families, and others like the Iraqi interpreters who work with them, the Iraqi military and civilian authories they sometimes interact with, and the ordinary Iraqi civilians they encounter. This is one of those books it is almost impossible to put down.
And above all Finkel makes the people in this book - the soldiers, their families, the Iraqis they deal with - real, and the reader comes to empathize or at least understand them in ways that makes reading what they go through have much more impact:
"This was the 'we got what we got' army that Kauzlarich got. The result, for the army, was enough soldiers to fight a war, but for Kauzlarich it meant that he spent a lot of time that year weeding out soldiers, such as the one who was arrested for aiming a handgun at a man who turned out to be an undercover police officer. And one who drank too much and couldn't stop crying and talked all the time about all the ways he wished to hurt himself, a level of sadness too destructive for even the army.
--Most of the soldiers he got weren't that way. A lot of them were great, some were brilliant, and almost all were unquestionably courageous: Sergeant Gietz, who was being nominated for a Bronze Star Medal with Valor for what he had done in June. Adam Schumann, who had carried Sergeant Emory on his back. The list went on and on. Every company. Every platoon. Every soldier, really, because now, in July, as the explosions kept coming, and coming, the daily act of them jumping into Humvees to go out of the wire and straight into what they knew was waiting for them began to seem the very definition of bravery. 'Stupid f[u]ckers,' someone watching them might think, but it was in a prayerful, lump-in-the-throat way. 'Here we go,' Kauzlarich, who had now been in three near-misses with EFP's, would say, and there they would go, without hesitation, protecting their hands, lining up their feet, and keeping private their fears, sometimes by listening in silence to the soothing clangs that came from deep inside the frames of the Humvees that sounded like drowsy cow bells, and other times by playing a game of what they wanted their last words to be.
--'Kill 'em all.'
--'F[u]ck Nine-eleven.'
--'Tell my wife I really didn't love her.'
--They were vulgar. They were macho. ('At no time did he scream. Strong kid.' was the compliment given a soldier who was severly hurt by an EFP.) They were funny (A conversation between two sergeants: 'No matter where you are, kids are kids.' 'Kids are the future.' 'But I saw a video this morning on the news of a kid, thirteen or fourteen years old, maybe here or in Afghanistan, about to cut off a guy's head with a knife. What was that kid thinking?' 'Probably thinking about cutting that guy's head off') With only a few exceptions, Kauzlarich was enormously proud of the battalion they had become, but what had been essential was his getting rid of roughly 10 percent of them before they deployed. They were the 10 percent he never should have gotten in the first place, a percentage that could have been higher except for his penchant for second chances. The knucklehead who got in a fistfight at Fort Riley because he kept eating the French fries of someone who kept warning him, 'Don't eat my French fries'? He got a second chance and turned out to be a good soldier. The goofball who spilled gasoline on his boots and decided the best way to clean them was to light the gasoline on fire and ended up with leg burns because he didn't think to take the boots off? He got a second chance, too, as did a soldier who was arrested for driving under the influence as he tried to drive onto Fort Riley, and then insisted to his sergeant that someone else had been at the whell and the guards at the gate were lying. 'Hey, Craig, you know there's a video camera there, right?' his sergeant had said, and so Andre Craig, Jr., backed down and took responsibility and got to go to Iraq, where on June 25 he was killed by an EFP.
--Another second-chancer: a soldier they called Private Teflon because he was always in the vicinity of bad things, from fights to a rumored drive-by shooting, but was never implicated. So he got to go to Iraq, too, and when his friend Cameron Payne was killed, he delivered a eulogy so overflowing with hurt it was like listening to the exact moment of someone being transformed by hearbreak. Which of course is what wars did, in every way imagineable, bad and good."
I learned a lot from this book, but in particular I learned three things: (1) Nothing in Iraq - absolutely nothing - is simple. Even something as seemingly simple as garbage collection runs up against unforseen problems. (2) IED and EFP attacks are nothing like the way they seem in the news. They take deadly toll, not only in the soldiers killed or maimed but in physical brain trauma and in the psychological cost of those who have to race to rescue those who are bleeding or burning to death. And (3) There is an enormous disconnect between how the war is perceived and portrayed here and how it is experienced by the soldiers who are actually over there:
"Sometimes, in the DFAC, the soldiers would listen to the screaming [pundits] and wonder how the people on those shows knew so much. Clearly, most of them had never been to Iraq, and even if they had, it was probably for what the soldiers dismissively referred to as the windshield tour: corkscrew in, hear from a general or two, get in a Humvee, see a market surrounded by new blast walls, get a commemorative coin, corkscrew out. And yet to listen to them was to listen to people who knew everything. They knew why the surge was working. They knew why the surge wasn't working. The not only screamed, they screamed with certainty. "They should come to Rustamiyah," more than one soldier said, certain of only one thing: that none of them would. No one came to Rustamiyah. But if they did, they could et in the lead Humvee. The could go out on Route Predators. They could go out on Berm Road. They could experience the full pucker. They could experience it the next day, too, and the day after that -- and then maybe they could go back on TV and scream about how bewildering all of this really was. At least then they would be screaming the truth."
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in what the war in Iraq means for the soldiers we send over there. It does not pretend to be more than it is - it is only what one particular battalion went through in one part of Baghdad during one tour that occurred during the Surge - but it will most definitely leave you feeling differently about just what the real costs of the war are for everyone involved. No matter what your views on the war are, this book will bring home just how much we ask of the troops we send, and how much we owe them. Truly unforgettable.
Summary of The Good Soldiers
It was the last-chance moment of the war. In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq. He called it the surge. ?Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences,? he told a skeptical nation. Among those listening were the young, optimistic army infantry soldiers of the 2-16, the battalion nicknamed the Rangers. About to head to a vicious area of Baghdad, they decided the difference would be them.
Fifteen months later, the soldiers returned home forever changed. Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter David Finkel was with them in Bagdad, and almost every grueling step of the way.
What was the true story of the surge? And was it really a success? Those are the questions he grapples with in his remarkable report from the front lines. Combining the action of Mark Bowden?s Black Hawk Down with the literary brio of Tim O?Brien?s The Things They Carried, The Good Soldiers is an unforgettable work of reportage. And in telling the story of these good soldiers, the heroes and the ruined, David Finkel has also produced an eternal tale?not just of the Iraq War, but of all wars, for all time.
Book Description It was the last-chance moment of the war. In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq. He called it "the surge." "Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences," he told a skeptical nation. Among those listening were the young, optimistic army infantry soldiers of the 2-16, the battalion nicknamed the Rangers. About to head to a vicious area of Baghdad, they decided the difference would be them.
Fifteen months later, the soldiers returned home forever changed. Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter David Finkel was with them in Bagdad almost every grueling step of the way.
What was the true story of the surge? Was it really a success? Those are the questions he grapples with in his remarkable report from the front lines. Combining the action of Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down with the literary brio of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, The Good Soldiers is an unforgettable work of reportage. And in telling the story of these good soldiers, the heroes and the ruined, David Finkel has also produced an eternal tale--not just of the Iraq War, but of all wars, for all time.
Faces of the Surge
Beneath every policy decision made in the highest echelons of Washington about how a war should be fought are soldiers who live with those decisions every day. These are some of the faces of the U.S. strategy known as "the surge," as photographed by David Finkel, author of The Good Soldiers.
 Soldiers of the 2-16 Rangers wait for permission to enter a mosque. |  Two soldiers try to collect themselves after their Humvee was hit by a roadside bomb. |
 |  Sergeant Adam Schumann, regarded as one of the battalion's best soldiers on the day he was sent home with severe post -traumatic stress disorder. | |
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