“As of today, 6,845 Americans have died in Iraq and Afghanistan and over 900,000 Americans have been injured in both wars…According to the Pentagon, more than half to two-thirds of Americans killed or wounded in combat in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been victims of IED explosions. As stated in The International Business Times, we’ve reached a ‘grim milestone’ after two failed wars…” – H.A. Goodman, The Huffington Post
A few days ago, I was keyed up to finally start reading Thank You for Your Service by David Finkel, only to read in the forward that it’s actually a sequel to the book The Good Soldiers. I did what any ordinary reader would do: I slammed the book shut and immediately purchased the latter book. It was imperative that I start at the beginning.
Finkel, a reporter for The Washington Post, deploys with the Second Battalion, Sixteenth Infantry regiment of eight hundred soldiers out of Fort Riley, Kansas under the leadership of U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, Ralph Kauzlarich, in early April of 2007. Their assignment: be the face of the new direction the Bush administration was taking with the “war on terror,” by counterinsurgency tactics that would help the Iraqi people become independent, and stand on their own two feet.
“The thing is, he and his battalion weren’t even supposed to be here, and that’s one way to consider everything that was about to happen…”
This book was amazing! No lie. I feel ashamed to admit that although I am a WWI and WWII walking encyclopedia, I know virtually nothing about many of the wars following that, especially the one that began my senior year in high school. Many of my classmates enlisted, and two months after graduation, a guy from our graduating class was one of the first group of casualties in Afghanistan. His picture was all over the national news; it was eerie.. To think of it now, it seems so long ago. He was only eighteen, and that’s what was so heartbreaking. I don’t think he realized what he’d gotten himself into.
“What about the youngest soldier in the battalion, who was only seventeen? ‘Roger that,’ he said, whenever he was asked if he was ready, but when rumors about the deployment first began to circulate, he had taken aside his platoon sergeant, a staff sergeant named Frank Gietz, to ask how he’d be able to handle killing someone. ‘Put it in a dark place while you’re there,’ Gietz had said. So was a seventeen-year-old ready?”
The same can be said of the majority of the soldiers rounding out the 2-16 battalion–most were between the ages of nineteen and twenty, not even old enough to legally drink. Some had hurriedly married girlfriends a few days before deployment, while other tenured family men said goodbye wives and children and headed back to second or third tours. Sent to eastern Iraq where Shia militants were running rampant, they had their work cut out for them from the get go.
As Finkel ran through each month of the fifteen month deployment, my heart would race like crazy. Each patrol run, explosion, death, injury, and house search had me biting my nails and nearly pulling my hair out. Who would be the next casualty? Who would be injured by an IED? Would the mortar attacks on the base ever stop? I really felt like I was there with these men. Dusty, tired, scared, suffering shock, and the loss of friends and “brothers in arms.” It was such an emotional read. Clearly the war we hear about on the news is a whole other war for those actually fighting it. It’s not entirely black and white, and throughout the year, each soldier’s optimism and endurance is tested. None of them would return as they’d left.
“Is war supposed to be linear? The movement from point A to point B? The odyssey from there to here? Because this wasn’t any of that anymore. The blur was the linear becoming the circular.”
There was one injured soldier’s story that just made me bawl. I was heaving, it was such an emotional passage. What’s interesting is at the war front, although missing many limbs and being burned throughout most of his body, he manages to survive long enough to be air transported back to the States for treatment. His survival seems like a success–he didn’t die. Back home at a state of the art hospital for “Wounded Warriors,” Kauzlarich has a chance to visit with the soldier and his family four months after the attack. What he witnesses is the reality of life after the war. The final words of the book were so perfect, and a natural introduction to the sequel:
“’The war’s over for you, my friend,’ Kauzlarich said now to Showman, and of all the things he had ever said, nothing had ever seemed less true.”
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