The Good Soldiers

Starred review from July 27, 2009
A success story in the headlines, the surge in Iraq was an ordeal of hard fighting and anguished trauma for the American soldiers on the ground, according to this riveting war report. Washington Post
correspondent Finkel chronicles the 15-month deployment of the 2-16 Infantry Battalion in Baghdad during 2007 and 2008, when the chaos in Iraq subsided to a manageable uproar. For the 2-16, waning violence still meant wild firefights, nerve-wracking patrols through hostile neighborhoods where every trash pile could hide an IED, and dozens of comrades killed and maimed. At the fraught center of the story is Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, whose dogged can-do optimism—his motto is “It's all good”—pits itself against declining morale and whispers of mutiny. While vivid and moving, Finkel's grunt's-eye view is limited; the soldiers' perspective is one of constant improvisatory reaction to attacks and crises, and we get little sense of exactly how and why the new American counterinsurgency methods calmed the Iraqi maelstrom. Still, Finkel's keen firsthand reportage, its grit and impact only heightened by the literary polish of his prose, gives us one of the best accounts yet of the American experience in Iraq. Photos.

Starred review from August 1, 2009
Did the much-vaunted surge of American troops in Iraq work? Yes, said George W. Bush. A soldierly response differed:"I've had enough of this bullshit."

So details Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post writer Finkel in this excellent study of soldiers under fire. In January 2007, Bush ordered a surge that involved flooding the Baghdad and other key locations with soldiers to quell anti-American partisan activity. In the field were troops who had seen time in Iraq before, had gone home and been sent back. Some were from a battalion stationed at Fort Riley, Kan., and they had the good fortune to be commanded by a smart West Pointer who had earned his Ranger parachute and had served in the first Gulf War and Afghanistan. His troops affectionately dubbed Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich,"the Lost Kauz." The sobriquet proved fitting, as Finkel chronicles, and though Kauzlarich did his best to prevent harm from befalling his charges, he could not stop the IEDs, suicide attacks and stray shots that inevitably followed their movements. The author writes with the you-are-there immediacy of Richard Tregaskis's Guadalcanal Diary (1943), taking the reader into the field, where, against a $100 explosive device, a"$150,000 Humvee might as well have been constructed of lace." Finkel also depicts the gruesome aftermath of such explosions:"All four limbs burned away, bony stumps visible. Superior portion of cranium burned away," reads a battalion doctor's death report."No further exam possible due to degree of charring." Aspects of the surge, the author writes, were merely rhetorical. Others were unquestionably successful, particularly the reduction in the number of attacks on Americans—successes to be chalked up to the bravery of the men and women under fire, and in no way, Finkel says, to anything happening in Washington. Says Kauz of one action that serves as an epigram to the entire enterprise,"It's fucked up. But you did the right thing."

A superb account of the burdens soldiers bear.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

September 15, 2009
Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Finkel chronicles the work of the Second Battalion, Sixteenth Infantry Regiment, during a 14-month tour in Iraq. The only real enthusiast for the war was commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Kautzlarich, but the rest of the battalion mostly approached the tour in the classic spirit of doing a job. A dirty job it was, too, as more sophisticated roadside bombs grew capable of destroying an armored Hummer and most of the men inside it. (The battalion lost 15 killed and many more maimed for life.) Most of the men ended by describing the war, the Iraqis, and the country in strings of four-letter words, but they had made a real effort to hold down civilian casualties while keeping the insurgents on the defensive, at which they may have achieved some modest success in 2007 and 2008. A memorable portrait of soldiers good enough to do their duty in a bad and ugly war, this is a superior addition to the Iraq War literature.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)