“The Good Soldiers’’ chronicles Colonel Ralph Kauzlarich’s 15-month mission leading the 2-16 infantry battalion out of Fort Riley, Kan., as it struggled to make allies and build local forces, impose a measure of order out of the constant chaos, and help put Iraq on a path to governing itself.
Despite the colonel’s persistent optimism Finkel shines a bright, if forgiving light on his blind spots and provides a bevy of evidence to support the moniker his soldiers gave him, “The Lost Kauz.’’
In the signature style he has honed in long narratives for the Post, Finkel takes readers through different moments of the deployment - before, during, after - and mixes them together, all the while threading the narrative with meticulous reporting.
Here’s Finkel’s description of what Kauzlarich sees when he encounters the first injured soldier: “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.’’
He describes the depression experienced by another severely injured soldier, and how his wife couldn’t bear to tell Kauzlarich of what her husband had been through: “She wondered: Should she tell him what she knew? How depressed her husband was? That one day he had tipped himself over onto a hard tile floor, telling her when she found him that he’d wanted to hit his head and die? That another day he had begged her to get him a knife? That another day he had asked for a pen so he could push it into his neck?’’
What really distinguishes “The Good Soldiers’’ from other accounts of the war in Iraq is how Finkel compares the rhetoric with the realities of the conflict, showing us with gritty detail rather than opining from some ideological perch.
