The Good Soldiers (41 page)

BOOK: The Good Soldiers

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Durrell Bennett, March 29, 2008

Patrick Miller, March 29, 2008

A NOTE ON SOURCES AND METHODS

Most of this book is based on events I personally observed between January 2007, when I first met the 2-16, and June 2008, the month of the Ranger Ball. I spent a total of eight months with the 2 -16 in Iraq and made additional reporting trips to Fort Riley, in Kansas; Brooke Army Medical Center, in San Antonio, Texas; the National Naval Medical Center, in Bethesda, Maryland; and Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington, D.C

The book also contains some scenes for which I wasn’t present. In those instances, the details, descriptions, and dialogue used in the book were verified through internal army reports, photographs, videos, after-the-fact observation, and interviews with as many participants as conditions would permit. All of the people described and quoted in the book knew that I was a journalist and that everything I was seeing and hearing was on the record.

It is to the army’s credit, I believe, that during the length of my reporting, there were only two times that I was asked to treat something as off the record. Both requests involved classified technological applications in use by the soldiers, the revealing of which could conceivably put subsequent soldiers using the applications at increased risk, and I agreed to do so.

And it is to the 2-16 soldiers’ credit that they tolerated a journalist being among them, and in almost all cases welcomed me with their trust. From the beginning, I explained to them that my intent was to document their corner of the war, without agenda. This book, then, is that corner, unshaded. I feel privileged to have been its witness, and to write the story of what happened.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are many people I want to acknowledge and thank, beginning with the soldiers of the 2-16, every one of them.

I want to thank Sarah Crichton, of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

I want to thank Melanie Jackson, my literary agent.

At
The Washington Post,
I want to thank Don Graham, Leonard Downie, Jr., Mary Ann Werner, Rick Atkinson, Bill Hamilton, David Hoffman, Dana Priest, Sudarsan Raghavan and the heroic Baghdad bureau, Tom Ricks, Liz Spayd, Julie Tate, Karl Vick, the foreign desk, and everyone in Benefits.

At the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, I want to thank Lee Hamilton, Michael Van Dusen, Lucy Jilka, Janet Spikes, and especially Margaret Paxson.

At Stanford University, I want to thank the Hoover Institution.

Thank you to my parents.

Thank you, Bob Barnes.

Thank you, Lucian Perkins.

Thank you, John Nagl.

Thank you, Katherine Boo.

Thank you, Anne Hull.

Thank you, Phil Bennett.

Thank you, Steve Coll.

Thank you, Julia, Lauren, and, most of all, Lisa. You are the home I got to come home to.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Finkel is the National Enterprise Editor of
The Washington Post.
He joined the
Post
in 1990 and has worked for the paper’s national, foreign, and magazine staffs. He has reported from Africa, Asia, Central America, Europe, and throughout the United States, and was part of the
Post’s
war coverage in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo.

Among Finkel’s journalism honors are a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting in 2006 for a series of stories about U.S.-funded democracy efforts in Yemen. He has been a Pulitzer finalist three other times, for both explanatory reporting and feature writing.

A 1977 graduate of the University of Florida, Finkel is married, has two daughters, and lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.