David Finkel (1) (1955–)

I found myself wincing and frowning constantly as I was reading David Finkel's NY Times bestseller, THE GOOD SOLDIERS (2009). So much so that my wife asked me, Why are you making that face? So, to try to explain, I read a aloud to her from where I was at the time, about Marie Emory, weeping at the bedside of her husband, Sergeant Michael Emory, who had been shot in the head, and had just been brought out of an induced coma at Bethesda. President Bush had just paid a visit and, trying to show more comfort her, had hugged her and said, "Everything's going to be okay." But her tears were tears of anger, at Bush.

"And nothing was okay, she said, so he was wrong about that, too. Her husband was ruined. In seven weeks, she had lost so much weight that her dress size had gone from a twelve to a six, her daughter was now living with a relative, she was now living in a hospital, the doctors were saying it could be years before her husband was better, if ever, and hope, if it existed at all, had to be extracted from wherever it could, from the awful day, for instance, in which he lifted his right hand and placed it on her shoulder, and then tried to move it across her breasts, and then started to cry."

Which is where I stopped reading aloud, because I began to cry too. And I continued to "make that face" almost continuously as I read deeper into Finkel's meticulously recorded, raw, up close and very personal account of the 2-16 Battalion out of Fort Riley, Kansas, and its commander, LTC Ralph Kauzlarich, and their 15 month tour in Iraq during "the surge" in 2007-2008.There are frequent examples of intense firefights, street patrols, and the constant danger of hidden IEDs and deadly, triggered EFPs that could pierce even heavily armored vehicles and shred driver and passengers. One of the sergeants spoke for all of his men when he said, after a skirmish -

"They're angry. Very angry ... How can anybody kill and function normally afterward? Or see someone get killed and function normally afterward? It's not the human response."

Killing and seeing killing - the root cause of "moral injuries," which may never heal. LTC Kauzlarich himself is not immune to this, as he watches one of his men, twenty-six year-old Joshua Reeves, brought into the aid station after an EFP ambush -

"... unconscious and without a pulse ... He wasn't breathing, his eyes weren't moving his left foot was gone, his back side was ripped open, his face had turned gray, his stomach was filling with blood and he was naked, with the exception of one bloodied sock - and as if all that weren't enough with which to consider Joshua Reeves in these failing moments of his life, now came word from some of the soldiers gathered in lobby that he'd begun this day with a message from his wife that she had just given birth to their first child. 'Jesus,' Kauzlarich said upon hearing this, his eyes filling with tears as he watched another soldier dying in front of him."

I can think of only one passage in the book where I laughed. It was when a very nervous soldier was being questioned by a pre-promotion review board, a man -

"... who had sweat rolling down his face as he struggled to answer the question, 'What are the four common points for checking a pulse?'
'The wrist. The neck. The ankle. And the anus,' he would say.
'Did he just say anus?' one sergeant would whisper to another."

Yeah. I laughed, a lot. Some much needed comic relief in the midst of so much violence, fear and misery that was war. I'm not gonna say I loved this book. Because it's all about war its human cost. And that makes it necessary reading. So I will give it my very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the Cold War memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA

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Another important addition to my extensive collection of war lit and military books and memoirs.

David Finkel's THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE (2013) is a gut punch to anyone who ... well, maybe to anyone with a soul. Period. It is a closeup and personal look at a small group of soldiers who returned from the Iraq war broken, mentally, spiritually and emotionally, and the lasting and far-reaching effects it had on their friends and families. A sequel to his acclaimed THE GOOD SOLDIERS, the record show more of his embedded year with the 2-16 Infantry Battalion during its deployment to Iraq, this time Finkel examines the hidden damage to several of these veterans, physically unharmed, but suffering from the "moral injury" that war inevitably inflicts. Set in and around Fort Riley, Kansas, the unit's home base, Finkel shadows these broken men as they try, not always successfully, to reintegrate into a world that knows nothing of war and is wary of its returning veterans. There is Adam Schumann, his beleaguered wife, Saskia. And Saskia's friend Amanda Doster, whose husband, James, did not return, an absence Adam will always feel responsible for. And there is Tausolo Aieti, from American Samoa, suffering from a TBI, making it nearly impossible to navigate the paperwork necessary for his treatment. And there is ... Ah, enough. It's been a couple weeks since I finished reading TYFYS, but I can't get it out of my head. I know it's the middle book of a trilogy Finkel has written about the battered soldiers of the Iraq war. And it is perhaps the most disturbing and moving looks at PTSD, TBI and other moral injury wounds that I have ever read. Did you know that spouses of returning combat veterans can also fall victim to PTSD? It's an injury that's contagious and often long term. But now I must read THE GOOD SOLDIERS, and maybe that third book too. (Stay tuned.) This one should be required reading for Congess. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the Cold War memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA show less

This book. This fucking book.

This is literary journalism at its finest. Finkel is lyrical at the darkest times, mining emotion and meaning from some of the most horrific and terrifying experiences humans have had to undergo in recent times. He’s spare sometimes and luxurious at others—surprisingly succinct when describing someone’s death, and then taking pages to illuminate mundane things. Uch. He’s just a great writer, trying to tell the story of great men, and it works.

For me, the show more experience of reading this book consisted of waiting. On the edge of my seat, for the next battle, the next encounter, the next explosion. The next death, most of all. When someone died I would skip to the page with the pictures of the dead at the end and sort of meditate on that person and think about how he died and try to see it. This is a powerful book. It’s fast and it’s scary. Explosive. It makes you understand why soldiers come back home and shoot themselves. show less

The Good Soldiers by Pulitzer Prize journalist David Finkel was a difficult read. He describes the horror of the American war experience in Iraq with an unflinching eye and it was unbearably sad to read of incidents that left young Americans dead or changed for life. Set in 2007, it is also unbearably sad to know that these kind of things are still happening in the Middle East today as the death and suffering continues.

This author brings both the war and the men who fought it to life on show more these pages as he describes their day-to-day activities, both in combat and in general duties. This is not a book about the political manoeuvrings of Washington, instead it follows one battalion throughout its 15 month deployment and allows the reader to feel a part of their experience. David Finkel spent 8 months with the 2-16 in Iraq and in telling of this units’ operations, he clearly shows the what the cost was:

“in the final minutes of a month in which four soldiers died, one lost a hand,
one lost an arm, one lost an eye, one was shot in the head, one was shot in the
throat, eight were injured by shrapnel, eighty IEDs or EFPs detonated on
passing convoys, soldiers were targeted by gunfire or rocket-propelled grenades
fifty-two times …”

And he humanizes this cost.

Yes, a difficult read, but presented in a moving and unforgettable manner which will make The Good Soldiers a hard book to forget. show less