Book Description It was the last-chance moment of the war. In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq. He called it "the surge." "Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences," he told a skeptical nation. Among those listening were the young, optimistic army infantry soldiers of the 2-16, the battalion nicknamed the Rangers. About to head to a vicious area of Baghdad, they decided the difference would be them.

Fifteen months later, the soldiers returned home forever changed. Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter David Finkel was with them in Bagdad almost every grueling step of the way.

What was the true story of the surge? Was it really a success? Those are the questions he grapples with in his remarkable report from the front lines. Combining the action of Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down with the literary brio of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, The Good Soldiers is an unforgettable work of reportage. And in telling the story of these good soldiers, the heroes and the ruined, David Finkel has also produced an eternal tale--not just of the Iraq War, but of all wars, for all time.

Faces of the Surge
Beneath every policy decision made in the highest echelons of Washington about how a war should be fought are soldiers who live with those decisions every day. These are some of the faces of the U.S. strategy known as "the surge," as photographed by David Finkel, author of The Good Soldiers.

Soldiers of the 2-16 Rangers wait for permission to enter a mosque.

Two soldiers try to collect themselves after their Humvee was hit by a roadside bomb.

Sergeant Adam Schumann, regarded as one of the battalion's best soldiers on the day he was sent home with severe post -traumatic stress disorder.

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Starred Review. 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. (Sept.)
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David Finkel is a staff writer for The Washington Post, and is also the leader of the Post’s national reporting team. He won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting in 2006 for a series of stories about U.S.-funded democracy efforts in Yemen. Finkel lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with his wife and two daughters. Email him at davidfinkel@thegoodsoldiers.com.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Christian Parenti David Finkel faced an unenviable task in writing his on-the-ground account of war in Iraq. Not only did he come very close to being killed, he also labored under the weight of our collective exhaustion. Six years of war in Iraq has produced a mountain of news reports, newspaper series, long magazine articles, documentary films, TV shows, Hollywood features, volumes of poetry and literally hundreds of books, mostly memoirs and journalistic accounts of the lives of the U.S. soldiers. Yet into this crowded field Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Finkel plunged. In "The Good Soldiers" Finkel follows the 15-month deployment of the Second Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Army. The narrative follows the battalion -- about 700 soldiers -- from Fort Riley, Kan., in early 2007 to the violent, sewage-clogged sprawl of East Baghdad and then back. This last movement, the return home, is the most profound. Finkel's main character is the battalion commander, Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, a man in his early 40s who comes across as affable, committed, religious, hard-working and naive. He wonders why Iraqis hate him. "It's all good" and "We're winning" roll off his tongue without irony. The wounding and death of various soldiers punctuate the larger arc of the book. The deaths are tragic, but the injuries are most harrowing. When Kauzlarich visits some of his men in a hospital recovery ward, we see the war "Johnny Got His Gun"-style: stripped of its glory, displaced from the realm of male camaraderie into the world of women and family. Now in the form of legless, armless, mauled, burnt, depressed and half-dead soldiers and their mothers and wives, war visits the reader as a long nightmare. "So, this is what I do now," says Maria Emory, the wife of a soldier with severe brain damage. Later, with massive understatement, she tells Kauzlarich: "It's changed our lives forever." Meanwhile her suicidal husband "had asked for a pen so he could push it into his neck. . . ." In the hospital we see political rage surface. A soldier named Atchley, who lost an eye and picks metal and plastic shrapnel from under his skin, explains: "I want people to know the price of war. . . . This war is complete [expletive]." He wears a glass eye emblazoned with crosshairs. As he explains to his visiting colonel, "I don't like pretending I have an eye." Unfortunately, these raw and powerful moments are often obscured by Finkel's heavy-handed style. When a soldier is shipped home due to mental stress, we get: "It was the helicopter for the injured and the dead. That was him, Adam Schuman. He was injured. He was dead. He was done." Finkel's constant use of intentional repetition begins to grate: "The [expletive] dirt. "The [expletive] wind. "The [expletive] stink. "They passed a [expletive] water buffalo. "They passed a [expletive] goat. "They passed a [expletive] man on a [expletive] bicycle and didn't give [expletive] when he began coughing from the [expletive] dust. "This [expletive] country." The effect of such prose is to flatten the story to stock characters in stock situations. In any embedded account, Iraqis can inevitably be reduced to backdrop: the little girl waving, the little boys throwing stones, the sullen father, the faceless Sadrist militiamen whose heads pop open in clouds of pink mist when American soldiers and helicopter gunships kill them. But in Finkel's portrait of the colonel's interpreter, Izzy, we see some of the Iraqis' experience: their code of honor and hospitality, and their humiliation at the hands of occupiers. "You're a traitor," an Iraqi tells Izzy as the man's home is ransacked in a search. "You are one of us. You should explain." What is the responsibility of a writer? To describe events, or explain them? I, for one, am not sure. But one wonders if after six years, another vérité, day-by-day portrait of war is sufficient.
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