The Good Soldiers Read Online Free Page A

pounds of weaponry and bulletproofing as they walked out of the FOB to make their first impression on 350,000 people who surely were just waiting to blow the dumbasses up.
    As they walked out of the gate, some of the soldiers were visibly shaking. Step by step, however, as they passed people who regarded them quietly, they began to relax, and by the time they got back to the FOB ten hours later, just as Kauzlarich had intended, they felt, if not fearless, then at least a little smarter about things. One platoon had found an unex-ploded mortar shell sticking out of the ground, with Iranian markings on the fins. A lesson, perhaps, in who they would be fighting.
    Another platoon had been approached by a frantic woman carrying something bundled in a blanket, and when she didn’t halt, they could have been forgiven for assuming she was a suicide bomber. But now, as she reached them, they saw that she was holding a badly burned little boy with open eyes and blistering skin, and as they knelt to wrap him in clean bandages, the mother they might have shot was instead thanking them in tears.
    A lesson, then, in restraint.
    And a third platoon got a lesson in stupidity and luck after a soldier said that a piece of foam block on the side of a street looked weird to him, a second soldier went over and gave it a nudge with his foot, and a third picked it up to have a look and saw a hole with wiring inside. Back on the FOB now, astonished, relieved, knowing that it had been an IED packed with nuts and bolts, they still couldn’t believe it hadn’t exploded.
    But it hadn’t, and as the first weeks of the deployment went by, that bit of good fortune seemed to set the pattern for them.
    They were finding stockpiles of weapons before the weapons could be used against them. They were getting shot at but not hit. Training and standards, Kauzlarich said—that was the difference. Other battalions were getting rocked by IEDs, but not them, and Kauzlarich kept saying, “It’s all good,” and that’s who they had become as March moved into April. They were the good soldiers.
    On the FOB, they were the only ones who wore gloves as they walked around, always ready for the just-in-case, and whenever a convoy rolled out of the wire, as one did now on April 6, at ten minutes past midnight, the soldiers always drove slower than fifteen miles per hour, because slower improved the chances of finding an IED. Other soldiers in other battalions who had been around longer sped; but not them. They crept along encased in the very best body armor, eye protection, ear protection, throat protection, groin protection, knee protection, elbow protection, and hand protection available, as well as in the very best Humvees the army had ever built, with armoring so thick that each door weighed more than four hundred pounds.
    Slowly, deliberately, they rolled into a neighborhood called Mualameen. They passed darkened apartment buildings. They passed the silhouette of a mosque. They drove with headlights off and night-vision goggles on, which at 12:35 a.m. flared into sudden blindness.
    Here came the explosion. It came through the doors. It came through the body armor. It came through the good soldiers. It was perfectly aimed and perfectly timed, and now one of the good soldiers was on fire.
    This was Cajimat, who in February had been gung ho to go, who in March had already seen enough to write in an online posting: “I just need some time to think this through,” and who in April was driving the third Hum-vee in a convoy of six, which was the one chosen by someone hiding in some shadow with a trigger in his hand.
    A wire ran from the trigger to another shadow, this one at the edge of the road. Almost certainly the man couldn’t see the actual IED, but he’d lined it up beforehand with a tall, tilting, broken, otherwise useless light pole on the far side of the road, which he could use as an aiming point. The first Humvee arrived at the aiming point, and, for