Book Review: The Good Soldiers, David Finkel

The Good Soldiers by David Finkel

The crack of thunder woke me early this morning. The lighting was so close that I saw its flash through my closed eyelids. It woke me up, and I felt just like how an animal feels during a thunderstorm; I was scared. My heart was racing, my breath was short and quick.

I took some deep breaths and I was able to fall back asleep. When I woke up later that morning, I was thinking about The Good Soldiers. I thought that the way I felt, waking up to thunder, might be how those soldiers feel leaving their compounds (their FOB—forward operating base). Of course, I know that my waking-up-to-bad-weather fright paled in comparison to their stays in Fedaliyah, Iraq. Nonetheless, I felt that I had gotten a taste of the ubiquitous fear and anxiety that invades their subconscious during and after their service. A life of IEDs, EFPs, mortars, and street patrols through dicey neighborhoods where American troops are not looked on favorably.

And, as Finkel captures, one of the things that makes service during the surge so scary is that it’s all chance; your fate is out of your hands. Every time, a soldier hops in a Humvee (just to travel from one point to the next—not necessarily to go on an aggressive mission after insurgents) they are relinquishing control of their life and their limbs. They are at the mercy of the road and the EFPs that may or may not be buried underneath it. These cheap, gruesome weapons account for most of the deaths in Iraq. Detonated by a frustratingly-invisible enemy, they blow through the bottom of Humvees and spray shrapnel throughout its interior.

The Good Soldiers, however, is about more than just the paranoia and fear of serving in Iraq during the surge. As its title suggests, it’s about the soldiers, young and middle-aged (but mostly way young--my age). Their lives and their brotherhood during service. It just so happens that serving in Iraq during the surge is a pretty damn scary, so much of Finkel’s writing captures this fear and frustrating helplessness.

Finkel captures their fear and frustration with poignancy. He writes with an astounding intimacy. There are a couple of quotes I’ve written down below that I feel capture this sad proximity to the soldiers; he articulates their struggles astoundingly well, capturing their complex war-stretched emotions with an intimacy and a truthfulness as though he is one of them. It’s pretty astounding.

And as his writing is soaked with a powerful closeness, it is also structured in a clever and striking way. The first few pages of the book, are enough to serve as an example: this was before, the soldiers hadn’t yet, he would say it…"Except now, on April 6, 2007, at 1:00 a.m., as someone banged on his door, waking him up, he said something different. ‘What the fuck’ he said, opening his eyes."

The comparison to The Things They Carried is apt (although FSG’s is the author of this flattering comparison). Finkel writes with the same intensity as O’Brien, and it loyally captures (at least I think), with a difficult intimacy and cleverness, these good soldiers lives.

This book was especially powerful for me because it’s the first book on war where my peers are the ones fighting. 19, 20, 21, 22 year olds just like me. Books and films about Vietnam or World War II seem so far removed from my life. I’m able to understand the morals and feel the emotions of these soldiers—Charlie Sheen in Platoon, Private Joker in Full Metal Jacket—but they still end up feeling a bit distant—removed form my life. But as I read about the good soldiers, and the difficult passages of young men like me dying in gruesome ways (19-year olds burning alive in cars, their bodies full of shrapnel) it felt more realistic, more disturbingly tangible and powerful.

My one caveat about the book would be that it’s told almost purely from the soldier’s perspective. As a result, there are a lot of generalizations, and the macro-level details of the conflict aren’t captured. Finkel makes it clear that his intention is to capture the soldiers perspectives—which is different from what think tank scholars and talking heads focus on. Nonetheless, there’s little info on Muqtada al-Sadr or the Jaish al-Mahdi. Nor is there any information on West Baghdad, al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the Sons of Iraq. So if you’re looking to understand who the they are that Finkel refers to, or what motivates insurgent attacks (or most interestingly, why the Muqtada’s cease-fire declaration resonates) then this book won’t be of much help. But Finkel’s goal is to capture the lives of these young, good soldiers, and this he does with a remarkable poise and weight that their service deserves.