David Finkel gives voice to the infantrymen in 'The Good Soldiers'

"It seemed like such a simple idea: Let's go and watch a battalion in the surge," David Finkel says of his new book The Good Soldiers. "I sort of wondered why no one had done this out of this war.

"But after the fourth or fifth rocket attacks, I realized why nobody had done it."

Finkel spent about eight months in Baghdad on a forward operating base with the U.S. Army's 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment in order to write the book. He will present it as a featured author at the St. Petersburg Times Festival of Reading on Oct. 24.

A University of Florida graduate, Finkel, 53, was a St. Petersburg Times reporter before joining the staff of the Washington Post in 1990. He won a Pulitzer in 2006 for explanatory reporting for his coverage of the U.S. government's attempt to bring democracy to Yemen.

He went to Iraq when the war began in 2003 — "I was not embedded" — for about six weeks. "By the time I left, I felt pretty desensitized. I thought I'd never go back," he says by phone from Washington, where he's back at the Post as editor of the enterprise reporting team after taking a book leave.

In 2007 he was assigned to write an article for the Post on a battalion about to depart for Iraq as part of "this new thing that had just been announced called the surge."

In Kansas, he met Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, commander of the 2-16. "He told me then, 'It's fine you're doing this piece, but you ought to do another one halfway through, and then later, to see how this changes us.' "

Finkel says it was the first time he felt he had a story he wanted to tell in book form. "So I got a contract, and I got disability insurance, and off I went."

During his first months in Baghdad, Finkel says, he went out on missions with the soldiers "five times a week." He lived with them at their base in east Baghdad — although, he says, "I had the luxury of being able to leave, to take a break. They didn't." Finkel came back to the United States every couple of months "because, as a reporter, I was cooked," then returned. He also made several visits stateside to hospitalized members of the 2-16, visits that add depth and poignancy to The Good Soldiers.

Although his goal was to document the experiences of the 2-16's infantrymen, "I wasn't trying to be a soldier." What he did to report the book was difficult, he says, but he had choices. "For them to just get up and get in that Humvee and go out every day was the bravest thing I've ever seen."

With the book published, Finkel has sent copies to Kauzlarich and another officer who became a major character. "Now I've been calling the families of the soldiers who died, to let them know the book's going to be out there and what's in it.

"I wanted them to know it's not a book about politics, about right or wrong, about victory or failure. It's about the soldiers, who they were, what happened and how they came home."

Colette Bancroft can be reached at cbancroft@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8435. She blogs on Critics Circle at blogs.tampabay.com/arts.