Not Oprah’s Book Club: The Good Soldiers

Pulitzer Prize-winner David Finkel has written a truly heart breaking book about the war that just won’t end in Iraq. In The Good Soldiers, he follows the 2-16, a battalion of army infantry soldiers nicknamed the Rangers, as they head into “the surge” in January of 2007. He follows them as they say goodbye to their girlfriends and two-year-olds, as they arrive at the base and face the football field-sized trash pit that surrounds them (especially disconcerting in a war where IEDs are so rampant), as they grow anxious and bored, as they get injured and killed, as the lucky ones return home. The Good Soldiers is truly in a class with Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a vivid, nonpartisan portrayl of what real soldiers are facing in this war.
Much of the fifteen-month narrative is built around Ralph Kauzlarich, a U.S. Army Liutenant Colonel who is known for his catch phrase, “It’s all good.” Well, of course, it’s not “all good” in Iraq circa 2007. Insurgents are planting IEDs in trash heaps on the side of the road so powerful that they rip through vehicles and tear off limbs. The moral force of the war feels lost on most of the soldiers. Attempts to do nation-building within Iraq–schools, a sewage system, build up the local police force–are all slow at best and impossible at worst.
I have never understood the war so well, despite reading quite a bit about it. The Good Soldiers paints a living, breathing picture of what the 19-year-old kids who put on the American army uniform actually face, and in turn, gives the reader a sense of her own responsibility like nothing else. It’s not all good. And we’re all to blame.

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