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 Publishers Weekly "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
usone of the best accounts yet of the American experience in Iraq.
Photos. "(Sept.)" From Kirkus: "Starred Review. "Did the
much-vaunted surge of American troops in Iraq work? Yes, said
George W. Bush. A soldierly response differed: "I've had enough of
this bullshit."So details Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post
writer Finkel in this excellent study of soldiers under fire. In
January 2007, Bush ordered a surge that involved flooding the
Baghdad and other key locations with soldiers to quell
anti-American partisan activity. In the field were troops who had
seen time in Iraq before, had gone home and been sent back. Some
were from a battalion stationed at Fort Riley, Kan., and they had
the good fortune to be commanded by a smart West Pointer who had
earned his Ranger parachute and had served in the first Gulf War
and Afghanistan. His troops affectionately dubbed Lt. Col. Ralph
Kauzlarich, "the Lost Kauz." The sobriquet proved fitting, as
Finkel chronicles, and though Kauzlarich did his best to prevent
harm from befalling his charges, he could not stop the IEDs,
suicide attacks and stray shots that inevitably followed their
movements. The author writes with the you-are-there immediacy of
Richard Tregaskis's Guadalcanal Diary (1943), taking the reader
into the field, where, against a $100 explosive device, a "$150,000
Humvee might as well have been constructed of lace." Finkel also
depicts the gruesome aftermath of such explosions: "All four limbs
burned away, bony stumps visible. Superior portion of cranium
burned away," reads a battalion doctor's death report. "No further
exam possible due to degree of charring." Aspects of the surge, the
author writes, were merely rhetorical. Others were unquestionably
successful, particularly the reduction in the number of attacks on
Americans--successes to be chalked up to the bravery of the men and
women under fire, and in no way, Finkel says, to anything happening
in Washington. Says Kauz of one action that serves as an epigram to
the entire enterprise, "It's fucked up. But you did the right
thing."A superb account of the burdens soldiers bear. Review: "Let
me be direct. "The Good Soldiers" by David Finkel is the most
honest, most painful, and most brilliantly rendered account of
modern war I've ever read. I got no exercise at all the day I
gulped down its 284 riveting pages." --Daniel Okrent, "Fortune""[A]
new classic . . . the reader cannot get enough . . . As a
compelling read, "The Good Soldiers" is all good." --J. Ford
Huffman, "Military Times""David Finkel has written the most
unforgettable book of the Iraq War, a masterpiece that will far
outlast the fighting." --David Maraniss, author of "They Marched
into Sunlight""From a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer at the height
of his powers comes an incandescent and profoundly moving book:
powerful, intense, enraging. This may be the best book on war since
the "Iliad."" --Geraldine Brooks, author of "People of the Book"
and "March""This is the best account I have read of the life of one
unit in the Iraq War. It is closely observed, carefully recorded,
and beautifully written. David Finkel doesn't just take you into
the lives of our soldiers, he takes you deep into their
nightmares." --Thomas E. Ricks, author of "Fiasco" and "The
Gamble""Brilliant, heartbreaking, deeply true. "The Good Soldiers"
offers the most intimate view of life and death in a
twenty-first-century combat unit I have ever read. Unsparing,
unflinching, and, at times, unbearable." --Rick Atkinson, author of
"An Army at Dawn" and "The Day of Battle""This is the finest book
yet written on the platoon-level combat of the Iraq war . . .
Unforgettable--raw, moving, and rendered with literary control . .
. No one who reads this book will soon forget its imagery, words,
or characters." --Steve Coll, author of "Ghost Wars"
From Publishers Weekly: "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 crise
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