Entertainment, Books - Navy Times

Book review: The Iraq surge from grunts’ point of view

This book is not a new version of Ford Madox Ford’s acclaimed 1915 novel “The Good Soldier.” But author David Finkel presents a new classic.

This book is not a valentine to 2-16, an infantry unit out of Fort Riley, Kan. But the author includes each soldier’s name.

This book is not a textbook full of tactics and strategies. But the author offers a book full of frustrations and feelings, opening with this:

“His soldiers weren’t yet calling him the Lost Kauz behind his back, not when all this 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 favorite 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 b------t ...’”

The soldier is fed up, but the reader cannot get enough.

That first paragraph hooks you with intrigue, with foreshadowing, with parallel sentence construction. Not only does Finkel evoke the everyday lives of soldiers, the Pulitzer-winning Washington Post journalist writes in a form that occasionally will mesmerize you with its cadence — or, possibly, repel you with its repetition.

The lost “Kauz” is Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, and the 2-16 is the 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Bridgade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division. The book is a personal chronicle of the people living and fighting and dying in what Kauzlarich sees as an opportunity — an opportunity to be a part of President George W. Bush’s effort to make a “difference” in Iraq in 2007.

In the beginning of the surge, being part of “winning” was “all good” to Kauzlarich.

What wasn’t so good was existing in the surge when “the battalion chaplain was seeing an increasing number of soldiers who would knock on his door late at night for discreet counseling, including two who were talking about suicide.”

What wasn’t so good was Kauzlarich’s trip to the Army’s Institute of Surgical Research Burn Center. While on leave, Kauzlarich visits San Antonio and gets motivated to return to theater and give the insurgents hell. The reporter, who spent a total of eight months with the regiment, visits Texas and files a report that devastates:

“[Kauzlarich] had decided to meet with [injured soldier] Duncan Crookston.

“He put on a protective gown, protective boots, and protective gloves and walked toward a 19-year-old soldier whose left leg was gone, right leg was gone, right arm was gone, left lower arm was gone, ears were gone, nose was gone, and eyelids were gone, and who was burned over what little remained of him. ...

“ ‘Wow,’ Kauzalrich said under his breath.”

Wow is right. As a compelling read, “The Good Soldiers” is all good.

The Good Soldiers by David Finkel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25, 284 pages.